219 Quotes by 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. Our television set keeps us in constant communion with the world, but it does so with a face whose smiling countenance is unalterable. 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. To.

Lippmann, for example, wrote in 1920: “There can be no liberty for a community which lacks the means by which to detect lies.

The written word is assumed to have been reflected upon and revised by its author, reviewed by authorities and editors.

All that has happened is that the public has adjusted to incoherence and been amused into indifference.

Popular literature now depends more than ever on the wishes of the audience, not the creativity of the artist.

I suspect, for example, that the dishonor that now shrouds Richard Nixon results not from the fact that he lied but that on television he looked like a liar. Which, if true, should bring no comfort to anyone, not even veteran Nixon-haters. For the alternative possibilities are that one may look like a liar but be telling the truth; or even worse, look like a truth-teller but in fact be lying. As.

Controlling your body is, however, only a minimal requirement. You must also have learned to pay no attention to the shapes of the letters on the page. You must see through them, so to speak, so that you can go directly to the meanings of the words they form. If you are preoccupied with the shapes of the letters, you will be an intolerably inefficient reader, likely to be thought stupid.

We must keep in mind the story of the statistician who drowned while trying to wade across a river with an average depth of four feet.

Until, years from now, when it will be noticed that the massive collection and speed-of-light retrieval of data have been of great value to large-scale organizations but have solved very little of importance to most people and have created at least as many problems for them as they may have solved. In.