television

Outstanding analysis of American culture of 1980s dominated by entertainment.

Makes a lot of sense to me since I witnessed myself similar changes to the culture growing up in Ukraine during the 1990s and 2000s.

This book is even more actual now in the age of Internet, mobile phones, social networks, instant deliveries etc.

Neil Postman

As Xenophanes remarked twenty-five centuries ago, men always make their gods in their own image. But to this, television politics has added a new wrinkle: Those who would be gods refashion themselves into images the viewers would have them be.

Neil Postman

That is why even on news shows which provide us daily with fragments of tragedy and barbarism, we are urged by the newscasters to “join them tomorrow.” What for?

Neil Postman

Just as a television commercial will use an athlete, an actor, a musician, a novelist, a scientist or a countess to speak for the virtues of a product in no way within their domain of expertise, television also frees politicians from the limited field of their own expertise. Political figures may show up anywhere, at any time, doing anything, without being thought odd, presumptuous, or in any way out of place. Which is to say, they have become assimilated into the general television culture as celebrities.

Neil Postman

“What do you mean when you say … ?” or “From what sources does your information come?” This type of discourse not only slows down the tempo of the show but creates the impression of uncertainty or lack of finish. It tends to reveal people in theact of thinking, which is as disconcerting and boring on television as it is on a Las Vegas stage.

Neil Postman

“We Americans seem to know everything about the last twenty-four hours but very little of the last sixty centuries or the last sixty years.” Terence Moran, I believe, lands on the target in saying that with media whose structure is biased toward furnishing images and fragments, we are deprived of access to an historical perspective. In the absence of continuity and context, he says, “bits of information cannot be integrated into an intelligent and consistent whole.”

Neil Postman

But the Founding Fathers did not foresee that tyranny by government might be superseded by another sort of problem altogether, namely, the corporate state, which through television now controls the flow of public discourse in America.

Neil Postman

Both the history and the ever-present possibilities of the television screen work against the idea that introspection or spiritual transcendence is desirable in its presence. The television screen wants you to remember that its imagery is always available for your amusement and pleasure.

Neil Postman

… that television’s conversations promote incoherence and triviality; that the phrase “serious television” is a contradiction in terms; and that television speaks in only one persistent voice—the voice of entertainment. Beyond that, I will try to demonstrate that to enter the great television conversation, one American cultural institution after another is learning to speak its terms. Television, in other words, is transforming our culture into one vast arena for show business. It is entirely possible, of course, that in the end we shall find that delightful, and decide we like it just fine. That is exactly what Aldous Huxley feared was coming, fifty years ago.

Neil Postman

But what I am claiming here is not that television is entertaining but that it has made entertainment itself the natural format for the representation of all experience.

Neil Postman

There is no more disturbing consequence of the electronic and graphic revolution than this: that the world as given to us through television seems natural, not bizarre.

Neil Postman

#television

Moreover, television offers viewers a variety of subject matter, requires minimal skills to comprehend it, and is largely aimed at emotional gratification.

Neil Postman

The commandments are as follows:

Thou shalt have no prerequisites

Every television program must be a complete package in itself. No previous knowledge is to be required. There must not be even a hint that learning is hierarchical, that it is an edifice constructed on a foundation. The learner must be allowed to enter at any point without prejudice. This is why you shall never hear or see a television program begin with the caution that if the viewer has not seen the previous programs, this one will be meaningless. Television is a nongraded curriculum and excludes no viewer for any reason, at any time. In other words, in doing away with the idea of sequence and continuity in education, television undermines the idea that sequence and continuity have anything to do with thought itself.

Thou shalt induce no perplexity

In television teaching, perplexity is a superhighway to low ratings. A perplexed learner is a learner who will turn to another station. This means that there must be nothing that has to be remembered, studied, applied or, worst of all, endured. It is assumed that any information, story or idea can be made immediately accessible, since the contentment, not the growth, of the learner is paramount.

Thou shalt avoid exposition like the ten plagues visited upon Egypt

Of all the enemies of television-teaching, including continuity and perplexity, none is more formidable than exposition. Arguments, hypotheses, discussions, reasons, refutations or any of the traditional instruments of reasoned discourse turn television into radio or, worse, third-rate printed matter. Thus, television-teaching always takes the form of story-telling, conducted through dynamic images and supported by music. This is as characteristic of “Star Trek” as it is of “Cosmos,” of “Different Strokes” as of “Sesame Street,” of commercials as of “Nova.” Nothing will be taught on television that cannot be both visualized and placed in a theatrical context. The name we may properly give to an education without prerequisites, perplexity and exposition is entertainment.

Neil Postman

All of this has occurred simultaneously with the decline of America’s moral and political prestige, worldwide. American television programs are in demand not because America is loved but because American television is loved.

Neil Postman

#television

…(by age sixty-five, a person will have spent twelve uninterrupted years in front of the TV).

Andrew Postman

…this book is an inquiry into and a lamentation about the most significant American cultural fact of the second half of the twentieth century: the decline of the Age of Typography and the ascendancy of the Age of Television. This change-over has dramatically and irreversibly shifted the content and meaning of public discourse, since two media so vastly different cannot accommodate the same ideas. As the influence of print wanes, the content of politics, religion, education, and anything else that comprises public business must change and be recast in terms that are most suitable to television.

Neil Postman

…the major educational enterprise now being undertaken in the United States is not happening in its classrooms but in the home, in front of the television set, and under the jurisdiction not of school administrators and teachers but of network executives and entertainers. I don’t mean to imply that the situation is a result of a conspiracy or even that those who control television want this responsibility. I mean only to say that, like the alphabet or the printing press, television has by its power to control the time, attention and cognitive habits of our youth gained the power to control their education. This is why I think it accurate to call television a curriculum. As I understand the word, a curriculum is a specially constructed information system whose purpose is to influence, teach, train or cultivate the mind and character of youth. Television, of course, does exactly that, and does it relentlessly. In so doing, it competes successfully with the school curriculum. By which I mean, it damn near obliterates it.

Neil Postman

In 1986, soon after the book was published and had started to make ripples, Dad was on ABC’s Nightline, discussing with Ted Koppel the effect TV can have on society if we let it control us, rather than vice versa. As I recall, at one juncture, to illustrate his point that our brief attention span and our appetite for feel-good content can short-circuit any meaningful discourse, Dad said, “For example, Ted, we’re having an important discussion about the culture but in thirty seconds we’ll have to break for a commercial to sell cars or toothpaste.” Mr. Koppel, one of the rare serious figures on network television, smiled wryly—or was it fatigue? “Actually, Dr. Postman,” he said, “it’s more like ten seconds.”

Andrew Postman

… we do not measure a culture by its output of undisguised trivialities but by what it claims as significant. Therein is our problem, for television is at its most trivial and, therefore, most dangerous when its aspirations are high, when it presents itself as a carrier of important cultural conversations.

Neil Postman

In watching American television, one is reminded of George Bernard Shaw’s remark on his first seeing the glittering neon signs of Broadway and 42nd Street at night. It must be beautiful, he said, if you cannot read.

Neil Postman

#television

As I suggested earlier, it is implausible to imagine that anyone like our twenty-seventh President, the multi-chinned, three-hundred-pound William Howard Taft, could be put forward as a presidential candidate in today’s world. The shape of a man’s body is largely irrelevant to the shape of his ideas when he is addressing a public in writing or on the radio or, for that matter, in smoke signals. But it is quite relevant on television. The grossness of a three-hundred-pound image, even a talking one, would easily overwhelm any logical or spiritual subtleties conveyed by speech. For on television, discourse is conducted largely through visual imagery, which is to say that television gives us a conversation in images, not words. The emergence of the image-manager in the political arena and the concomitant decline of the speech writer attest to the fact that television demands a different kind of content from other media. You cannot do political philosophy on television. Its form works against the content.

Neil Postman

Television is the new state religion run by a private Ministry of Culture (the three networks), offering a universal curriculum for all people, financed by a form of hidden taxation without representation. You pay when you wash, not when you watch, and whether or not you care to watch.

George Gerbner television

Liberation cannot be accomplished by turning [television] off. Television is for most people the most attractive thing going any time of the day or night. We live in a world in which the vast majority will not turn off. If we don’t get the message from the tube, we get it through other people.

George Gerbner

…the phenomenon whereby the reporting of a horrific event—a rape or a five-alarm fire or global warming—is followed immediately by the anchor’s cheerfully exclaiming “Now … this,” which segues into a story about Janet Jackson’s exposed nipple or a commercial for lite beer, creating a sequencing of information so random, so disparate in scale and value, as to be incoherent, even psychotic.

Andrew Postman

#television

The problem is not that television presents us with entertaining subject matter but that all subject matter is presented as entertaining, which is another issue altogether.

Neil Postman

But ventriloquism, dancing and mime do not play well on radio, just as sustained, complex talk does not play well on television.

Neil Postman

I should go so far as to say that embedded in the surrealistic frame of a television news show is a theory of anti-communication, 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 theater, it is known as vaudeville.

Neil Postman

Was it inevitable that by 1995 American children would be watching 5,000 hours of television before entering the first grade, 19,000 hours by high school’s end, and by age twenty would have seen 600,000 television commercials?

Neil Postman

The worst thing about television news or radio news is that there is no reason offered for why information is there; no background; no connectedness to anything else; no point of view; no sense of what the audience is supposed to do with the information.

Neil Postman

Television solved several important problems, but in solving them changed the nature of political discourse, led to a serious decline in literacy, and quite possibly made the traditional process of socializing children impossible.

Neil Postman

We are presented with a world of “and”s, not “because”s. This happened, and then this happened, and then something else happened.

Neil Postman

Radio, for example, made it unnecessary for people to read to each other, or to read a all. Movies led people out of their homes; television brought them back but not to read.

Neil Postman

Television erases the dividing line between childhood and adulthood in two ways: it requires no instruction to grasp its form, and it does not segregate its audience. Therefore, it communicates the same information to everyone, simultaneously, regardless of age, sex, level of education, or previous condition of servitude.

Neil Postman

As television begins to render invisible the traditional concept of childhood, it would not be quite accurate to say that it immerses us in an adult world. Rather, it uses the material of the adult world as basis for projecting a new kind of person altogether. We might call this person the adult-child… Television promotes as desirable many of the attitudes that we associate with childishness - for example, an obsessive need for immediate gratification, a lack of concern for consequences, and almost promiscuous preoccupation with consumption.

Neil Postman

The idea of children implies a vision of the future. They are the living messages we send to a time we will not see. But television cannot communicate a sense of the future or, for that matter, a sense of the past. It is a present-centered medium, a speed-of-light medium. Everything we see on television is experienced as happening now. The grammar of television has no analogue to the past and future tenses in language. It amplifies the present out of all proportion and transforms the childish need for immediate gratification into a way of life. We end up with what Christopher Lasch calls “the culture of narcissism” - no future, no children, everyone fixed at an age somewhere twenty and thirty.

Neil Postman

The symbolic for of television does not require any special instruction or learning. In America, television-viewing begins at about the age of eighteen months, and by thirty-six months children begin to understand and respond to television imagery… There is no need for any preparation or prerequisite training for watching television… Watching television requires no skills and develops no skills. That is why there is no such things as remedial television-watching. That is also why you are not better today at watching television than you were five years ago, or ten.

Neil Postman

The brain does not regard brain change as a problem. If we think of language as brain of civilization, then it is possible that severe language-damage may not be perceived by the social body as a problem. It is possible that we have adapted ourselves to disinformation, to Newspeak, to picture newspapers and magazines, to religion revealed in the form of entertainment, to politics in the form of a thirty-second television commercial. In adapting ourselves, we come to accept the present situation as the only available standard.

Neil Postman

Television if relentless in both revealing and trivializing all things private and shameful.

Neil Postman

#television

Television obliterates the distinction between child and adult, as it obliterates social secretes, as it undermines concepts of the future and the value of restraint and discipline, we seem destined to be moving back toward a medieval sensibility from which literacy had freed us.

Neil Postman

Television screens saturated with commercials promote the Utopian and childish idea that all problems have fast, simple, and technological solutions.

Neil Postman

Commercial television adds to the Decalogue several impious commandments, among them that thou shalt have no other gods than consumption, thou shalt despise what is old, thou shalt seek to amuse thyself continuously, and thou shalt avoid complexity like the ten plagues that afflicted Egypt.

Neil Postman

I believe that human beings need first to be children before they can be grown-ups. Otherwise, they remain like television’s adult-child all their lives, with no sense of belonging, no capacity for lasting relationships, no respect for limits, and not grasp of the future.

Neil Postman

Childhood innocence is impossible to sustain, which is why children have disappeared from television… All the children on televisions shows are depicted as merely small adults, in the manner of thirteenths - and fourteenth-century paintings… You will see children whose language, dress, sexuality, and interests are not different from those of the adults on the same shows.

Neil Postman

Junk food, once suite only to the undiscriminating palates and iron stomachs of the young, is now common fare for adults. It has already been forgotten that adults are supposed to have more developed taste in food than children. McDonald’s and Burger King commercials show us that this distinction is no longer relevant.

Neil Postman

This is where television news is at its most radical - not in the giving publicity to radical causes, but in producing the impression of an ungovernable world.

Neil Postman

With the assistance of modern contraceptives, the sexual appetite of both adults and children can be satisfied without serious restraint and without mature understanding of its meaning. Here, television has played an enormous role, since it not only keep the entire population in a condition of high sexual excitement but stresses a kind of egalitarianism of sexual fulfillment: sex is transformed into a product available to everyone - let us say, like mouthwash or under-arm deodorant.

Neil Postman

In the television-commercial parables, the root cause of evil is Technological Innocence, a failure to know the particulars of the beneficent accomplishments of the industrial process.

Neil Postman

The theme music came up and Sassoon had just time enough to say, “Don’t go away. We’ll be back with a marvelous new diet and then a quick look at incest”.

Neil Postman

“Watching television” is something quite different from “watching a television program”. The later implies a selection, the former a compulsion.

Neil Postman

The living room has become a voting booth. Participation via television in Freedom Marches, in war, revolution, pollution, and other events is changing everything.

Marshall McLuhan

But America is a rather odd country. It’s very religious, and at the same time it allows the broadcast of the pope’s funeral t be interrupted by advertisements, many of which were the direct embodiment of what he had criticized fir his entire life. I found it truly hard to understand, and it made me more and more uncomfortable, until I finally switched the television off.

Václav Havel