1 - Media Form Determines Media Content
Just as you cannot use smoke signals to communicate the emotional depths of romantic love, you cannot use television to host a careful and rigorous political debate. TV (no to mention Twitter) has an in-built bias toward entertainment and excitement. Slogans will replace logic.
2 - The Previous Media Environment Trained People to Think
Early America in particular was a bookish culture. Farm boys walked behind the plow reading Homer. Local fairs featured 6 hour political debates. Before the advent of the telegraph and photography, people cared about information that (1) made sense and (2) led to action.
3 - Emerging Technologies Made Relevance Irrelevant
The telegraph enabled people to hear about ‘news’ from all around the world. Photography created an artificial context for this ‘news.’ Suddenly, people were not bothered or bored by hearing stories that had no context and about which they could do nothing. This process has accelerated due to the creation of 24/7 news and sports channels and, even more importantly, the supernova effect of the internet.
4 - New Media Technologies Prioritize Entertainment over Action, Feeling over Thinking
The classic example of this is what it means to be ‘informed’ in modern society. We all think it’s a good thing for people to be informed about local, national, and global events. However, other than casting an occasional ballot, no one expects us to change or do anything in response to new information. As long as we feel horror in the face of tragedy, and righteous anger before injustice, nothing more is expected.
5 - We Are Completely Adjusted to Our New Media Environment
Read the following quotation substituting ‘Iphone’ for ‘TV’:
‘There is no more disturbing consequence of the electronic and graphic revolution than this: that the world as given to us through television seems natural, not bizarre. For the loss of the sense of the strange is a sign of adjustment, and the extent to which we have adjusted is a measure of the extent tot which we have been changed. Our culture’s adjustment to the epistemology of television is by now all but complete; we have so thoroughly accepted its definition of truth, knowledge, and reality that irrelevance seems to us to be filled with import, and incoherence seems eminently sane. And if some of our institutions seem not to fit the template of the times, why it is they, and not the template, that seem to us disordered and strange’
6 - We Now Live in a Peek-a-Boo World
Read the following quotation keeping in mind that Postman was writing 35 years ago. Just imagine what he would say if confronted with the information environment of social media!
‘Together, this ensemble of electronic techniques called into being a new world - a peek-a-boo world, where now this event, now that, pops into view for a moment, then vanishes again. It is a world without much coherence or sense; a world that does not ask us, indeed, does not permit us to do anything; a world that is, like the child’s game of peek-a-boo, entirely self-contained. But like peek-a-boo, it is also endlessly entertaining’