Quote

The effects of technology are always unpredictable. But they are not always inevitable.

Neil Postman

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Unpredictable
Inevitable
Effects
Technology
Always

More quotes by Neil Postman

Image
It is not entirely true that a TV producer or reporter has complete control over the contents of programs. The interests and inclinations of the audience have as much to do with the what is on television as do the ideas of the producer and reporter.
Neil Postman
Image
Typography fostered the modern idea of individuality, but it destroyed the medieval sense of community and integration.
Neil Postman
Image
'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.
Neil Postman
Image
The spectacle we find in true religions has as its purpose enchantment, not entertainment. The distinction is critical. By endowing things with magic, enchantment is a means through which we may gain access to sacredness. Entertainment is the means through which we distance ourselves from it.
Neil Postman
Image
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.
Neil Postman
Image
Remember: in order for a perception to change one must be frustrated in one's actions or change one's purpose.
Neil Postman
Image
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.
Neil Postman
Image
The whole problem with news on television comes down to this: all the words uttered in an hour of news coverage could be printed on a page of a newspaper. And the world cannot be understood in one page.
Neil Postman
Image
Printing links the present with forever. It carries personal identity into realms unknown.
Neil Postman
Image
[It] is not that television is entertaining but that it has made entertainment itself the natural format for the representation of all experience. […] The problem is not that television presents us with entertaining subject matter but that all subject matter is presented as entertaining. (87)
Neil Postman
Image
I am not a Luddite. I am suspicious of technology. I am perfectly aware of its benefits, but I also try to pay attention to some of the negative effects.
Neil Postman
Image
Children enter school as question marks and leave as periods.
Neil Postman
Image
Americans no longer talk to each other, they entertain each other. They do not exchange ideas, they exchange images. They do not argue with propositions they argue with good looks, celebrities and comercials.
Neil Postman
Image
By itself photography cannot deal with the unseen, the remote, the internal, the abstract, it does not speak of Man, only of a man not of Tree, only a tree.
Neil Postman
Image
We do not measure a culture by its output of undisguised trivialities but by what it claims as significant.
Neil Postman
Image
A definition is the start of an argument, not the end of one.
Neil Postman
Image
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.
Neil Postman
Image
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.
Neil Postman
Image
. . . Americans are the best entertained and quite likely the least well-informed people in the Western world.
Neil Postman
Image
Watching television requires no skills and develops no skills. That is why there is no such thing as remedial television-watching.
Neil Postman