![]() In Chapters 3 through 5, Postman examines the way that "Typographic America" influenced the "Typographic Mind." He discusses the period between the colonial period through about the mid nineteenth century, first illustrating how the population at the time of the nation's birth was markedly literate and as a result was accustomed to approaching the world from a rational perspective. Television has influenced the way we live off the screen. What concerns him is that it has limited our discourse to where all of our serious forms of discussion have turned into entertainment. What concerns Postman about the television is not that it provides non-stop entertainment in fact, he enjoys this aspect of it. A primitive oral culture will put great stock in a man who remembers proverbs, since truth is passed on through such stories, whereas a culture of the written word will find oral proverbs quaint and the permanence of written precedent far more important. He believes that there is no universal way to know truth, but rather that a civilization will identify truth largely based on its forms of communication. In Chapter 2, "Media as Epistemology," Postman examines how any civilization's media will determine the way in which it defines truth. It is all an introduction for his basic examination, which aims to show how the television age is undergoing a rapid transformation in the wake of the relatively new media of television. He suggests, for instance, that an oral culture will speak of the world differently than one that has printed language. In Chapter 1, "The Medium is the Metaphor," Postman introduces the concept of the "media-metaphor." Simply put, he posits that every civilization's discourse is limited by the biases of the media it employs. Part I is concerned mostly with background and historical analysis. ![]() Postman wishes to reveal how discourse inspired by television has turned our world into a more Huxleyan one. The book opens with a Foreword that examines two literary dystopic visions – that of George Orwell, who in 1984 warned about a tyrannical state that would ban information to keep the public powerless, and that of Aldous Huxley, who in Brave New World depicted a population too amused by distractions to realize that they had been made powerless. As such, it follows a rather schematic organization, in which Postman introduces his basic thesis, conducts a background explanation of the suppositions on which the thesis is founded, and then presents the thesis in more detail. Its basic thesis is that television has negatively affected the level of public discourse in contemporary America, and it considers media in a larger context to achieve that. ![]() ![]() Amusing Ourselves to Death is a work that aims to both explore complicated ideas and market itself to the general public. ![]()
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