Is it just me, or is the most quotable book imaginable? I am so PLEASED to be reading something so thought-provoking and brilliantly concise… and applicable. Postman, I feel, is dead on. Ahead of his time. And more gush gushings.
This is the first text book in a long while that I have decided to just go ahead and write in. Too many post-its sticking out of each page.
I will be referring to Postman over and over this semester, I know it. For now, as he sinks in, these quotes to address in future ruminations and writings:
"And, in any case, I should be very surprised if he story I have to tell is anywhere near the whole truth. We are all, as Huxley says someplace, Great Abbreviators, meaning that non of us has the wit to know the whole truth to tell it if we believed we did, or an audience so gullible as to accept it" (p. 6).
"The news of the day is a figment of our technological imagination" (p. 8).
"...it is, I believe, a wise and particularly relevant supposition that the media of communication available to a culture are a dominant influence on the formation of the culture's intellectual and social preoccupations" (p. 9).
"For although culture is a creation of speech, it is recreated anew by every medium of communication--from painting to hieroglyphs to the alphabet to television. Each medium, like language itself, makes possible a unique mode of discourse by providing a new orientation for thought, for expression, for sensibility" (p. 10).
"It has been pointed out, for example, that the invention of eyeglasses in the twelfth century not only made it possible to improve defective vision but suggested the idea that human beings need not accept as final either the endowments of nature or the ravages of time. Eyeglasses refuted the belif that anatomy is destiny by putting forward the idea that our bodies as well as our minds are improvable" (p. 14).
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