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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.

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
Skills
Television
Thing
Remedial
Develops
Requires
Watching

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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 definition is the start of an argument, not the end of one.
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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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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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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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...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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There is no escaping from ourselves. The human dilemma is as it has always been, and we solve nothing fundamental by cloaking ourselves in technological glory.
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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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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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Public schooling does not serve a public it creates a pubic.
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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 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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We do not measure a culture by its output of undisguised trivialities but by what it claims as significant.
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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.
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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.
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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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When media make war against each other, it is a case of world-views in collision.
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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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. . . Americans are the best entertained and quite likely the least well-informed people in the Western world.
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The written word endures, the spoken word disappears
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