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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.

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
Never
Expressed
Shown
Beliefs
False
Keys
Belief
Self
Confirming
Way
Fanatical

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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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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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We do not measure a culture by its output of undisguised trivialities but by what it claims as significant.
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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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...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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People in distress will sometimes prefer a problem that is familiar to a solution that is not.
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. . . Americans are the best entertained and quite likely the least well-informed people in the Western world.
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A definition is the start of an argument, not the end of one.
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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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An educated mind is practiced in the uses of reason, which inevitably leads to a skeptical outlook.
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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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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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The effects of technology are always unpredictable. But they are not always inevitable.
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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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