Neil Postman
Neil Postman was an influential American cultural critic and media theorist, best known for his book *Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business*, published in 1985. In this work, Postman argued that television diminishes society’s ability to engage with serious ideas, transforming complex issues into entertainment. Born and raised in New York City, he earned a bachelor's degree from the State University of New York, Fredonia, and advanced degrees from Columbia University, where he later became a prominent educator at New York University for over forty years.
Postman founded a graduate program in media ecology, a field he developed, and authored twenty books and numerous articles throughout his career. His early works, including *Teaching as a Subversive Activity*, advocated for radical changes in educational practices. Influenced by Marshall McLuhan, Postman critically examined the impact of communication technologies, particularly television and the Internet, on modern life and childhood development. His thesis in *The Disappearance of Childhood* highlighted the erosion of boundaries between adult and child knowledge due to media exposure. Postman’s insights remain relevant in discussions about media and communication in contemporary society. He passed away from lung cancer in 2003 at the age of seventy-two.
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Neil Postman
Neil Postman was an American cultural critic and media theorist. His best-known book, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, was published in 1985, and purported that, over the course of its existence, television had diminished the ability of societies to communicate and examine serious ideas. The book sold more than two hundred thousand copies worldwide and was translated into eight different languages. While not an outright opponent of television, Postman was highly critical of its influence on childhood development, and the growing perception that the medium had educational value.
Overview
Neil Postman was born and raised in New York City. In 1953, he received a bachelor’s degree from the State University of New York, Fredonia; he earned a master’s degree in 1955, and a doctorate in education in 1958, both from Columbia University. Postman began his teaching career at New York University (NYU) in 1959, where he would go on to teach for more than forty years, founding a graduate program in media ecology—a field of his own creation—at NYU’s Steinhardt School of Education. In addition to the twenty books Postman published in his time as a public figure and educator, he also penned more than two hundred magazine and newspaper articles, writing each one in longhand, as he owned neither a computer nor a typewriter.
Early in his career, Postman published a number of books on pedagogical theory, gaining widespread attention with 1969’s Teaching as a Subversive Activity, coauthored with Charles Weingartner. The book was a call for radical reform in schools, advocating for the abolition of tests and textbooks. But Postman is most popularly remembered as a media critic. Heavily influenced by Marshall McLuhan, the Canadian communication theorist who coined the phrase “the medium is the message,” Postman was an active critic of the role of technology—especially communication technologies like television and the Internet—in modern life.
He became a prominent public voice on the subject with the release of The Disappearance of Childhood in 1982. The book and its thesis—that television breaks down information boundaries between children and adults, burdening still-developing young people with knowledge previously sequestered in the realm of adulthood—were widely discussed at the time, and praised years later as notably prescient.
In Amusing Ourselves to Death, Postman commented on what he saw as television’s most damaging flaw—its tendency to turn everything, even the most serious of issues, into entertainment. He lamented the theme songs, colorful graphics, and “talking hairdos” of television news, and argued that the medium was incapable of rationally conveying complex truths.
In October 1990, Postman delivered an address to the German Informatics Society in Stuttgart called “Informing Ourselves to Death.” In the speech, he spoke of a break between information and action, asserting that, with every advancement in communication—the printing press, television, the Internet—humans have further saturated the world with information, approaching the point where the sheer quantity and availability of information renders information itself practically useless.
Neil Postman died of lung cancer on October 5, 2003, in Flushing, Queens. He was seventy-two.
Bibliography
Blechman, Robert K. “Praising Postman.” Afterimage 33.6 (2006): 14–18. Print.
Kavanagh, Peter. “Why Postman Matters.” Commonweal 130.20 (2003): 11–12. Print.
Moore, Rick Clifton. “As Predicted.” Journalism 13.3 (2012): 447–62. Print.
Moran, Terence P. “Neil Postman and the Teaching of English.” English Journal 94.2 (2004): 25–27. Print.
Quayle, Matt. “The Method of the Medium Is in Motion.” ETC: A Review of General Semantics 67.3 (2010): 300–310. Print.
Quill, Lawrence. “The Disappearance of Adulthood.” Studies in Philosophy and Education 30.4 (2011): 327–41. Print.
Ripmaster, Terence M. “How Neil Postman Changed My Life.” ETC: A Review of General Semantics 60.4 (2003): 351–53. Print.
Sternberg, Janet. “Neil Postman’s Advice on How to Live the Rest of Your Life.” ETC: A Review of General Semantics 63.2 (2006): 152–60. Print.