In the first chapter, Postman explores the basic premise to the whole book: the medium is the metaphor. This is essentially the idea of whatever medium is used to translate language, it is so crucial to understand how the message will be translated by that medium. Obviously, the medium he is talking about for the book is television. He claims that television is the way of knowing and communicating now, instead of typography. Of course, this is pursued more in chapter 2, media as epistemology. He says, “ I am arguing that a television-based epistemology pollutes public communication and its surrounding landscape, not that it pollutes everything” (28). While I do think he is right on with his overall thesis, I think he misses something by not addressing the philosophical ramifications of nothingness in media, namely, nihilism. I sometimes felt that he did not go far enough in his critique of media and entertainment. However, I do understand that his overall point was not the segments of entertainment that are actually for entertainment; he merely was worried about when people do not know that they are in fact being entertained. So his focus was on those areas that claim authority yet use the television or any sort of popular media device to inform the public. This brings us to the next chapter.
In Typographic America, he goes into a history lesson to compare and contrast the upcoming analysis of television. He even looks at forms of advertising that were extremely long and logical. In Typographic Mind, he mainly looks at the Lincoln-Douglas debates. He notes how coherent, long, logical, and typographic they were. Then he notes some key religious leaders of the day, namely, Jonathan Edwards. Comparing that culture to ours, he notes: “It is also the difference between living in a culture that provides little opportunity for leisure, and one that provides much” (61). In The Peek-a-Boo World, he looks at the changes in typography from longer news to the short telegraph and the picture. This opened up discourse for irrelevance, impotence, and incoherence. “The photograph documents and celebrates the particularities of this infinite variety. Language makes them comprehensible” (72). All of these changes gave way to our age of show business and television.
In The Age of Show Business, he talks about what I have already mentioned briefly in the first paragraph. Entertainment for the sake of entertainment is fine; education and public discourse as entertainment is not. Really, a big point in this chapter is that television is not made for long discourse of ideas and thinking. This is really the opposite of showbusiness. In order to make his point about incoherence on television, he examines, in “Now…This”, how news’ anchors will report something then say, “Now…we move on to something else.” This sets up a way of communication that contains just short segments and have no context. “I should go so far as to say that embedded in the surrealistic frame of a television news show is a theory of anticommunication, featuring a type of discourse that abandons logic, reason, sequence and rules of contradiction. In aesthetics, I believe the name given to this theory is Dadaism; in philosophy, nihilism; in psychiatry, schizophrenia. In the parlance of the theatre, it is known as vaudeville” (105).
In the next three chapters, he focuses on how the television has changed the face of religion, politics, and education. Of course, he brings up such people as Jimmy Swaggart and Jerry Falwell. “Television’s strongest point is that it brings personalities into our hearts, not abstractions into our heads…Which is why he is the star of the show. And why Billy Graham is a celebrity, and why Oral Roberts has his own university, and why Robert Schuller has a crystal cathedral all to himself. If I am not mistaken, the word for this is blasphemy. In Reach Out and Elect Someone, he notes: “The point is that television does not reveal who the best man is. In fact, television makes impossible the determination of who is better than whom, if we mean by “better” such things as more capable in negotiation, more imaginative in executive skill…For on television the politician does not so much offer the audience an image of himself, as offer himself as an image of the audience.” (133). This chapter was very enlightening concerning the idea of politics. Basically, the whole idea in Teaching as an Amusing Activity is to show how simple and incomplex education is through the TV. One cannot talk back to the TV either. It is not a better way of learning when information is presented in a dramatic setting.
He ends the book with The Huxleyan Warning. I wish I would have read the book Brave New World. The ending would have made much more sense, but I think I got the overall idea. We are dying intellectually by not even knowing the ramifications of the ways that we amuse ourselves. It is not necessarily that we are being controlled by others; rather, we are controlling ourselves and we don’t even know it.
While discussing this book with a friend named Winston, he was claiming that we have moved beyond Postman’s criticisms into a much more complex form of entertainment. While I agree that it is more complex today in the form of the internet and audio, I tend to see the basic principles of the book applying to our lives today, apart from those areas of nihilism that need analyzing. There is still a lot of typography, even on the internet. Yes, it is a merging of all forms of medium. I am surprised of the amount of print and time needed to understand current events. I would argue that we are even more decontextualized, being a global community with the internet, but it seems you can work with it. Maybe I am just too optimistic about all of this, but I think Postman is applicable for us in the sense that we can compare and contrast different time periods, knowing the development of thought and changes that have occurred. Knowing that you are being entertained is the important thing. I think Postman is still usable for today with minor improvising. But discussion will flesh this out further, for I am a much better discusser with hours to waste than what a few minutes of reflection can do me.
