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. . . Americans are the best entertained and quite likely the least well-informed people in the Western world.
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
Well
Informed
World
Likely
People
Western
Americans
Least
Quite
Best
Wells
Entertained
More quotes by Neil Postman
The effects of technology are always unpredictable. But they are not always inevitable.
Neil Postman
Watching television requires no skills and develops no skills. That is why there is no such thing as remedial television-watching.
Neil Postman
[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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Computers are merely ingenious devices to fulfill unimportant functions. The computer revolution is an explosion of nonsense.
Neil Postman
Make no mistake about it: the labeling of someone's language as 'sexist' involves a political judgment and implies the desirability of a particular sociological doctrine. One may be in favor of that doctrine (as I believe I am) but it is quite another matter to force writers by edicts and censorship into accepting it.
Neil Postman
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.
Neil Postman
Printing links the present with forever. It carries personal identity into realms unknown.
Neil Postman
When media make war against each other, it is a case of world-views in collision.
Neil Postman
Education Research: This is a process whereby serious educators discover knowledge that is well known to everybody, and has been for several centuries. Its principal characteristic is that no one pays any attention to it.
Neil Postman
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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People in distress will sometimes prefer a problem that is familiar to a solution that is not.
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We do not measure a culture by its output of undisguised trivialities but by what it claims as significant.
Neil Postman
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.
Neil Postman
An educated mind is practiced in the uses of reason, which inevitably leads to a skeptical outlook.
Neil Postman
A definition is the start of an argument, not the end of one.
Neil Postman
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.
Neil Postman
'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.
Neil Postman
The written word endures, the spoken word disappears
Neil Postman
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.
Neil Postman
My argument is limited to saying that a major new medium changes the structure of discourse it does so by encouraging certain uses of the intellect, by favoring certain definitions of intelligence and wisdom, and by demanding a certain kind of content - in a phrase, by creating new forms of truth-telling.
Neil Postman