The truth is that there is no easy solution, and that the simplest solution (i.e., turning everything off completely), is unworkable because we and our children would be functionally disconnected from so much of society. He’s standing athwart history yelling “STOP,” but does not provide a solution. Lacking from Postman’s analysis is an answer the for the disease that ails us. It may even be easier to accept now that a quarter of a century has passed and the challenges have morphed. So, the cycle continues and the hole gets deeper. In our current milieu, there appear to be a fair number of people that get their news through comments on social media rather than any legitimate news source (regardless of its bias). Additionally, with the wide array of “news” shows of varying degree of accuracy and political leanings available all 168 hours each week, the presentation of information has to be even more entertaining than before.
Our news sources have recognized this, along with the inability to discern opinion from fact in most of the population, and thus they have largely abandoned anything like an attempt at objective reporting because getting their constructed truth out is more important the facts. Our elections have been tampered with by agents from other nations who spread misinformation with just enough truth to cast doubt. The reshaping of epistemology is radically important, even more so now than it was in 1985. Even news sources that are still considered credible have recognized that few people read beyond the headlines and those who do are unlikely to get past the perspective that the headline has already presented, whatever the evidence is that runs to the contrary.
There are entire companies that feed off of deceptive headlines that declare one thing in their headline and argue something entirely different in the body of the article. We need look no farther than click-bait internet articles to see that Postman is correct. Media is forming our minds to perceive in particular manners. Not only how we acquire information but how we know is shaped by how information is received.
Whether or not we know how to spell it, everyone has an epistemology.) (Epistemology is the study of the way that people know things. The efficacy of each medium to convey certain parallel signals effortlessly alters people’s epistemologies. As a result, it is most commonly used in its most suitable manner, which shapes the media consumer in powerful ways. The point is not that technology is bad, but that technology is most effective if it is used in a particular manner. It would be easy to claim that Postman was merely clutching at pearls, if the evidence did not point overwhelmingly toward the aggravation of the problems he identifies. Thus, the endurance to learn and slog through difficult tasks has been diminished by the medium that is very effective in achieving short term gains. According to Postman, whatever good is done by teaching through entertainment is undermined as it forms the learning human to expect education to be exciting. Postman notes that Sesame Street is a prime example of this, though certainly neither the worst nor the only platform that does this.
Instead of doing the long, hard work of training minds, much of our educational methodology has shifted to entertainment. Not only has news changed, but education has changed. Notably, it is much easier for me to find out about the personal lives of political leaders across the globe than to find out what the local city council is talking about. The change was not wrought overnight, but the shift of concern from local issues to global ones has completely overtaken us today. The telegraph sped up the spread of national and international news, so that information could be had within minutes rather than days or weeks. In other words, the facts of the news are the same (if written well), but the secondary signals created by the means that the news is transmitted also shape the reception of the news.įor example, Postman notes that prior to the invention of the telegraph, most newspapers focused almost exclusively on local news. Postman’s clarification is helpful, since it separates the content of the message from vehicle that carries the message.