Neil Postman shares his philosophy in
chapter one, “A Medium is a Metaphor”, of his book Amusing Ourselves to Death. He
mainly argues that we as a society have been slowly going away from our sophisticated ways of communicating with the invention of
the television and telephones. I would have to agree with
Postman. Even though this book was written in 1984, we have only
progressed further away from our sophisticated ways of writing such as
physical text on letters
and more face to face interaction. Having email and text messaging
on personal cell phones has made it very easy for our generation
to avoid any of these refined ways of communicating. Another
clear example of Postman's argument deals with our 27th, William
Howard Taft and how big of a factor the television is. Postman argues
how a President that weighs 300 pounds or is bald would not get elected
when people had access to televisions. He says this because people
care more about appearance than they do about the certain ideas a
person puts forth has when they run for president. Back when there weren't
any televisions, people didn't see that Taft weighed 300 pounds.
They cared mainly on his ideals and not his appearance. In this
generation, it would be very unlikely that a person like Taft would
be elected because of how vastly our society has changed its ideas
about other people. We are all affected by our televisions and this
has hindered our realization of what the norm is because we have set
such high expectations for everything in life.
Postman defines the "medium" in "The Medium
is a Metaphor" as something through which we enforce our understanding of
reality. This understanding we have has many similarities to what it was
back in 1984. However, the only difference between 1984 till now,
is that we have gotten progressively worse in our understanding of
what the "medium"
is. For example, we went from have simple house telephones where
you could call your friends at night and interact with them even if it
wasn't face to face, to having personal cellphones where you only
text message your friends because you are too lazy or too tired to
talk to them over the phone and hear their voice. Through Postman's humor
and examples he gets his point across to us and helps us to understand
what his understanding of what the "medium" in his world is.
