What is your response to the idea that we are all subject to a "technological narcotic" ?
In Postman be sure to emphasize:
1. Postmans' arguments and can we reconcile his ideas and ours?
2. Justice Story on Daniel Webster's method. pp, 57-58
3. on Huxley's "technological narcotics" principle, p. 112
" 'nothing but entertainment is news."
"Such programs have little content,…the language …has become…increasingly decontextualized and discontinuous….knowing about the world' is effectively blocked."
4. Journals
5. Impressive selections:
the basic point of Postman's book
How is the change in media significant?
Advertising had an impact, if so when?
What in my notes I call the information to action ratio and
orders -- 2:1
spoken --10:1
typographic --25:1
modern media -- 100:5
The term is used by Postman to reveal how action based on news and informative correspondence (discourse) is subject now to a form of diminishing returns or marginal utility -- if those terms make sense to you.
I suggest a means to reconcile the arguments raised over Postman's epistemology "pre-post modern" that I discussed as not being "positivistic: but more likely post-positivist in his outlook, as he is not a reductionism prone --but a synthetic-- thinker.
A positivist (1870s-1899) thinks that there is a reality we can know through our senses., reason, and investigation. Such as a crime scene investigation.
A post-modernist (1970s-2008) believes that there are plural realities that correspond to different ways people make meaning of the often dueling truths they are subjected to by society and media.
What is Postman or is he neither one?
Aldous Huxley versus H. G. Wells
George Orwell
"On the politics or the English language"
