You Don't Need a Postman To Know It's Mostly Junk Mail
media ecology #1
At Calvin College in the ‘90s, there was a locally revered English professor named Lionel Basney whose freshman composition students were always assigned two books: Bill McKibben’s The Age of Missing Information (1991) and Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985). Copies of these books would float around; I would hear people talking about their contents. When I got my first truly white-collar job — at the campus writing center, which we called, whether with reference to Aristotle and Burke or to (gag) “digital rhetorics” or both, the Rhetoric Center — I read a lot of papers by first-year students who were mad at Neil Postman’s book. So I believe that I have Basney to thank for putting Postman on my radar in the first place. I never got to take one of his classes; he died one summer in a swimming accident. Thus he was one of those people whose measure one takes by the scale of the grief his loss inspires in others. Judged by this standard, Basney must have been irreplaceable.1
Postman, in a much happier and more trivial way, was thus also a writer I knew for a long time by the reactions he inspired in others — those others being Basney’s freshmen, visiting the Rhetoric Center with their response papers. Boy, were they mad. A book attacking not the junk on TV, but TV itself? A whole medium? Didn’t that argument generalize too much? (And isn’t that one of the first educated-sounding things we all learn to say, as college students — that someone is generalizing too much?) And anyway, how dare he criticize “Sesame Street”? The more intelligent of these writers would eventually get around to what they considered Postman’s hypocrisy. In Amusing Ourselves to Death, Postman argues that the very form of television — the givens of its existence as the medium it is — transform whatever content you put into it. Politics, religion, education, adapted to television, become entertainment. And yet Postman’s book was — as these students’ arguments grudgingly conceded — entertaining. He implied that “Sesame Street” impeded viewers’ ability later in life to knuckle down and learn, and he criticized teachers who worked too hard on being funny or entertaining; he saw them as evidence of his thesis. So wasn’t he a hypocrite?
For a long time after I eventually read Amusing Ourselves to Death, and became a little obsessed with it and recommended it to all my friends, I considered this a somewhat facile critique. Postman isn’t saying “Don’t be funny,” I thought. His Socratic irony isn’t “entertainment,” I objected. His accessibility isn’t the TV kind of accessibility, I complained. Then I reread the book.