Posting on Postman

Classical 89 Thinking Aloud Interview on a related topic: http://www.classical89.org/thinkingaloud/past.asp?d=7/11/2008

Twice now (in over three hundred Thinking Aloud interviews) the title Technopoly by the late Neil Postman has been mentioned. A third allusion would be the charm. (Any bets on how soon?) Frankly, I wouldn’t be surprised to have Technopoly crop up again in just about any interview touching on human behavior or cultural trends—or at least Postman’s name. So today I’m thinking about Neil Postman, a cultural commentator on things related to media and education. Nowadays we all fancy ourselves media experts; there’s little point in distilling any ideas from Technopoly in this post. A simple weblink suffices; you can Google the rest. Do I endorse the book? Yes … probably … haven’t read it yet, actually. But as I think about this title and its author—who three years before his death delivered the August 2000 commencement address at BYU (an address that in its extreme brevity seems to have met the minimal length requirement to justify conferral of an honorary degree), I can’t help but wonder if, in coming years, a general education at any reputable university (including BYU) will not of necessity include a prerequisite course along the lines of media-and-technology-literacy, so that, as Postman put it, the educated person will be in a position to “use technology rather than being used by it.” I’m not a card-carrying member of the truly wired generation. But even those of us who grew up watching Walter Cronkite and Gilligan’s Island (premiere broadcasts of the latter!) … we older, perhaps wiser folk know that technologies push not only content but values at us that we wouldn’t necessarily choose to pull. Even something as archaic and outmoded as television did that to me (for far too long, I’m ashamed to say). The internet does it to me. Alas, almost no barrier is sufficient to prevent the pushers. (Didn’t that word have really nasty connotations in the 60s?) Finally, a really nice Postman quote for you: “Children are the living messages we send to a time we will not see” (from The Disappearance of Childhood [1982]).

-Marcus Smith