In the chapter titled, “The Typographic Mind” of Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman discusses how American society functioned during a time when “the use of language as a means of complex argument was an important, pleasurable and common form of discourse in every public arena” (pg. 47). He used public debates between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas as examples. After showing an extended quote from one of Douglas’ introductions, Postman notes, “the language is pure print. That the occasion required it to be spoken aloud cannot obscure that fact. And the fact that the audience was able to process it through the ear is remarkable only to people who’s culture no longer resonates powerfully with the printed word” (p. 49). Upon reflection, it was hard to fathom any professor or political figure (let alone an Average Joe!) in today’s world speaking with such eloquence and articulacy without receiving blank stares in return. By moving away from the printed word and spending the majority of our time online, using social media sites and engaging in trivial, fragmented news stories, our vocabularies have devolved and our methods of intimate face-to-face conversation have become almost primitive. Our very thought processes have seemingly developed a character limit, like many of the websites we frequent so often. Postman continues on page 50, where he asserts, “there is no escape from meaning when language is the instrument guiding one’s thought.” This led me to wonder… what is the instrument guiding our thoughts today? Has our fragmented and trivial culture, with our depletion of literacy, begun to escape meaning?
On page 57, Postman describes the former US Supreme Court Justice John Marshall as “the preeminent example of Typographic Man—detached, analytical, devoted to logic, abhorring contradiction.” So who, then, would be the representative of our time, of the Digital Age? The person with the most popular Twitter account? The host of the most entertaining TV show? An overpaid athlete or actor/actress? John Marshall might roll over in his grave if he knew any of the names that just popped into your head. Postman draws a parallel between this change in epistemology and newspaper advertising by claiming, “The history of newspaper advertising in America may be considered all by itself, as a metaphor of the descent of the typographic mind, beginning, as it does, with reason, and ending, as it does, with entertainment” (pg. 58).
Postman expands on this “descent,” describing how the printed word once “had a monopoly on both attention and intellect…Public figures were known largely by their written words, not by their looks or even their oratory” (pg. 60). Present public figures are known for the opposite, because of “the difference between thinking in a word-centered culture and thinking in an image-centered culture” (pg. 61). It was hard not to laugh when Postman made the observation, “The modern idea of testing a reader’s ‘comprehension,’ as distinct from something else a reader may be doing, would have seemed an absurdity in 1790 or 1830 or 1860” (pg. 61). The urge to laugh was not completely due to Postman’s delivery, but also that I had never questioned the idea of evaluating reading comprehension. As Postman goes on to ask, “What else was reading but comprehending?”
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