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Remember: in order for a perception to change one must be frustrated in one's actions or change one's purpose.

Neil Postman

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Neil Postman
Age: 72 †
Born: 1931
Born: March 8
Died: 2003
Died: October 5
Author
Communication Scholar
Essayist
Journalist
Media Critic
Pedagogue
Sociologist
University Teacher
Writer
New York City
New York
Remember
Must
Frustrated
Actions
Perception
Purpose
Action
Order
Change

More quotes by Neil Postman

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Cyberspace' is a metaphorical idea which is supposed to be the space where your consciousness is located when you're using computer technology on the Internet, for example, and I'm not entirely sure it's such a useful term, but I think that's what most people mean by it.
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Printing links the present with forever. It carries personal identity into realms unknown.
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A metaphor is not an ornament. It is an organ of perception. Through metaphors, we see the world as one thing or another.
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Information is now a commodity that can be bought and sold, or used as a form of entertainment, or worn like a garment to enhance one's status. It comes indiscriminately, directed at no one in particular, disconnected from usefulness we are glutted with information, drowning in information, have no control over it, don't know what to do with it.
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The written word endures, the spoken word disappears
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Children are the living messages we send to a time we will not see. From a biological point of view it is inconceivable that any culture will forget that it needs to reproduce itself. But it is quite possible for a culture to exist without a social idea of children. Unlike infancy, childhood is a social artifact, not a biological category.
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People in distress will sometimes prefer a problem that is familiar to a solution that is not.
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Education Research: This is a process whereby serious educators discover knowledge that is well known to everybody, and has been for several centuries. Its principal characteristic is that no one pays any attention to it.
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We do not measure a culture by its output of undisguised trivialities but by what it claims as significant.
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The effects of technology are always unpredictable. But they are not always inevitable.
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. . . Americans are the best entertained and quite likely the least well-informed people in the Western world.
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An educated mind is practiced in the uses of reason, which inevitably leads to a skeptical outlook.
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Public schooling does not serve a public it creates a pubic.
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A definition is the start of an argument, not the end of one.
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My argument is limited to saying that a major new medium changes the structure of discourse it does so by encouraging certain uses of the intellect, by favoring certain definitions of intelligence and wisdom, and by demanding a certain kind of content - in a phrase, by creating new forms of truth-telling.
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When media make war against each other, it is a case of world-views in collision.
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Watching television requires no skills and develops no skills. That is why there is no such thing as remedial television-watching.
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At its best, schooling can be about how to make a life, which is quite different from how to make a living.
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The idea of taking what people call the 'entertainment culture' as a focus of study, including historical perspective, is not a bad idea.
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If students get a sound education in the history, social effects and psychological biases of technology, they may grow to be adults who use technology rather than be used by it.
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