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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.

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
Call
Idea
Entertainment
Culture
Historical
Ideas
Including
People
Perspective
Taking
Focus
Study

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As a culture moves from orality to writing to printing to televising, its ideas of truth move with it.
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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.
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The key to all fanatical beliefs is that they are self-confirming....(some beliefs are) fanatical not because they are false, but because they are expressed in such a way that they can never be shown to be false.
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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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Printing links the present with forever. It carries personal identity into realms unknown.
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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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The effects of technology are always unpredictable. But they are not always inevitable.
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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 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.
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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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Typography fostered the modern idea of individuality, but it destroyed the medieval sense of community and integration.
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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.
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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.
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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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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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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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An educated mind is practiced in the uses of reason, which inevitably leads to a skeptical outlook.
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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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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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