User:Tedfdahlstrom/sandbox

I have been a fan of Neil Postman since I read his work in my first COML class. I think his insights are quite interesting, particularly his notion that if a new technology is introduced to society, it creates an entirely new ecosystem rather than the existing ecosystem plus the new technology. As a huge fan of television, I was drawn to his work on the television being a destroyer of society as a way to learn from the ground of the other.

Here are a few sources I plan to use in my article:

Postman, N. (1986). Amusing ourselves to death: public discourse in the age of show business. New York, NY: Penguin Books.

Postman, N. (1993). Technopoly: the surrender of culture to technology. New York, NY: Vintage.       

--After looking at the Postman article, I have found several edits that need to be made. Below are some edits that I am drafting. The first two paragraphs should be incorporated into the Biography.

Biography[edit]

Neil Postman (March 8, 1931 – October 5, 2003) was an American author, educator, media theorist and cultural critic, who is best known for his seventeen twenty books, including Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985), Conscientious Objections (1988), Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology (1992), The Disappearance of Childhood (1994) and The End of Education: Redefining the Value of School (1995). Postman was a humanist, who believed that "new technology can never substitute for human values."

Postman was born in New York City, where he would spend most of his life. In 1953, he graduated from State University of New York at Fredonia where he played basketball. At Teachers College, Columbia University he was awarded a master's degree in 1955 and an Ed.D (Doctor of Education) degree in 1958.

He was a faculty member at New York University for 39 years. In 1971, at NYU's Steinhardt School of Education (originally known as SEHNAP, School of Education, Health, Nursing, and Arts Professions), he founded a graduate program in media ecology. He became the School of Education's only University Professor in 1993, and was chairman of the Department of Culture and Communication until 2002.

He died of lung cancer in Flushing, Queens, on October 5, 2003.

--The Works section is also incomplete. He wrote 20 books and over 200 articles, only one of which is mentioned in his article. I will add one of his works to the Works section.

Works[edit]

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Postman wrote 18 20 books and more than 200 magazine and newspaper articles for such periodicals as The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, Harper's Magazine, Time, Saturday Review, Harvard Educational Review, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Stern, and Le Monde. He was the editor of the quarterly journal ETC: A Review of General Semantics from 1976 to 1986. He was also a contributing editor at The Nation. Despite his oft-quoted concerns about television, computers and the role of technology in society, Postman used not only books, but also the medium of television to advance his ideas. He sat for many television interviews and, later in life, even had cable television in his home. He sat for numerous television interviews, and in 1976 taught a course for NYU credit on CBS-TV's Sunrise Semester called "Communication: the Invisible Environment".

Technopoly[edit]

In his 1992 book Technopoly: the Surrender of Culture to Technology, Postman defines "Technopoly" as a society which believes "the primary, if not the only, goal of human labor and thought is efficiency, that technical calculation is in all respects superior to human judgment ... and that the affairs of citizens are best guided and conducted by experts."

In an interview, Postman described Technopoly as being about the tendency of technology to be given cultural control of sovereign American social institutions.

Postman argues that the United States is the only country to have developed into a technopoly. He claims that the U.S. has been inundated with technophiles who do not see the downside of technology. This is dangerous because technophiles want more technology and thus more information. However, according to Postman, it is impossible for a technological innovation to have only a one-sided effect. With the ever-increasing amount of information available, Postman argues that: "Information has become a form of garbage, not only incapable of answering the most fundamental human questions but barely useful in providing coherent direction to the solution of even mundane problems."

Postman was not opposed to all forms of technology. In page 7 of Technopoly, he agrees that technological advancements, specifically "the telephone, ocean liners, and the reign of hygiene," have lengthened and improved modern life. In his words, this agreement proves that he is not a "one-eyed technophobe."

In a 1996 interview, Postman re-emphasized his solution for technopoly, which was to give students an education in the history, social effects and psychological biases of technology, so they may become adults who "use technology rather than being used by it".

In Technopoly, Postman discusses Luddism, explaining that being a Luddite often is associated with a naive opposition to technology. But, according to Postman, historical Luddites were trying to preserve their way of life and rights given to them prior to the advancement of new technologies. was accused of Luddism,^{[citation needed]} despite his statement in the conclusion of Amusing Ourselves to Death that "We must...not delude ourselves with preposterous notions such as the straight Luddite position..."

--I will be adding one section to the Works section:

Amusing Ourselves to Death

One of Postman's most influential works is Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. In Amusing, Postman argued that by expressing ideas through visual imagery, television reduces politics, news, history, and other serious topics to entertainment. He worried that culture would decline if the people became an audience and their public business a "vaudeville act." Postman also argued that television is destroying the "serious and rational public conversation" that was sustained for centuries by the printing press.