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There is no escaping from ourselves. The human dilemma is as it has always been, and we solve nothing fundamental by cloaking ourselves in technological glory.

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
Nothing
Escaping
Always
Technological
Fundamental
Fundamentals
Solve
Glory
Human
Humans
Dilemma

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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.
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A definition is the start of an argument, not the end of one.
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Computers are merely ingenious devices to fulfill unimportant functions. The computer revolution is an explosion of nonsense.
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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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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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Printing links the present with forever. It carries personal identity into realms unknown.
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When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience, and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk culture-death is a clear possibility.
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[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)
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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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Children enter school as question marks and leave as periods.
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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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Public schooling does not serve a public it creates a pubic.
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When media make war against each other, it is a case of world-views in collision.
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The written word endures, the spoken word disappears
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The past is strapped to our backs. We do not have to see it we can always feel it. People gather bundles of sticks to build bridges they never cross. People in distress will sometimes prefer a problem that is familiar to a solution that is not.
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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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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.
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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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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.
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