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Contribution to the Postman-seminar
Journalistutdanningen, Høgskolen i Oslo, tirsdag 25. October 2005
This year we can celebrate the twentieth anniversary of Neil Postman´s book Amusing
Ourselves to Death (1985), a book which was translated into Norwegian only two years later.
It was preceded by The Disappearance of Childhood from 1982, likewise followed by a
Norwegian translation only two years later. Both these books received much attention in the
public sphere in Norway and were instrumental in shaping the attitude of schoolteachers and
parents to electronic media. There were some media scholars who made a stand against
Postman´s one-dimensional analysis of the effects of electronic media, but they had
practically no impact on the public opinion.
The first-mentioned book propounded the “death of childhood”-thesis, which is that television
and other electronic media have blurred the boundaries between childhood and adulthood.
Here Postman calls attention to the demise of childrens´ traditional games and distinctive
styles of dress, and to the increasing uniformity of childrens´ and adults´ leisure pursuits. He
is particularly dismayed by people´s growing addiction to television which he regards as a
“total disclosure medium”, a medium that renders information “uncontrollable”. In the age of
television, the power and control that adults used to have over the symbolic environment of
the young, has become impossible to exert. Readers of his book were invited to blame
television for the apparent collapse of discipline in schools, and the rise in child crime, drugtaking and teenage pregnancy.
Following Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan, Postman attributed a determining
significance to technologies and the human attributes which they require, and in his next book
Amusing Ourselves to Death he drew a clear-cut distinction between print, which is
essentially symbolic and linear, and television which is a visual medium. Whereas print
cultivates abstraction and logical thinking, television requires no special skill, nor does it
cultivate any. Television is essentially irrational, he argues, it offers no proposition, and it
does not have to conform to rules of evidence or logic. Because television is inherently visual,
it requires no intellectual, emotional or imaginative investment on the part of the audience,
who is regarded as an undifferentiated mass. Audiences are passive consumers incapable of
responding critically to what they watch; children, in particular, are victims to the endless
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flow of trivial messages. Our culture has moved toward a new way of conducting its business,
Postman argues, and introduces the metaphor “the Age of Show Business”, which he defines
in an equally metaphorical way:
The problem is not that television presents us with entertaining subject matter but that all
subject matter is presented as entertaining, which is another issue all together.
In the introduction to this rather gloomy vision, Postman pays visit to another dystopia,
namely George Orwell´s 1984, but only to inform us that his own vision is more related to the
one spelled out by Aldous Huxley in his novel Brave New World. Whereas Orwell feared that
we would become a captive culture, Huxley feared that we would become a trivial culture. In
Huxley´s vision no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity, and
history. Rather, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that
undermine their capacities to think. Postman ends his book by endorsing Huxley´s (and H. G.
Wells´) dictum that we are in a race between education and disaster, arguing that we can only
get out of this deadlock by understanding the politics and epistemology of media.
It is fair to say that this argument gained ground both in pedagogical and political circles in
Norway in the eighties and nineties, and the national curriculum which is called L93, contains
formulations which echo Postman´s argument. A chapter entitled “The cooperative human
being” draws a rather negative picture of the current youth culture. It points out that young
people´s increasing consumption of mass media reduces them to the passive role of spectators
and exposes them to conflicting values. At the same time social intercourse between young
people and adults is considerably less frequent than it used to be; jointly these processes have
produced an introverted and narcissistic youth culture, to quote the general part of the
curriculum.
We find here the same form of moral conservatism as in Postman´s books. What seems
particularly troubling for both authors about the television age is the demise of “good
manners”. Both authors show a desire to “turn back the clock”, urging parents to strengthen
the social and normative surrounding of the school and the students. And both assign to
school and educational institutions the task of helping their students resisting the spirit of the
age.
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As I have already suggested, it is not only the old moral order that is romanticized in these
texts, it is a whole culture that is being extolled, namely the culture of modernism. In
Postman´s texts modernism is associated with the print medium, which effectively created our
modern notion of individuality, and with this “intensified sense of self” paved the way for the
“flowering of childhood”. Since print also required an apprenticeship in literacy, it provided
the impetus for the invention of schools to check the childrens´s exuberance and develop their
intellectual capacities.
Literacy is of course a key word in Postman´s writing, and in the two books that I have been
dealing with so far, literacy is equivalent to the “culture of the book”. Postman tracks the
history of literacy back to Plato´s Phaedrus, where the philosopher argues that the alphabet
has introduced a new form of conversation between man and man, and that writing has
brought about a perceptual revolution: a shift from the ear to the eye as an organ of language
processing. But whereas Plato speaks in favour of oral communication and bans writing and
writers from his utopian Republic, Postman cherishes writing which, pace Plato, he regards as
the prerequisite of philosophy. Writing makes it possible and convenient to subject thought to
a continuous and concentrated scrutiny. Reading and writing literacy among ordinary people
made great progress with the advent of typography in the middle of the fifteenth century. For
Postman the alphabet and the printed book were the two technologies that facilitated the
Enlightenment project and enabled human beings to acquire a broad “cultural literacy”.
To be “culturally literate” is admittedly not a term used by Postman himself, but two years
after Amusing Ourselves to Death was published in the US, two books came out which put
this term on the agenda, namely E. D. Hirsch: Cultural Literacy and Allan Bloom: The
Closing of the American Mind. The former had the subtitle “What every American needs to
know”, and produced a list of the books that every American ought to know to be able to
participate in social conversation. Without this frame of reference communication will come
to a standstill, Hirsch argued. In his book, Bloom expanded this cultural canon to include
basic works in our Western civilisation, works that he regarded as timeless and valid
everywhere. According to Bloom they represent a common cultural heritage and are the
product of the creative originality of great artists. Every educational activity should be
permeated by these cultural values.
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This point of view had many advocates in the late 1980s and the 1990s, and it also left its
mark on our national curriculum. One of the goals for education in Norway expressed in L93
is that the school should foster a national identity. This should be done by introducing the
students to the cultural canon, which was spelled out in great detail for each subject, and
especially for Norwegian literature. No matter whether the students had chosen to follow a
vocational or a theoretical course of study, they were supposed to be taken through much the
same literary texts and, to crown all, in the same order.
As I have already pointed out, the cultural literacy perspective embedded in L93 was
accompanied by a devaluation of the television medium. But this perspective also forestalled
a critical and thorough account of the role of the new digital media in education. Information
technology was simply presented as a neutral instrument for making the transmission of
traditional cultural values in school more efficient. Now, ten years later, it is obvious to
everybody that the media are in a process of converging, and that it is no longer possible to
design curricula for the present age without dealing with the media collectively.
Postman´s Amusing Ourselves to Death is informed by the same spirit as the books of Hirsch
and Bloom; they are all apologies for the print medium and the Western civilization facilitated
by the distribution and consumption of written texts. But ten years later Postman published
another book which radically questioned his previous position, The End of Education, a book
that came out in 1995. In the first place he has it out with Hirsch´s attempt to define a
common core of knowledge that is the hallmark of a “culturally literate” person. Postman
argues that this may not be a wise strategy in America where schools are, and always have
been, multicultural; the fact of ethnic diversity may inspire a curriculum of revenge.
More importantly, however, Postman makes every effort to detach the concept of literacy
from the content it was given by the “cultural literacy” movement. Hirsch and his followers
had defined the “culturally literate” as a person with insight into our society´s store of factual
knowledge about history, literature, science, philosophy, wars, cities, popular arts, etc.
Inspired by John Dewey´s aphorism “learning by doing”, Postman argues that we learn
through trial and error, and that no fact can evade critical scrutiny. The challenge to the
students is to find out who has produced these facts, how he arrived at them, why they are
regarded as important, and by whom. Only through this kind of scrutiny will the students
learn how facts and truth change, depending on the circumstances under which they were
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produced and described. Thus Postman takes exception to the content fixation of the literacy
concept, such as it shows itself in the “cultural literacy” movement. “The end of education”,
as Postman sees it, is to develop the students´ critical scepticism, thereby enabling them to
participate in a competent way to the reproduction of our culture, or – to use Postman´s own
words – to be part of the Great Conversation. In this book Postman gives the concept of
literacy a communicative dimension which – ironically enough – makes it well-suited to
embark on a fresh and unbiased analysis of the cultural significance of the media.
Svein Østerud