........tv..........

So, today I’m simply discussing Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

            This book is phenomenal. I’m on Part 1 Chapter 3 and cannot put it down. In this book, Neil Postman describes how, during the 18^th and 19^th centuries, the United States was a print-based society. Print, being the main source of communication, influenced every aspect of the American life. First English books (as americans did not have enough paper to create their own literature), then americans began writing. This included newspapers and pamphlets. Even speeches began to take on the sound of writing. When Lincoln and Douglas would debate, they’d write down all their speeches ahead of time…even their witticisms took on a typographical tone. The audience had the uncanny ability to sit for hours and listen to these debates…uhhmhhh…unlike nowadays where we have difficulty listening to a 20-minute speech. Books/ print was their entertainment, their discourse. They were used to sitting down and sifting through a book for hours at a time. This was expected by society and rolled over into oratory tradition training the public to sit and sift through lectures for hours at a time, weighing each argument, inference, metaphor, etc. Sometimes, people would go to see a “stump” speaker, where some random person would find a stump or an opening of some sort and “take the stump,” so to speak!

            How interesting that print influenced our society in such a way. I’m coming to the next section where he discusses society’s drift from print-based discourse to television-based discourse. I find it interesting that, as Postman mentioned, people used to speak like they’d write.  Now we tend to write like we speak. There is obviously a place for writing like one speaks in fiction or when recording dialogue, etc, but there isn’t an influence to write differently.  I’m off to go think now and will probably discuss this much more later. Hope your day goes swell. I still feel as though this is floating to the bottom of the canyon. Ridiculous. Although Postman writes in the 1980’s and doesn’t specifically discuss blogging, perhaps I’ll take a crack at how blogging, which is technically print, will also influence a television-based society. Hmmmm…