Postman's "The Medium is a Metaphor"

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.

Blog #1 Freedom of Expression

In Gwen Wilde's essay, she is very persuasive on the way she portrays the idea of having the phrase "under God" removed from the pledge of allegiance. Wilde makes multiple points about how you may be affected if you are a non-Christian. For example, many people who aren't Christian might be called unpatriotic because they don't feel comfortable saying the phrase "under God". She also talks about how people can't feel like they are patriotic towards their country because of this phrase. I strongly disagree with removing the phrase in the pledge due to the fact that I am Catholic and I attend Strake Jesuit. I also believe that this country was founded through the help of God. In Bok's essay, he makes many point regarding censorship on college school campuses. He supports to no censorship even if people will get offended, but he does not support the campus police from stopping someone being harmed. In my opinion, the difference between an act being harmful or an act being offensive is that an act that is harmful would cause physical pain towards someone, while an offensive act would probably cause some mental harm. It's very hard to truly determine between the two, but I disagree with Bok's view on censorship. For example, I feel that if someone puts up a confederate flag then a lot of people will be offended and it's safe to say that they should probably take down the flag. There is no need to allow behavior like that even if someone can't express how they feel. I think there should be a limit to how much you can censor someone and that should have helped decide this dilemma. An example where I was personally violated of my freedom of expression was when I posted a comment on social media that was removed most likely because the person may have found it offensive. I believe that in this example it's fine to allow people to have the power to remove any comments they feel are offensive or harmful towards them. While many students may not agree with me, I feel that administrators have the right to do what they want if anything offensive is posted about the school, but the administrators shouldn't be able to punish a student if they are just expressing themselves freely on their social media. I don't feel like the government really needs to get involved as long as administrators don't blow anything out of proportion with what students say.