Chapter 5 of Amusing Ourselves to Death: The Peek-a-Boo World

Postman begins by showing the way that the telegraph totally changed the way discourse occurred in the United States, changing how (and what) information was important. It made information a necessary commodity. Postman quotes Coleridge to show how people were inundated with information, most of it with very little use. The telegraph, he argues, paved the way for news as slogans, almost soundbites. Telegraph information was like headlines, but it stopped there-impersonal, fragmented, and sensational. The telegraph desensitized the average person to what was going on around them. Postman also makes sure to distinguish the photograph from language, and what this meant for communication as the photograph became part of the mainstream.

All of this useless knowledge, he writes, gave rise to trivia games such as the crossword puzzle as people searched for ways to use their "useless" knowledge, and as the electronic conversation kept on, and photography and the telegraph were major contributors to pushing typographic culture out of relevance. Similarly, the radio also came to support this epistemological shift, as did film, and all this together created what Postman calls "the peek-a-boo world." The peek-a-boo world is one where information blinks in and out, endlessly entertaining but without much of a point. This wouldn't be a problem but for the fact that it is all we have. We no longer have a culture and entertainment. Our entertainment (specifically television) has become our culture.

Would we argue that television is no longer our culture, but that the internet is?

Can photography be considered an art of truth in the advent of photo-editing technology?

Postman seems to be arguing that the so-called shrinking of the world by telegraph was a negative thing for the state of information. Was it the same for everything else?

Chapter 2 of Amusing Ourselves to Death: Media as Epistemology

In chapter two, Postman makes his purpose even clearer. He wants to prove how television has made our media into nonsense. Postman immediately goes on, however, to say that the best part of television is its nonsense; the problem is that people want to take television seriously, and for television's output to be significant. Probably one of the most important parts of this reading, in my opinion, was the definition of epistemology (a subject concerned with the origins and nature of knowledge). Through resonance, Postman claims, media gains a power much greater than it originally may have. This is only transcended in subcultures (university settings, courtrooms, etc.) where the written word is given higher precedence than the spoken.

Through a phrase called "print-intelligence," Postman makes the case that we are growing sillier and sillier by moving from print-based epistemology to television-based epistemology. We must be able to distinguish tone as well as be able to see through it, Postman says, as well as a number of other things, in order to be not ruined by television, as it "pollutes public communication and its surrounding landscape (page 28)."

What is the truth of this today, with our internet-based epistemology?

Why are certain environments (courtrooms, universities) slower to change than the rest?

What sort of things are "resonant" today?

A Juxtaposition of Commercials

I loved the esurance Walter White commercial during the Super Bowl. It had everything I look for in an advertisement. It was easy to laugh at as well as short and to the point, and the pop culture references made it all the more enjoyable. The ads in general were very enjoyable this year for the most part, and helped make the experience of a great game even better.

Besides this commercial, my favorite one by far was the domestic violence PSA. It was absolutely chilling, with the calm 911 call over images of domestic unrest, and I know that a lot of people really didn't like it because it made them upset. However, these people miss the point. The advertisement was supposed to make us uncomfortable, and it absolutely achieved its purpose. So many people say it was too glum, but they fail to see the reality that people who are victims of domestic violence live with. In my opinion, this was the most powerful advertisement of the Super Bowl. It was meant to make us upset about something that happens behind closed doors every day.