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Computers are merely ingenious devices to fulfill unimportant functions. The computer revolution is an explosion of nonsense.
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
Merely
Ingenious
Function
Explosions
Computer
Unimportant
Revolution
Functions
Fulfill
Computers
Devices
Nonsense
Explosion
More quotes by Neil Postman
As a culture moves from orality to writing to printing to televising, its ideas of truth move with it.
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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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People in distress will sometimes prefer a problem that is familiar to a solution that is not.
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The written word endures, the spoken word disappears
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Through the computer, the heralds say, we will make education better, religion better, politics better, our minds better — best of all, ourselves better. This is, of course, nonsense, and only the young or the ignorant or the foolish could believe 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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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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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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Public schooling does not serve a public it creates a pubic.
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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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The effects of technology are always unpredictable. But they are not always inevitable.
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'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.
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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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[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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Children enter school as question marks and leave as periods.
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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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When media make war against each other, it is a case of world-views in collision.
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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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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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