I just finished reading Neil Postman's book "Amusing Ourselves to Death," and it is an amazingly insightful look at our culture today -- and a bold warning.

Neil Postman

This prescient book was written in 1985, and Postman died in October, 2003, at age 72. But his son, Andrew, wrote a foreword that accurately points out how everything his father wrote about is still accurate, only more intense now as we've added a plethora of electronic toys and gadgets in our lives, from cell phones to playstations to the big one, the Internet.
The basic premise of Postman's book is that much of our American (and European) culture has changed tremendously over the last century, and that these changes have affected the way we think and process information.
On Aug. 21, 1854, when Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas held the first of their seven debates, Douglas opened with a three-hour talk and when it was Lincoln's turn, he suggested everyone go home and eat and freshen up because it was going to take him at least as long as that to respond.
The people went home and returned to hear Lincoln talk for four hours.
That was seven hours of political lectures in one day! And neither man was running for office at the time.
Can you imagine two current politicians engaging in a seven-hour debate? With no PowerPoint? How many people would attend? How many would stay to the end? Ha. You know there wouldn't be anyone there except fanatics and the lunatic fringe.
When our country was founded, the prevailing way of thinking involved the "typographical mind" in which people's frame of reference and thought processes were based on the printed word. Even the farm boy held a book while working the plow.
Today it is what Postman calls "The Peek-a-Boo World," where unrelated, disembodied information pops into our lives with no rhyme or reason. News anchors report genocide in Darfur and transition with a "Now this..." to show a clip of a waterskiiing squirrel in Orlando.
Postman traces this shift to the invention of the telegraph, which for the first time allowed the transmission of bits of information worldwide, instantaneously, and not tied to any physical messenger or linked to geographic context.
As technology evolved, it changed the way information was sent and consumed, and eventually it changed the way we think. Today, instead of a four-hour rebuttal from a politician in a debate, we get 60 seconds on TV -- if we're lucky.
Where Lincoln and Douglas spoke in eloquent, complex sentences, our political leaders today either purposefully keep sentences short and simple, or are unable to construct lengthy thoughts or expressions.
(Anyone who watches David Letterman's Late Show , which I enjoy, has seen the regular feature, "Great Moments in Presidential Speeches," which captures President Bush's most unintelligible public pronouncements. It's painfully funny. I feel sorry for George W but realize that, for one thing, the camera's on him constantly so he's bound to slip up, and second, he obviously is not the brightest president we've ever had.)
What does this mean for today's newspapers, journalists, and readers?
We are on the cusp of a new era in the use and misuse of media.
We are getting a firehose of information in multiple bits and pieces, instantaneously, not just on TV and radio but on our "smart phones" and PDAs and laptops. When we surf through our 500 satellite TV channels, we find some of them have three "crawls" of data moving across the the screen simultaneously.
We are media junkies and we're strung out on information. But we crave information on what celebrity is pregnant or in drug rehab as much as we do what Congress is debating or our local politicians are saying or how humanity is polluting the environment.
All the news is thrown into a hat, shaken up, and tossed willynilly onto the screen in no particular order or context.
As Postman points out repeatedly, our world today is much more like Aldous Huxley's vacuous Brave New World than it is George Orwell's ominous 1984.
We are not being oppressed by Big Brother; we are laughing and amusing ourselves so much that we've stopped thinking.
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Sylvania, Ohio
July 18, 2008