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Writer's pictureZach Omer

Journal #1: The Medium is the Metaphor

Updated: Dec 27, 2018

On the last page of the foreword (page xx) in Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman writes, “Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.” This quote jumped out at me when I first read it, because of its shell-shocking nature. Since our conversion from a print-based society, our culture has spent so much time, money, and energy on making our lives more convenient, more accessible, and more technology based. We’ve made it so that you can fit your entire life into a handheld device, like a smartphone. At first, this was a thrilling time for the world, a huge advancement in technology and convenience. But now that these smartphones have taken a foothold; now that it’s practically (or literally, in some cases) required to own one, the humanistic aspects of our society are crumbling. We are becoming a world of cyborgs, clinging to our phones and computers as if they were necessary appendages. With so much entertainment coming from the devices in our hands, we no longer feel the need to seek enjoyment from the printed word or the outside world.


In the first chapter, Postman focuses on the idea of the medium as a metaphor. He considered Las Vegas, Nevada as "a metaphor of our national character and aspiration” because it is “entirely devoted to entertainment” (p. 3). On page 5, he makes the assertion that “in America, God favors all those who possess both a talent and a format to amuse.” Postman continues on to give examples of how a form of media can exclude its content. He argues that “you cannot use smoke to do philosophy,” and “you cannot do political philosophy on television” because their form works against the content (p. 7).


Another section of Postman’s book that really made me think was when he discussed how the “news of the day” has affected our society. On page 7 he writes, “I do not mean that things like fires, wars, murders and love affairs did not, ever and always, happen in places all over the world. I mean that lacking a technology to advertise them, people could not attend to them, could not include them in their daily business.” As a result of this instantaneous coverage of world events, people get a false sense of being informed, when in fact, the knowledge we gain from the news today is trivial, fragmented, and fleeting. We move from one “breaking news” story to the next, becoming so overloaded with stories that we only retain the key point (if that!) of each. Social media apps with character limits, like Twitter and Snapchat, encourage that fragmented way of thinking and conveying information. Postman says on page 16 that “under the governance of television,” discourse in the US has become “shriveled and absurd,” and those characteristics have carried over into this new digital age. We are becoming a culture based on a false sense of knowledge and information in connection with the outside world.


This is further proven through Postman’s quote on page 8: “the clearest way to see through a culture is to attend to its tools for conversation.” If you look at the average American citizen from 150 years ago compared to today, the difference in literacy would be astounding. Because the printed word was all they had to communicate, people were much more eloquent in their writing and even their spoken word. People in the present day spend so much time “type-talking” that even our basic speaking skills have suffered. Our tools for conversation have made common conversation broken and transient, and it shows in how we speak to each other.

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