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

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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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A definition is the start of an argument, not the end of one.
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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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Public schooling does not serve a public it creates a pubic.
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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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The effects of technology are always unpredictable. But they are not always inevitable.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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[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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An educated mind is practiced in the uses of reason, which inevitably leads to a skeptical outlook.
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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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