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.
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