The Medium is the Message

Guys

I tried to find a more creative title for my blog posting, and I just came to realize that Marshall McLuhan's is so catchy and so darn insightful that there's no need to bother.

This is my posting concerning the first two chapters, and Postman makes it quite clear what he's trying to say (don't you just love it when authors are as clear as saying "this book is about..."? it makes the reader's job so much more straightforward!). Two quotations, and then some thoughts:


...
"To say it, then, as plainly as I can, this book is an inquiry into and a lamentation about the most significant American cultural fact of the second half of the twentieth century: the decline of the Age of Typography and the ascendancy of the Age of Television. This change-over has dramatically and irreversibly shifted the content and meaning of public discourse, since two media so vastly different cannot accommodate the same ideas." --page 8

"I raise no objection to television’s junk. The best things o television are its junk, and no one and nothing is seriously threatened by it… therein is our problem, for television is at its most trivial and, therefore, most dangerous when its aspirations are high, as when it presents itself as a carrier of important cultural conversations… television is nothing less than a philosophy of rhetoric." -page 17
...


Here is the gist of the first two chapters and, really, the whole of Postman's book. I reckon we could spend our entire discussion on these two ideas:
1) television has altered public discourse
2) television in itself shapes the discourse, no matter what that discourse is.

Idea #1: How bad is it? I felt shivers when I read this book for the first time because it resonated deeply w/ the feelings I was trying to piece together about the USA, especially since returning from Lima. In short, the things that were considered important by the two cultures seemed to be different. When trying to compare the interests/personalities of the average people I met from outside the US, I found that people cared a lot more about 'real' things, whereas the culture in America had to do more with image and hype.

Brittany Spears' life now makes CNN- that happened while we were at Whistler. What else would I need to say to convince either of you of where we're at? Any culture in which something like this becomes possible is already in deep trouble. Is there anyone who doubts the direction public discourse in America has taken?