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The written word endures, the spoken word disappears

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
Endures
Disappears
Spoken
Disappear
Endure
Written
Word

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Typography fostered the modern idea of individuality, but it destroyed the medieval sense of community and integration.
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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 making of adaptable, curious, open, questioning people has nothing to do with vocational training and everything to do with humanistic and scientific studies.
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...there must be a sequence to learning, that perseverance and a certain measure of perspiration are indispensable, that individual pleasures must frequently be submerged in the interests of group cohesion, and that learning to be critical and to think conceptually and rigorously do not come easily to the young but are hard-fought victories.
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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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Children enter school as question marks and leave as periods.
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I believe I am not mistaken in saying that Christianity is a demanding and serious religion. When it is delivered as easy and amusing, it is another kind of religion altogether.
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Through the computer, the heralds say, we will make education better, religion better, politics better, our minds better — best of all, ourselves better. This is, of course, nonsense, and only the young or the ignorant or the foolish could believe it.
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The effects of technology are always unpredictable. But they are not always inevitable.
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A definition is the start of an argument, not the end of one.
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We can make the trains run on time but if they are not going where we want them to go, why bother?
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Printing links the present with forever. It carries personal identity into realms unknown.
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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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An educated mind is practiced in the uses of reason, which inevitably leads to a skeptical outlook.
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If politics is like show business, then the idea is not to pursue excellence, clarity or honesty but to appear as if you are, which is another matter altogether.
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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 scientific method,' Thomas Henry Huxley once wrote, 'is nothing but the normal working of the human mind.' That is to say, when the mind is working that is to say further, when it is engaged in correcting its mistakes.
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The problem in the 19th century with information was that we lived in a culture of information scarcity, and so humanity addressed that problem beginning with photography and telegraphy and the - in the 1840s. We tried to solve the problem of overcoming the limitations of space, time, and form.
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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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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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