Chapter 7 of Amusing Ourselves to Death: "Now... This"

Now... this is the title of Chapter 7. The Now, This mentality leads to fragmented news with no context. News shows choose attractive people to tell their audiences terrible things, and this leads to not looking for people with credentials, but people with nice faces, ones that are "likable and credible." They frame the program with music at the beginning and end to set a mood, to help dissociate viewers from the seriousness of whatever the news is. Television news is not constructed to make the viewer think of the implication of the news.

In some ways, Postman argues, television is anticommunication. Television that is informative has only a niche audience, and follows typographic discourse. Because of this, Postman says, Americans are easily the best-entertained and least-well-informed people on the planet. This leads us to a Huxley-esque Brave New World style universe, where we want gratification more than anything else and it's readily available.

How does "now... this" culture perpetuate mean world syndrome?
Are there any ways that the world is like 1984?
Has the media further desensitized us from the time Postman wrote his book?

Chapter 4 of Amusing Ourselves to Death: The Typographic Mind

Orators color American history, and none more so, perhaps, than Abraham Lincoln. He is most well known (in orating) for his debates with Stephen Douglas. Even these events, though, were beacons of entertainment. Postman writes that these debates took on the air of carnivals, surrounded by rides and fun. These audiences were not more intellectually able than audiences of today, just in tune with a different kind of entertainment. Even this speech is an extension of the written word, and the people were in tune with it because they were entertained by the written word.

Print gave way to analytical thought in a way never before seen. Logic and reason were important in a way that they never had been before. It was a time, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, that religion was being scrutinized in a way that it never had been before. These churches did, though, lay the foundation for the modern university structure. Typography began to decline in the 1860s, documented by Frank Presbey. Postman calls this entire age the Age of Exposition.

Are we still in the Age of Show Business?
How did the importance of rational thought shape our reliance on the written word?

Chapter 3 of Amusing Ourselves to Death: Typographic America

Chapter 3 begins with Postman relating the story of the Dunkers. The Dunkers, a minor religious sect in the United States, are the singular instance of a religious sect refusing to write down their principles, because their principles should be able to change over time. Writing down religious doctrines would bind the Dunkers in a way that would leave them "entrapped" for all time. The colonists in the New World were intensely preoccupied with their own literacy, most coming from very literate parts of England. More than that though, education was of God, keeping Satan at bay. Additionally, Americans didn't have to create their own literary tradition from scratch. They had a whole library to import from the motherland. Everyone, rich and poor, had access to reading, and so read everyone did. In this society, Thomas Paine's Common Sense sold better than any book today possibly could; only an event like the Super Bowl could attract such numbers.The printing press received quicker success in America than home in England, as the British royalty did not try to stop it as it did in its own cities of Liverpool and Birmingham.

Americans did quickly establish their own tradition no matter their history. The newspaper, Postman says, greatly changed the typographic game. Benjamin Harris published the first in Boston in 1690. The Boston News-Letter, Boston Gazette, and New England Courant followed in the thirty years after. Proportionally speaking, Americans had far more newspapers per head than England did. Pamphlets and newspapers quickly replaced books as the primary outlet for Americans to read. By the 1800s, America was an incredibly print-based culture. Charles Dickens was treated as a celebrity upon his arrival there in 1842. Lecture halls reinforced this culture, with writers frequenting the Lyceum circuit. The printed word dominated American culture totally.

Were pamphlets the soundbites of colonial times?
Did Americans pay such attention to the printed word just to spite the Old World?
In what ways did the Lyceum movement influence more modern academic lectures?