Postman begins, in chapter 2, to explain a bit of why he is so critical of television. Essentially, Postman’s view is that television is changing and cheapening the way our previously print-based society views and understands the truth. Stephanie Bennett takes a very similar position in her article when she argues for the necessity of silence to personal growth. Manoush Zomorodi again drove home a similar point as she revealed that the boredom we avoid with our phones is actually critical to our own creativity.
I found these arguments to be very compelling. For a long time I have struggled to recover, for example, my love of reading fiction, in large part because I spend a large amount of time on my phone each day. Postman’s argument is not quite so relevant today–I spend almost no time consuming television–but I think that it can easily be extrapolated to apply to the technology of the modern day much like the arguments of Zomorodi and Bennett. I particularly enjoyed Postman’s remarks on the nature of truth and how our conceptions of it change as our media of communication change. I see this applied in my everyday life so frequently: when innocently discussing the news with a friend, we have to stop and read articles to ascertain the veracity of our words rather than accepting them at face value. I am excited to read further into Postman’s work and to see how exactly he develops his argument that television is bad for the collective human experience.
