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?
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