Postman's Last Paragraph

The distinction Postman makes in the last paragraph in Chapter 11 is that we live in a society that is "in a race between education and disaster." What that basically means is that education has taken a turn for the worse. With it becoming integrated into television (a combination that is destined for failure in the first place), the educational value of anything on TV, whether classified as educational programming or not, has been swapped for entertainment. Because of this, according to Aldous Huxley, we as a collective whole have stopped using rational thinking in our approach to television, and are treating every program as a joke, whatever the subject matter is. At this point, there seems to be no way out, and our lack of rational thoughts is going to continue until we are, literally, Amusing Ourselves to Death.

Friday-A Day Without Words :O

Friday can be summed up in one word-Rough. It was really hard to express everything I was feeling through charades. This was especially difficult during lunch, where besides actually eating, it was tempting for me to join in the conversations, but I knew I couldn't or else I'd lose the deal. Then, it hit me. That is exactly what Postman was talking about in Amusing Ourselves To Death. Without talking, my life was very awkward and it was hard for me to really express what I was feeling. In the same way, Postman warns us that our lives are becoming very much like mine on Friday. In the new age of social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, and other methods like texting, actual verbal communication between people is diminishing. As such, it's hard to distinguish tone and sarcasm in something as simple as a status update. Friday's experiment certainly put my life in the 21st century into perspective.

Postman's YouTube Speech

Neil Postman's speech to the students at Calvin College has a couple of parallels to his book "Amusing Ourselves to Death". One of the big ones comes near the end of the video, when he says that there will come a time when we will have no choice but to conform to our technological counterparts. This is also one of the main points of AOTD, which discusses the decline of print media and the rise of technology, notably television. While Postman does not directly mention television in his discussion, it is implied that that is what he is referring to, along with other technological advancements such as computers, iPods, and so on.

Postman also discusses theologians, politicians, educators, and businessmen who are getting worried about the uprising of technology into the new millennium in his speech. This is a parallel to when he was talking about those same groups of people growing uneasy about the rise of technology in its infancy, in AOTD. What Postman is implying is that very little has changed in the then 13 years between the book's 1985 release and his 1998 speech. All these groups who have grown up in a completely different society are going to stay uneasy regardless of how long they have been surrounded by such technology. This also goes back to the first point in my discussion, which says that sooner or later, these different people are going to have to accept the fact that typography is highly unlikely to come back into the mainstream, and they must go along with the new technological era before they find themselves slipping further and further behind the times.

Civility not Censorship

1) The first six words, "Civility in public discourse is important", mean that when in public, people should use discretion before they speak, or something they say could be misconstrued as something racially offensive to the people that they come in contact with.

2) The word "bellicose" means to be aggressively hostile and eager to fight. When Chavez uses this word to describe the metaphors, what she means is that politicians are always ready to stand up for their beliefs, sometimes even escalating into physical confrontation.

3) A. Chavez is trying to persuade the reader into believing that forcing select words out of our everyday vocabulary is a hindrance towards us being able to express our feelings. Also, we should be discretionary when talking to people, because what we say could possibly be taken the wrong way.

B) Chavez's best point in my opinion is when she says that the use of the n-word in "Huckleberry Finn" takes impact away from the book, and "deprives students from learning important lessons like racism and social mores of earlier eras."

4. I agree with Chavez. On the surface, those words are not bad. And while it's probably still not good to say them in public, we should still at least find out the true meaning behind them.

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