Mr Postman

I've been reading "Amusing Ourselves to Death" by Neil Postman, a book that is repeatedly quoted in many other books I have read.  Halfway through at the moment, and it really is a fascinating and well written examination of TV culture.   The only problem with the book is that it predates the internet, or even the possibility of the internet, and I just hope that somewhere he set down his thoughts on how it might affect the conclusions he forms in this book.

Anyway, it's tempting to quote most of the book, which I won't be doing, but here's a start.  His main thesis is:

...an argument that fixes its attention on the forms of human conversation, and postulates that how we are obliged to conduct such conversations will have the strongest possible influence  on the ideas that we can conveniently express.  And what ideas are convenient to express inevitably become the important ideas of a culture.  

Which is terrifying in a way:  what TV is able to communicate becomes, because TV is dominant, the content of our culture.  What TV as a medium struggle to communicate, vanishes from a culture.

...I do not know exactly what content was once carried in the smoke signals of American Indians [but] I can safely guess it did not include philosophical argument.  Puffs of smoke are insufficiently complex...You cannot use smoke to do philosophy. Its form excludes the content....

...on television, discourse is conducted largely through visual imagery, which is to say TV gives us a conversation in images not words...you cannot do [political] philosophy on television. Its form works against the content. (p6&7)

Which is why politicians have image management not thinkers at the forefront.