Neil postman Quotes - QuotesSweet | quotesweet.com

Author: Neil Postman
Quotes of Author: Neil Postman

Neil Postman _ Amusing Ourselves to Death:
Think of Richard Nixon or Jimmy Carter or Billy Graham, or even Albert Einstein, and what will come to your mind is an image, a picture of face, {in Einstein's case, a photograph of a face}. Of words, nothing will come to mind. This is the difference between thinking in a word-centered culture and thinking in an image-centered culture.
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Neil Postman _ Amusing Ourselves to Death:
What I suggest here as a solution is what Aldous Huxley suggested, as well. And I can do no better than he. He believed with H. G. Wells that we are in a race between education and disaster, and he wrote continuously about the necessity of our understanding the politics and epistemology of media. For in the end, he was trying to tell us that what afflicted the people in Brave New World was not that they were laughing instead of thinking, but that they did not know what they were laughing about and why they had stopped thinking.
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Neil Postman _ Amusing Ourselves to Death:
Controlling your body is, however, only a minimal requirement. You must also have learned to pay no attention to the shapes of the letters on the page. You must see through them, so to speak, so that you can go directly to the meanings of the words they form. If you are preoccupied with the shapes of the letters, you will be an intolerably inefficient reader, likely to be thought stupid.
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Neil Postman _ Amusing Ourselves to Death:
Although the general character of print-intelligence would be known to anyone who would be reading this book, you may arrive at a reasonably detailed definition of it by simply considering what is demanded of you as you read this book. You are required, first of all, to remain more or less immobile for a fairly long time. If you cannot do this {with this or any other book}, our culture may label you as anything from hyperkinetic to undisciplined; in any case, as suffering from some sort of intellectual deficiency.
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Neil Postman _ Amusing Ourselves to Death:
But most of our daily news is inert, consisting of information that gives us something to talk about but cannot lead to any meaningful action.
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Neil Postman _ The End of Education:
Textbooks, it seems to me, are enemies of education, instruments for promoting dogmatism and trivial learning. They may save the teacher some trouble, but the trouble they inflict on the minds of students is a blight and a curse.
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Neil Postman _ Amusing Ourselves to Death:
That is why a good reader does not cheer an apt sentence or pause to applaud even an inspired paragraph. Analytic thought is too busy for that, and too detached.
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Neil Postman _ The End of Education:
Because we are imperfect souls, our knowledge is imperfect. The history of learning is an adventure in overcoming our errors. There is no sin in being wrong. The sin is in our unwillingness to examine our own beliefs, and in believing that our authorities cannot be wrong.
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Neil Postman _ Amusing Ourselves to Death:
The number of hours the average American watches TV has remained steady, at about four and a half hours a day, every day {by age sixty-five, a person will have spent twelve uninterrupted years in front of the TV}.
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Neil Postman _ Amusing Ourselves to Death:
on October 16, 1854, in Peoria, Illinois, Douglas delivered a three-hour address to which Lincoln, by agreement, was to respond. When Lincoln's turn came, he reminded the audience that it was already 5 p.m., that he would probably require as much time as Douglas and that Douglas was still scheduled for a rebuttal. He proposed, therefore, that the audience go home, have dinner, and return refreshed for four more hours of talk. 1 The audience amiably agreed, and matters proceeded as Lincoln had outlined.
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Neil Postman _ Amusing Ourselves to Death:
We might say that a technology is to a medium as the brain is to the mind.
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Neil Postman _ Technopoly: The Surrender of
...computer technology functions more as a new mode of transportation than as a new means of substantive communication. It moves information-lots of it, fast, and mostly in a calculating mode. The computer, in fact, makes possible the fulfillment of Descartes' dream of the mathematization of the world. Computers make it easy to convert facts into statistics and to translate problems into equations. And whereas this can be useful {as when the process reveals a pattern that would otherwise go unnoticed}, it is diversionary and dangerous when applied indiscriminately to human affairs.
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