Postman and the Shaping of our World

Landon Winner’s 1980 article, “Do Artifacts Have Politics?” introduces his claim that technologies have a way of defining the way we build the world and that “some technologies are by their very nature political in a specific way” (33). In other words, the adoption of a technical system changes the way we act and interact, in a social context and in a political context. He argues that we should pay more close attention to the nature of technologies and the anticipated consequences of adopting certain technologies.

Over the course of the semester, we have looked at new media, not just what it does, but also the affect it has on the way we think, the way we communicate, and the way we learn. It is not merely a tool, but it has the potential to change the way we interact culturally and politically.

In his book, The Hidden Power of Electronic Culture, Shane Hipps paraphrases Marshall McLuhan’s definition of media, stating, “Every medium is an extension of our humanity” (34).

He continues, “All forms of media (i.e., any human inventio or technology) extend or amplify some part of ourselves. They either extend a part of our body, one or more of the senses, some function of our mental processes, or some social process” (34) and offered some examples: The wheel extends our body and “amplifies the function of the foot,” the telephone extends our voice and our ear, eyeglasses extend our ability to see, and weapons extend our teeth and our fists.

He allows that this is a very broad and unusual definition that includes items we don’t usually define as media, but states, “Understanding media as extensions of ourselves is crucial to understanding media, period. When we fail to see media this way, we become overly enamored, giving them the power to make us slaves to our own creations” (35).

I like McLuhan’s definition, and I appreciate Hipps’ application of the definition. Both allow me to view writing, communication, and other forms of new media through new lenses and challenge me to think about the implications of using these extensions to my body and my mind.

His definitions challenge previous ways of thinking. For example, the use of words and the communication of ideas through ideas are so essential to my way of life that I don’t see these things as technology. They have become a part of me. In fact, I am often more comfortable writing than I am with entering into random conversations. I can plan what to say in an essay or a blog; I can be in control. If I am not writing, I am often reading, absorbed in the power of text.

Hipps might argue that I have become a slave to the written word.

Hipps’ use of McLuhan’s definitions is not limited to the power of text. He is arguing that we need to examine that ways that media, particularly communications media, directly or indirectly affects communication. What are the implications of adopting any given medium?

These ideas complement Winner’s argument about the politics of technology and his warning that we must pay attention to the unintended consequences of technology.

Both of these writers have challenged me this semester, and pushed me to examine the world in new ways and to explore the nature of technologies in my life, in our culture, and in the world. They have forced me to redefine terms like “media,” “writing,” technology,” and “politics.”

And that really is Postman’s point in “The Word Weavers/The World Makers.” Every day, wherever we go, we are subject to ideas, communicated in words that affect the way we think in subtle ways. We don’t think about the verbs we use, the prepositions, or the metaphors that define our world. We adopt verbal expressions as tools to communicate, but we don’t realize how they affect the way we think. (This makes me wonder if McLuhan would categorize words, an extension of thought, as media.)

Postman claims, “Definitions, questions, metaphors—these are three of the most potent elements with which human language constructs a worldview” (135). Words have power; they are artifacts with politics, intended and unintended.

Just as we don’t generally talk about the use of computers for the acquisition of information as having political implications, we don’t talk generally about the use of words to shape the world, we don’t generally teach students to identify or question the use of metaphors through which they see the world.

And because they don’t learn to identify or question the shaping of their world through language, “world making through language is a narrative of power, durability, and inspiration” (135).

Winner describes this as politics.

Hipps claims that if we don’t examine the effects of media, we become slaves to it. We must study and understand cultural forces in order to “learn to use them rather than be used by them” (183).

Postman says that we must teach our students to ask questions about where definitions and metaphors come from, who made them up, and why they were created.

He argues for technology education, which isn’t training on how to use technology, but the study of

. . . how televisions and movie cameras, Xerox machines, and computers reorder our psychic habits, our social relations, our political ideas, and our moral sensibilities. It is about how the meanings of information and education change as new technologies intrude upon a culture, how the meanings of truth, law, and intelligence differ among oral cultures, writing cultures, printing cultures, electronic cultures. (143)

He includes ten principles that should be included in such an education, including the understanding that all “technological change is a Faustian bargain. For every advantage new technology offers, there is always a corresponding disadvantage” (143), and that these advantages “are never distributed evenly among the population . . . new technology benefits some and harms others” (143).

Winner, Hipps, and Postman are not arguing for the abandonment of technology. They just want us to think about what is happening, about the ways our world is shaped for us instead of by us. Hipps quotes McLuhan, who said, “There is absolutely no inevitability as long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening,” (182) and suggests that “by understanding the forces that shape us, no outcome is inevitable” (183).

Texting Toward Utopia? Maybe not.

Back in the 70s, the USSR’s strength seemed impenetrable. Every now and then someone would manage to defect to the West, and the news media would report how bad Communism was, how limited freedom was, how grateful these individuals were to be in the West, how sad they were to leave their country.

The news coverage made me think that everyone wanted to leave, they all wanted to live in the West where freedom and democracy reigned and there was liberty and justice for all. It made me think that if given the opportunity, if the USSR weren’t so repressive, the people would all rise up and revolt and choose our form of government.

In retrospect, I realize that my perspective was limited. Not everyone wanted to leave and not everyone wanted to change the government. And while I truly do believe that we live in an amazing country, I have since learned that we have our own problems with freedom and democracy and human rights.

In “Texting Toward Utopia,” Evgeny Morozov suggests that we have a similarly narrow perspective, and we have been a little optimistic when it comes to the “Internet’s democratizing potential” (1/9).

Evgeny Morozov is a leading thinker and commentator on the political implications of the Internet. He is a contributing editor to Foreign Policy and runs the magazine's blog about the Internet's impact on global politics Morozov is currently a Yahoo! fellow at Georgetown University's E.A. Walsh School of Foreign Service.

This article is filled with lots of overstatement and understatement. This sort of tone is particularly helpful as his chief strategy is to introduce claims of “democratizing potential,” to concede portions of those claims, and then to refute the absolute nature of those claims by introduce alternate possibilities.

He begins by providing quotes made by U.S. presidents and their speechwriters pertaining to the Internet’s freedom-producing power:

· Reagan: “The Goliath of totalitarianism will be brought down by the David of the microchip”

· Clinton – described Internet censorship as “trying to nail Jell-O to the wall”

· George W. Bush – “imagine if the Internet took hold in China. Imagine how freedom would spread”

He He notes that others have been optimistic as well:

· Rupert Murdoch, the 132-nd richest person in the world and the owner of several newspapers and Fox Network:

o “Advances in the technology of telecommunications have proved an unambiguous threat to totalitarian regimes everywhere.”

· The author notes sites like Facebook, YouTube and Blogger, which are especially unpopular with authoritarian regimes and declare that the Internet will lead to nothing short of a revolution—in politics and information.

· They declare that the Internet will bring about freedom on earth!

Morozov isn’t quite as optimistic. He notes that internet censorship has increased since 2003. He cites Carnegie Report that warned the “global infusion of the Internet presents both opportunity and challenge for authoritarian regimes” and concluded that “the political impact of the Internet would vary with a country’s social and economic circumstances, its political culture, and the peculiarities of the . . . Internet infrastructure” (1).

He concedes that some things have been hopeful—

· Ukraine activists relied on new-media technologies to mobilize supporters during the Orange Revolution

· Colombian protesters used FB to organize massive rallies against leftist guerrillas

· Photos of anti-government protests in Burma quickly traveled the globe, affecting international response

· Democratic activists in Zimbabwe used the Web to track vote rigging I last year’s election and phones to take photos of election results posted outside polls, providing proof of irregularities

BUT – as he clearly puts it,

“Regime change by text messaging may seem realistic in cyberspace, but no dictators have been toppled via Second Life.”

Obviously, a dictator in Second Life’s synthetic realm holds no threat to the world we live in, and so Morozov sets up an easily toppled straw man to make his point that the idea of Internet revolution isn’t that simple.

Many factors need to be considered when assessing the role of the Internet in fulfilling the “grandiose promise of technological determinism” (2).

He introduces examples that show new media benefit that might signal revolution and then demonstrates that there are other factors.

· It has been proposed that Barack Obama’s electoral success is due to his team’s mastery of databases, online fundraising, and social networking.

o Offers that yes, this is true, but to claim the “primacy of technology over politics would be to disregard”

§ Obama’s charisma

§ The legacy of the unpopular Bush administration

§ Global financial crisis

§ Choice of Sarah Palin

o In other words, “one cannot grant much legitimacy to the argument” that web savvy gave Obama the election.

· Orange Revolution in the Ukraine

o Mobile phones

§ 150 mobile groups responsible for spreading information and coordinating election monitoring

§ 72 regional centers

§ 30,000 registered participants

o He points out that to “focus so singularly on the technology is to gloss over” the other factors

§ the brutal attempts to falsify the results of the presidential elections that triggered the protests,

§ the two weeks that protesters spent standing in the freezing November air,

§ the millions of dollars pumped into the Ukrainian democratic forces to make those protests happen in the first place” (3).

In other words, online tools play a significant role—in addition to the role of DIRECT COMMUNICATION.

He concedes that “even third world countries have this kind of access to global communication, the Internet is making “group and individual action cheaper, faster, and leaner.” It’s true. I was in Cameroun a few years ago. Access to indoor plumbing was limited, but nearly everyone had a portable, a mobile phone.

This concession allows Morozov to argue five things:

1. That logistics are not the only determinant of civic engagement and in fact,

a. He asks important questions:

i. What is the impact of the Internet on our incentives to act?

ii. Does the Internet foster an eagerness to act on newly acquired information?

b. He claims that whether the Internet augments or dampens this eagerness is both critical and undetermined.

2. Increased volume of information can actually work against the cause of informing individuals and groups.

a. Optimists claim that open data helps to expose abuses of power (3)

i. All governments can benefit from increased scrutiny by the world community as well as their own people. We believe this scrutiny requires information.

b. As we all know, doing searches on the internet means asking your search engine the right questions.

i. He illustrates the problems by providing the example of Bernie Madoff, even publicly available filings with the SEC don’t mean that someone is going to get caught.

ii. Just because the information is there doesn’t mean that the average user knows where to look or what questions to ask.

iii. As Mozorov puts it, “making sense of 1.2 million documents uploaded to Wikileaks will take time, effort, and a large contingent of investigative journalists” (4)

iv. Not all crimes are documented in ways that can be categorized and put online.

3. New media technologies don’t always mean that we can be persuaded to change.

a. Sometimes we just search out more information like the information we already have.

i. “enclave extremism”

ii. One of the responses to this article came from someone living in Bangladesh who claimed that the “notion that free flow of information will reduce intolerance has proved futile. On the other hand, it seems to make both groups more extreme.”

4. Blogs and other new media technologies can be used against the cause of freedom and democracy as defined by the West.

a. Much of the value that readers place in blogs hinges on the perception that the authors are independent, free from manipulation by the state or other third-parties.

b. Old media: Soviets didn’t ban radio; they jammed certain Western stations and exploited the medium to promote their ideology.

c. China and Russia are the two states most active in posting Web content.

5. There is no guarantee freedom and democracy, as defined by the West, is what other cultures desire.

a. Little evidence that an open internet will suddenly make the Chinese or Russians dream of democracy.

b. Illustration of this idea: East Germans who could not tune in to West German broadcasting had higher rates of opposition to their government than those who did.

c. Reports that most Egyptian bloggers are pro-West didn’t take into account that the secular, progressive, and pro-Western bloggers tend to write in English rather than in their native language.

d. Labeling a Muslim Brotherhood blog as “undemocratic” suggests duplicity.

i. If that is what the majority of people in a country chose, then this really is government by the people—and enforcing our version of democracy would actually be undemocratic.

Morozov concludes with a warning: The problem with building public spheres from above, online, or offline, is much like that of building Frankenstein’s monsters: we may not like the end product.

In other words, be careful about assuming that use of the Internet can only lead to democratization. It would be wise to figure out specifically how the Internet can benefit existing democratic forces and organizations, very few of which have shown much creativity in using technology.

Questions and More Questions

A) Where do you get most of your news?

It's sort of embarrassing, but I watch Channel 6 news every morning. My husband and I are "couch potatoes”--if we keep entering enough Couch Potato codes, we'll win one of their raffles eventually and maybe a trip to Hawaii or dinner at a restaurant or tickets to a concert we won’t attend. I understand that this is primarily fluffy local news, but for some reason I watch it anyway. On Tuesday morning, during a commercial, I switched over to CNN and learned that there had been a skirmish between North and South Korea in the Yellow Sea. I also learned that middle school students were taken hostage in New York. And that there was a high speed chase from Orange County to San Diego. None of that news was on Channel 6.

I also check the headlines from i-Google, which allows me to choose news categories of interest to me and then provides what somebody—or the computer—thinks are the top five stories of the day. I chose World, U.S., Entertainment, Science/Tech, Health, and Korea.

If I had more time, I could stay up to date on those categories and others, but there really is no time.

Before starting school a year ago, I read the newspaper every morning. I loved the randomness of unrelated stories lying next to each other on the page. I loved the randomness of learning things that I might never have chosen to learn about—that I wouldn’t have even existed. I stopped receiving the paper when I started school. It went unread too many mornings and seemed like a waste of money.

Reading about newspapers and news and leisurely learning random information makes me nostalgic. I feel uninformed.

Have you ever subscribed to a newspaper?

I started reading the paper when I was age 13 and had a paper route. I started with Dear Abby and the comics and moved on to the front page and the editorials. When I got married, I decided I should learn about sports and so I started reading that section in order to know what my husband and his friends were talking about. Later on I read the business section. Pretty soon I felt compelled to read the entire paper.

How much news do you get online? Could you recognize any of the trends described in the articles?

In “A New Literacies Sampler,” Lankshear and Knobel summarize Michael Schrage, who argued that “viewing the computing and communications technologies of the internet through an information lens is ‘dangerously myopic’” (12).

The information is there, but it takes time to process.

As described above, I get some news online, mostly from i-Google, but there's not enough time to search out the information needed to understand what's really going on in the world. Just because the information's available doesn't mean I am asking the questions needed to find the answers. It takes time to learn the right questions. It takes times to ask them. It takes times to understand the answers.

We don’t know what we don’t know.

B) What are newspapers for? Does it really matter if they go away?

Newspaper journalists take the time to ask the questions I would ask. As Shirky notes, print media "does much of society's heavy lifting . . . covering every angle of a huge story . . ."

Print media allows journalists to slow down and explore different aspects of a story. It allows the reader to synthesize what he or she already knows what is new. Newspapers provide information that raises questions I wouldn't normally ask. Not because I am not interested, but because I don't know yet know that I am interested.

Lasch says that the "proper role of the press is to extend the scope of debate by supplementing the spoken word with the written word" (294). Newspapers propel me "into arguments that focus and fully engage" my attention so that I become an "avid seeker of relevant information" (291). They push me beyond my “preferences and projects” and raise questions in my mind. Once I’ve got the questions, I can do all kinds of research.

We’re moving in a week, and after reading all these articles, I’m thinking of subscribing to the paper again. Or checking MSN.com more often. I can scan headlines and feature articles quickly, and if I decide to read one in-depth, the website will suggest others that may interest me. In that way, it functions like a newspaper, introducing me to new material, material I probably wouldn't have sought out.

Shirky says strongly, "Society doesn't need newspapers. What we need is journalism." In theory, I agree with him. I'm just not sure how to gain exposure to new information without it.

C) Which of the arguments in the readings did you find most persuasive?
What do you think will or should replace newspapers, and if we are heading
to a new system for news, what principles ought this system try to promote?

Shirky says, “Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism.” Print media is costly to produce. And by the time it’s printed, it’s out of date. The web gives us up-to-the-minute information.

At the same time, I’m a little nostalgic. I love newspapers. I love the gift of information, tossed in my driveway every morning. I love the way stories cover so many angles of an issue. I love the prospect of learning new things, things that challenge my ideas, things that influence my opinions.

News stories on the web tend to be shorter and to touch on the basics of stories. They answer the “what,” but they don’t explore the “why.”

And generally speaking I only click on news stories that affect my life. As Sunstein describes in “The Daily We,” I can customize or personalize my entire “communications universe.” I can listen to people who agree with me—or I can listen to no one.

I like having my viewpoints challenged. I like learning new perspectives. Sometimes I change my mind. Sometimes I don’t. That’s not really the point. The point is I am engaged with the world.

Most of us don’t engage anymore.

Lasch describes newspapers of the 19^th century as “journals of opinions in which the reader expected to find a definite point of view . . .” (291). He says that it was no accident that “journalism of this kind flourished during the period from 1830 to 1900, when popular participation in American politics was at its height” (291). He states that 80 percent of eligible voters went to the polls and suggests that this was because political debate, communicated in print and in public forums, propelled citizens to get involved. He claims that when newspapers became more “objective,” citizens began to disengage.

Maybe the news got too intense. Maybe as the world became smaller with World Wars and American men dying in countries across oceans, Americans decided they didn’t want to know everything. Maybe there was just too much information to absorb.

Maybe the Internet just makes things worse. There’s so much information out there, and we can’t learn all of it, so rather than make choices, we just focus on fluffy news and where’s Reuben and Couch Potato points.

In an ideal world, and I love ideals, we know what’s going on around us. We care. We engage in thoughtful debate and work together for solutions. We want to find the best, most productive ways to disseminate news, whether that is print media, internet, television, or combinations.

So we sit down and identify the end goal and the problems that keep us from achieving that goal, ascertain possible underlying causes for failure to achieve that goal, and then propose possible solutions and the advantages and disadvantages of those solutions.

Assuming the goal is to further democracy, government by the people, then people need to know what's going on. They need to understand that we all operate from certain biases--there is always an argument and a point of view. Rhetorical education is invaluable, the ability to identify persuasive strategies, isolate claims, and evaluate evidence will help them determine how to get involved.

On the other hand, maybe the fact that we are increasingly aware of divergent perspectives, the idea that there may be no one right answer to the problems facing our world, will keep us from getting involved no matter what kind of news we are exposed to.

Have Students Really Lost the Ability to Read Deeply

My adult daughter, who teaches 9th grade Humanities at High Tech High, dropped by last night. I am sorting through books I don't want on my shelves anymore, and I always like to offer them to her. Two of my three children have inherited the obsession to purchase and hold on to books we have read, as though having the book on the shelf means that the ideas contained within them are ours forever. She was super excited that I had found some of her textbooks from college. She can use them in her classroom or in future research.

We like to share ideas we have been reading about and so we began talking about some of the concepts from this class.

She mentioned that teaching reading and reading comprehension to students is one of the hardest parts of her job. Her students just don't read deeply. They don't want to spend time understanding the books they are assigned. She suggested that exposure to new medias might be part of the problem.

Maybe.

On the other hand, I know all kinds of people who never read a book in high school. They wrote reports based on cliff notes or reading the back covers of books.

And they did that before the internet was invented.

Prophecies

In 1971, my mother enrolled my brothers in the Fundamental School, a public elementary school that promised to focus on the three R’s, reading, writing, and arithmetic. I’m not sure how their elementary school experience was different than the one my sister and I had, but my mom was hopeful that they would get a better, more focused education in an environment that didn’t spend time creating wall murals on butcher paper. For what it’s worth, we were all good students and did more or less the same in high school and college.

My mom’s concerns were not unique. Rudolph Flesch’s 1955 book Why Johnny Can’t Read—and What You Can Do About It is still in print and is available on Amazon for only $10.40. It’s sort of odd that I am familiar with the title of a book published before I was born and that people younger than me are blogging about exactly this phrase. It seems that education hasn’t improved much since Flesch’s book—or at least the market for books about the dismal state of education is still pretty healthy.

As a result, I’m not terribly alarmed by the ominous prophecies in our readings.

It seems like someone is always complaining that young people just aren’t the same as they used to be. In “Teaching and Reading the Millennial Generation through Media Literacy,” 2007 article published in the Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, David Considine observed that in “times of rapid technological change, it has been typical for adults to criticize the academic achievement and work ethic of their own children” (471). He noted that this has been going for thousands of years and even Greek philosopher Socrates was critical Athenian teenagers and their deficient education.

Sven Birkerts’ 1994 book entitled The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age is equally alarmist, claiming that “our students are less and less able to read, or analyze, or write with clarity and purpose” (119).

Stephen Johnson’s April 2009 article “How the E-Book Will Change the Way We Read and Write,” published in the Wall Street Journal, states that that instant web access “may be great news for the dissemination of knowledge,” but predicts that it is “not necessarily so great for that most finite of 21^st-century resources, attention” (2).

Similarly, in his 2008 Atlantic Online article, “Is Google Making Us Stupid,” Carr suggests that the internet seems to be “chipping away at [his] capacity for concentration and contemplation” (2).

He cites Bruce Friedman, a pathologist and member of the faculty at the University of Michigan Medical School, who complained of a “staccato” quality in his thinking as a result of scanning short passages from online texts. He says he can no longer read War and Peace.

I have never read War and Peace. I tried, but, like Friedman, I couldn’t concentrate. Sadly, I can’t blame the internet for my inability to engage the text. Small children and laundry are significant distractions. So is 19^th century prose. Most of us just don’t think that way anymore.

Is that wrong? Does that demonstrate holes in our education, or is it a sign of something else?

In my other reality, the one outside academia, not everyone cares about history and most people don’t read classics in their spare time

They also don’t think about old or new media literacies or how those technologies influence the way they think.

Technology is part of life, and most people use whatever technologies work best.

Carr cites developmental psychologist Maryanne Wolf, who notes that reading “is not an instinctive skill for human beings” and it’s “not etched into our genes the way speech is” (3).

It’s true.

Our culture had to transition from an oral to a written tradition. It took thousands of years for reading and writing to become such a part of the fabric of life that we take it for granted that all men and women should learn.

We’ve been reading about the development of the printed word and the ways this development has changed the way we think, the way we respond to each other, the way we process information, the way we generate new discoveries.

That development has brought us to this point.

It has brought us to new technologies that once again are changing the way we think, respond to each other, the way we process information, and the way we generate new discoveries.

Just like the new technology of print privileged certain ideologies, strengths, and learning modalities these new media technologies privilege certain ideologies, strengths, and learning modalities. The hierarchies have not been erased; new hierarchies have been created.

After touting the utopian Wikipedia goals of “shared principles” and the “focus on neutrality,” Henry Jenkins acknowledged that the “decentralized nature of knowledge production . . . results in some surprising gaps and excesses” (3). Science fiction authors are apparently more interesting to Wikipedia contributors than dead presidents.

And although Wikipedia has become pretty standard, the “participatory culture” that Jenkins celebrates only includes a small percentage of users.

Still, it is hard to believe that the ability to concentrate has been lost when the rate of technological innovation has increased exponentially.

It’s not gone—it’s just different.

After sounding an alarm, Carr concedes that we should be skeptical of his skepticism (6). After all, a similar alarm was sounded when writing threatened the status quo.

“Teaching and Reading the Millennial Generation through Media Literacy.” David Considine, Julie Horton, Gary Moorman Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, Vol. 52, No. 6 (Mar., 2009), pp. 471-481 Published by: International Reading Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20468390 Accessed: October 26, 2009.

Seven Hours of Debate? No, Thank You

Neil Postman “The Typographic Mind”

Nicholas Carr “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”

Neil Postman informs us that the famous Lincoln-Douglas debate in 1858 lasted seven hours and the audience was willing to “cheerfully accommodate themselves” (1) to the long oratory. The asks the obvious question: “What kind of audience was this?”

I’ve been judging high school debate for 1999. Team policy rounds consist of four eight-minute constructive speeches and four five-minute rebuttal speeches. Lincoln-Douglas value debates are shorter, lasting a total of 40 minutes including prep time and cross-examination. Sometimes I have to force myself to stay awake, especially if I’ve judged consecutive rounds.

Speeches by most professional politicians aren’t any better, but I can walk away from the television when I listen to those.

I pay attention to lectures by taking copious notes. If I don’t take notes, I am unlikely to understand what it is being said.

Obviously, I am not like the 1858 audience. Very few of us are. We have changed.

Postman explains that “people of a television culture,” like myself, need “’plain language’ both aurally and visually” (2). He suggests that there is something else going on as well.

He points out the fact that “the written word, and an oratory based upon it, has a content: a semantic, paraphrasable, propositional content” (2). It makes claims and asserts ideas. In other words, it has a “meaning which demands to be understood” (2).

Or at least it should have meaning that demands understanding.

Postman argues that “much of our discourse today has only a marginal propositional content,” leading to our increasing inability to listen to seven-hour debates. He illustrates his argument by comparing advertising claims from the eighteenth century, which provided detailed claims and information, to the catchy advertising slogans of the present that basically say nothing. He describes American television which requires “minimal skills” (3) for comprehension, but which is “pleasing to the eye and accompanied by exciting music” with “the best photography in the world” (3).

He extends his argument and states that the “problem is not that television presents us with entertaining subject matter but that all subject matter is presented as entertaining” (3).

He cites the example of WINS, an old New York City radio station, that used to tell listeners, “Give us twenty-two minutes and we’ll give you the world” (5). Postman points out that this is said without irony, as if the audience believes it can really be gone.

There is a reason why we used to call television the “idiot box.” But has it really transformed us into a culture without meaning, or is there something else going on?

In his article “Watching TV Makes You Smarter,” Steven Johnson argues that new media, including television, is causing us to develop new cognitive abilities and that the “growing complexity involves three primary elements: multiple treading, flashing arrows and social networks” (216).

I’m not sure.

Nicholas Carr suggests a different causation for our lack of focus in his Atlantic Online article, “Is Google Making Us Stupid,” from 2008. He celebrates internet research, the “advantages of having immediate access to such an incredibly rich store of information” (2), but says that the “Net seems to . . . [be] chipping away at [his] capacity for concentration and contemplation” (2). He says he is not alone. He quotes Bruce Friedman, who stated, “I now have almost totally lost the ability to read and absorb a longish article on the web or in print” (2). He claims that his thoughts have taken on a “staccato” quality, and he has lost the ability to read books like War and Peace.

Carr asserts that the “human brain is almost infinitely malleable” (3), that it adapts to the technologies we use. Did Nietzsche’s writing really change when he began using a typewriter? (3). And does use of the Internet affect our cognition? Does Google’s ability to understand “exactly what you mean” and “give you back exactly what you want” shut down some cognitive process in our minds? (5).

Carr sends us back to Plato’s Phaedrus, in which Socrates worried about the development of writing, concerned that it would erode our memories and eliminate the need for dialectic.

The proliferation of writing as a technology has indeed changed us, but we depend on it too much to ever give it up. The way we learn, the way we process information, is constantly changing. We don’t want to listen to seven-hour speeches. We have better things to do.We may not read War and Peace voluntarily.

Whether we like it or not, the adoption of technology transforms us in subtle and not-so-subtle ways.

Johnson, Steven. “Watching TV Makes You Smarter.” They Say/I Say. Ed. Gerald Graff, Cathy Birkenstein, and Russel Durst. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, Inc, 2009. Print.