Neil Postman

(1931-2003)

By Jason Miller

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“Stated in the most dramatic terms, the accusation can be made that the uncontrolled growth of technology destroys the vital sources of our humanity. It creates a culture without a moral foundation. It undermines certain mental processes and social relations that make human life worth living. Technology, in sum, is both friend and enemy.” This quote from Neil Postman in his book Technopoly underscores why we chose to profile him for this month’s Cultivare. Postman, while certainly not the only critic, is one of the earliest, most articulate, and outspoken critics of the technological age. 

Postman was born to a Jewish family in New York City. He would receive his Doctorate from the renowned Teachers College at Columbia University and serve his vocational career as a professor at New York University. At NYU he would found their Ecology of Media program and chair the department of Culture and Communication. Postman describes the Ecology of Media using the metaphor of a petri-dish: If in biology a 'medium' is something in which a bacterial culture grows (as in a Petri dish), in media ecology, the medium is 'a technology within which a [human] culture grows’. It is this question-- of the capacity of technology not simply to influence but to spawn culture-- that seems to permeate his societal critiques. 

Always the educator, Postman was a prolific writer who would author 20 books and over 200 articles.  Perhaps his most well-known book, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business was published in 1985. In this book, Postman stands as an inconvenient fence across the pathway that many Americans strolled to their television sets. However, do not confuse this with one-dimensional thinking, as it was entertainment at large, and the growing variety of mediums for entertainment, that he attempted to shine a light on. As Megan Garber identified in a 2017 article for The Atlantic, Postman questioned a culture where “good” professors entertained their classes, Presidential debates were graded on the performance, and “televangelists of the time brought an infomercial feel to the experience of faith.” This angst surrounding the shaping nature of technological entertainment is summarized by Postman: “Our priests and presidents, our surgeons and lawyers, our educators and newscasters need worry less about satisfying the demands of their discipline than the demands of good showmanship.”

We may not agree with every salient point of Postman’s perspective. Certainly, as a critique of culture, he makes some strong and polarizing observations. However, we invite you to get to know this man and his writings as he has proven to be an early prophetic voice to our ever increasingly technological age. Read his writings, engage his critiques, allow yourself to take a personal inventory of your relationship with technology. Heed the call posed by Postman to be thoughtful when expounding on Huxley’s Brave New World — he states, “it was not that they were laughing instead of thinking, but that they did not know what they were laughing about and why they had stopped thinking.”