Agree or Disagree

   In chapter one, The Medium is the Metaphor, Postman says "America's journalists, i.e., television newscasters, have not missed the point. Most spend more time with their hair dryers than with their scripts, with the result that they compromise the most glamorous group of people this side of Las Vegas... those without camera appeal are excluded from addressing the public about what is called "the news of the day."" (p.4) I agree with Postman that newscasters are always good looking and worry more about their appearance than their script. On the news today, all the reporters get their hair done just right, and wear make-up to cover any imperfections. Channels such as ABC or Fox must choose slender and handsome or pretty men and women to share the daily news, so people will watch their show.  

    In chapter two, Media as Epistemology, Postman says "But there is still another reason why I should not like to be understood as making a total assault on television. Anyone who is even slightly familiar with the history of communications knows that every new technology for thinking  involves a trade-off." (p.29) I agree that not everything about television is bad and that just like other new technology it has positives and negatives. iPods, for example, are great because people can only buy the songs they want to put on them and do not need to pay for the entire CD. However, ever since they became popular people stealing music from line wire and other illegal sights has become a problem. Television also has positives and negatives. It is good for those who are stuck in hospitals for months at a time as a source of comfort and entertainment. However, news shown on TV jumps from one story to the next, or switches to a commercial, so quickly that people are not able to think about what they just saw. They show a horrible disaster and then the next minute a Windex commercial comes on with happy music. This  aspect of television is a problem.

    In chapter three, Typographic America, Postman says "In 1786, Benjamin Franklin observed that Americans were so busy reading newspapers and pamphlets that they scarcely had time for books." (p.37) This chapter does a great job of displaying how America has moved from the Age of Typography to the Age of Television. I agree with Postman that in the eighteenth century any written material was highly valued and the people loved to read anything and everything. I also agree that our society is much different. Back then, everyone paid for newspapers, but now the Free Press had to cut back on the days they delivered because not enough people will pay for a subscription. Instead, Americans pay for cable TV and watch the news on one of the hundreds of channels they receive.

   In chapter four, The Typographic Mind, Postman says "For one thing, its attention span would obviously have been extraordinary by current standards. Is there any audience of Americans today who could endure seven hours of talk? or five? or three? Especially without pictures of any kind? Second, these audiences must have had an equally extraordinary capacity to comprehend lengthy and complex sentences aurally." (p.45)Once again, I agree with Postman. that no audience today could stay attentive to a speaker for this length of time. Most television shows are half an hour or an hour and a movie that lasts more than two hours is considered long. Also when people go to plays, there is an intermission after about an hour to break up the two to three hour play. These examples display how short of an attention span we have and they contain a visual. When the visual aid is taken out it gets worse. For daily chapel, at Lutheran North, students complain about how boring a speaker was, yet it only lasted twenty minutes! This shows how much shorter people's attention span's today last.

   In chapter five, The Peek-a-Boo World, Postman says "Wars, crimes, crashes, fires, floods- much of it the social and political equivalent of Adelaide's whooping cough- became the content of what people called"the news of the day." (p.67)I disagree with Postman's opinion that all these stories are irrelevant and unimportant because they are so out of context and from all over the nation. It is important to hear about these disasters even if they do not directly affect you because they will often have an indirect effect on an aspect of your life. A few years ago, Hurricane Catrina hit New Orleans destroying many people's homes. This was all over the news and though it only hit one city, people from all over the country saw it on the news and went to help. Another example of a time when a news story brought people from all over to help was the three little boys who went missing around Thanksgiving, 2010. People heard the story on the news and spent days helping the police search for the little boys.

   In chapter six, The Age of Show Business, Postman says "The technology of television has a bias, as well. It is conceivable to use television as a lamp,a surface for texts, a bookcase, even as a radio. But it has not been so used and will not be so used, at least in America." (p.85) I agree with Postman that people claim the TV can be used as a lamp, to show words, a place to set books, or a radio, but people do not and will not ever use it for these purposes. That would be like a person using their phone only to take pictures. This would be silly because cell phones are much more useful for texting and calling family and friends. Also a digital camera that was made for the purpose of photography gives a person much better quality pictures than a phone's camera. In the same way, TV can be used occasionally as a place to set an object or just for background noise like a radio. However, this is not its main purpose so people will never stop watching television.

   In chapter seven, "Now... This", Postman says "In presenting news to us packaged as vaudeville, television induces other media to do the same, so that the total information environment beings to mirror television." (p.111) I agree with Postman that all sources of information are starting to use the same tactics television uses to capture people's attention. Magazines and the radio are two key example of this. Magazines have short little subtitles on the front cover to get a person interested and to buy the magazine so they can read it and learn more about the stories that caught their attention. The radio is also all about have the most interesting show so people listen to your show. Then the commercials pay more to be played on that station and they make more money. On 99.5 WYCD, they have a 7:20 lol every morning to try to amuse people with songs where they changed the lyrics to correspond with the latest celebrity news story. These examples display the way the radio and magazines aim for the same goal as television. They all want to be the most entertaining, in order to have the most viewers and make the most money.

   In chapter eight, Shuffle Off to Bethlehem, Postman says "Everything that makes religion an historic, profound and sacred human activity is stripped away; there is no ritual, no dogma, no tradition, no theology, and above all, no sense of spiritual transcendence. On these shows, the preacher is tops. God comes out as second banana." (p.117) I agree with Postman preaching the Gospel message on television is very dangerous and the preacher often gets caught up in the Age of Television and worries more about image than preaching the truth. Also knowing the huge amount of viewers they have gets to their head and they get high egos and think they are better than everyone else, even God. All the important aspects of religion are taken away on shows like Billy Graham's or Pat Robertson's because the main goal is to amuse the people and get more people to watch your station.

   In chapter nine, Reach Out and Elect Someone, Postman says "The television commercial is not at all about the character of products to be consumed. It is about the character of the consumers of products to be consumed. It is about the character of the consumers of products. Images of movie stars and famous athletes, of serene lakes and macho fishing trips, of elegant dinners and romantic interludes, of happy families..." (p.128) I agree with Postman that commercials are all about the consumer, not the products. One Walmart commercial shows a family having a nice civilized meal, then flashes back to reality with fighting and yelling and food all over. However, their point is you can still enjoy delicious food and imagine that life style if you buy their product. Anther commercial for treating allergies begins with a haze over the picture, then they take the medicine and suddenly everything is clear and it's a beautiful sunny day. The commercials often create a false illusion that the consumer will have what the people in the commercial have if they buy their product. Television is misleading.

   In chapter ten, Teaching as an Amusing Activity, Postman says "We now know that "Sesame Street" encourages children to love school only if school is like "Sesame Street." (p.143) I disagree with Postman and think that parents just need to make sure their children know that school and Sesame Street are different. In the same way children in middle school watch High School Musical and know students don't really break into song in the cafeteria or on the basketball court. It isn't just television where children must be able to make a distinction between two scenarios. There are also books, like fairy tales, and the children know it is all just imaginary. So for Sesame Street the children simply need to understand that watching a show on TV is different from going to school.

Laughing instead of Thinking

 Postman makes a distinction between people laughing instead of thinking and people not knowing what they were laughing about and why they stopped thinking. Postman points out that people are no longer thinking, but the problem is that they are unaware why they are laughing instead of thinking. Therefore  people laugh more and think less, but do not even notice the difference. This distinction is important because it shows the problem of our changing society is rooted much deeper than just switching from thinking to laughing. The problem is we do not understand the reason the change is taking place.

A Day Without Talking

   I thought it was very difficult to use only pictures and acting to communicate at lunch! We had a lot to talk about after two snow days and it was hard to draw what we did those two days. Also we wanted to discuss how our day without talking was going, but it was frustrating when other people wouldn't know what I was trying to draw. Sometimes it was really funny how far off they were on guessing what I was trying to show. This relates to Postman's point that smoke signals are not a sufficient means of communication and words are much more effective when trying to explain an idea. I am now aware of how hard it would be to communicate with people using pictures everyday. This also relates to Postman's point that society is changing from a time of seeing magic in writing to a time where magic is seen in electronics. Words are very powerful and should not be lost.

The Downward Spiral

   In both the novel Amusing Ourselves to Death and Dr. Postman's interview, he discusses the changes that are taking place in society. In the book, he tells that his book examines "the decline of the Age of Typography and the ascendancy of the Age of Television". In other words, he explains how as time progresses our society will use written words such as newspapers and magazines less and less. Instead, everything will change into something that can be shown on television. In the video, Postman also predicts how people will change in upcoming years. He quotes the man who wrote Being Digital saying "In the next millennium we will find we are talking with, as much or more, machines as human beings." Postman says people will talk to door knobs and toasters as if it is completely normal to talk to non-living objects. He claims that people are already beginning to do this by talking to their answering machines. Another argument he makes to convince his audience this will happen is that people adapt to many things. For example, a soldier gets used to killing, a child adapts to living without a father, and wives learn to live with an abusive husband. In the same way, people will adapt to talking to machines. Postman gets across the same point in the book and the video, the changes taking place in society are not improvements.

   The video and book also relate in that they both talk about the importance of image. During the interview, Postman expresses his belief that in the near future a human being will be cloned. A sheep, a monkey, and possibly a  frog have already been cloned. He also discusses the idea that every human born will have a clone that they lock up and if the person every needs a kidney or other body part they will take it from their clone. In the book, he says that TV newscasters spend more time on looking good than on reading their scripts. He also mentions touching people up for television or magazines. The picture shown on the front cover of a magazine is not an accurate portrayal of their actual appearance. His point is clear in both the video and book, our concern with image is leading to a selfish and naive nation.

Watch What You Say

   1) Chavez’ intends for the first six words to inform the reader that she sees the need for courtesy when engaging in discussions.  These words are important because throughout most of the article Chavez discusses how eliminating offensive words will “denude our language of color, passion, or good metaphor".

  2) Chavez uses the word "bellicose", which means inclined to war, because she wants to make the point that these type of metaphors have always been used in politics. She says that if the phrases such as "took his best shot" are no longer used it would leave us unable to accurately express ourselves. 

  3)Chavez is trying to persuade the reader that we should not stop using words or phrases just to avoid offending certain people. We must think before speaking, but this does not mean we need to say everything in a gentle, soothing way so we do not offend anyone. Her best example to get this point across is the Los Angeles Times restricting the use of the words "Indian", "Hispanic", "ghetto", and "inner-city" and replacing them with what they saw as less offensive words. She has a very good point after this in that it is not the words we use that are the problem, but they attitude behind them. Simply forbidding certain words will not resolve the problems.

4) I agree with Chavez that we should not stop using certain words, to avoid offending someone. It is not the words used that cause problems, rather the intent behind them.