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In Memoriam: Neil Postman



In Memoriam: Neil Postman by Angela Penny

Every year around this time the New York Times Sunday Magazine publishes its "The Lives They Lived" issue, which offers bite-sized profiles of the most fascinating, if not well-known, personalities to pass on during the previous 12 months. It's strange, then, that among the 34 luminaries covered, the Times staffers couldn't find room for Neil Postman, 72, an academic iconoclast and a founder of media studies.

The omission is tragic, too, because Postman's passing on Oct. 9 didn't garner much coverage, either. An author, educator and founder of New York University's Media Ecology program, Postman agitated tirelessly against the social dangers of the entertainment industry's invasion of education. In his 20 books and more than 200 articles, Postman called upon people to be less passive when receiving information, regardless of its source. More than 30 years after the founding of his program, its cautionary messages continue to be a warning sign in today's media-saturated society.

Media Ecology was more than a program title; as a phrase it encapsulates Postman's central concern: the conflict between independent thinking and the entrancing power of new technologies. According to Postman, his most important book was 1982's "The Disappearance of Childhood," and from its first sentence Postman's concerns are clear: "Children are the living messages we send to a time we will not see." The book warns of a blurring between children's and adult concerns; Postman observes that mass media expose children to phenomena that they're not old enough to understand, such as violence, sex and death. Postman writes, "If all the secrets of adulthood are opened to children, cynicism, apathy or ignorance replace curiosity for them."

Postman even criticizes the sacred cow, "Sesame Street," because it "answered questions that weren't asked." He argued that once children love and trust "Sesame Street" and its characters, they become trapped by an emotional connection that leaves them vulnerable to a lifetime of manipulation by advertisers. In 1984, people were thinking about how our culture compared to George Orwell's vision. But just two years later, Postman wrote his most famous work, "Amusing Ourselves to Death," in which he argues that Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World," not "1984," more accurately described the current state of affairs. People craved entertainment and pleasure, and media owners were only too happy to give it to them.

Postman explains in the book's forward that "Huxley feared those who would give us so much [information] that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Huxley feared that we would become a trivial culture. Huxley remarked that civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions." Seventeen years later, Postman and Huxley have proven eerily prescient.

After receiving a Ph.D. in education, Postman began his career as an English teacher. He wrote his first book, "Television and the Teaching of English," in 1961, at a time when TV was still in its primitive state, with a handful of mostly black-and-white channels that were only on the air part of the day. But even then, he realized that all the English teachers in the world weren't going to be able to offset the influence of the new medium. Former student Jay Rosen, now the head of the NYU Journalism department, quotes Postman on his blog: "Television, is the first curriculum, Postman wrote. School is second."

Postman had a second critical success with 1969's "Teaching as a Subversive Activity"; In it, Postman advocates an "inquiry-based" mode of education that teaches students how to think instead of asking them to memorize random information. Thirty-four years later, it is still a popular media-studies text.

Postman's books have a satirical tone, and they often offer a worst-case scenario. But then he himself was a bit of a radical in his personal life, shying away from new technologies he found unnecessary, like electric windows in cars or personal computers. He wrote in longhand. Postman didn't encourage people to follow his example, but he did live his life as an alternative model. (He did watch some TV, though; he was a fan of David Letterman because, he said, Letterman's humor made fun of the media and "broke the frame.")

Today Postman is second only to Marshall McLuhan as a giant in the media studies field, but despite his critical success he is less well known outside academia. So maybe it's no surprise that the Times left him out of its year-end retrospective. Though, given his wariness of media icons, that may have suited him just fine.

On-line chatting is not an addiction

On-line chatting is not an addiction
 Don't believe the headlines: It's a healthy method of communication

----------------------------------------------------------------

Written by Angela Penny, of 2-D Chat software company The Palace

Sunday Viewpoint, San Francisco Chronicle/Examiner, November 1997

IF YOU FOLLOW news about the Internet, you might think that chat groups are nothing more than forums for perverse, immoral discourse. At least, it seems that way, considering the negative implications and even sensationalism I have seen associated with them.

The most negative message about chat came out of the American Psychological Association's recent annual convention in Chicago. There, a University of Pittsburgh psychologist, Kimberly Young, presented research based on 360 surveys of active Internet users. Her study found that people dependent on-line interaction suffered withdrawal and other symptoms similar to drug or alcohol addiction. Young says this group includes less than 10 percent of all users, spending about 38 hours per week on-line. "Nonaddicts" are wired maybe 8 hours a week.

She technically called this affliction pathological Internet use, but used the word "addiction" often in her report and cited on-line chatting as one of the major contributors.

Well, I don't agree that these people should be called addicts. I suspect that there are similar statistics out there about television couch potatoes and people who spend hours on the telephone. My mother loves to talk on the phone, but no one calls her addicted. Many people use other behaviors that can be considered compulsive like TV watching, sleeping, exercising, and even driving, but you never hear these behaviors characterized as being as damaging as alcohol and drugs.

Internet chat gets the bad press because it's still foreign to many of us. People are saying, "God didn't intend us to communicate this way. It isn't natural. It isn't human."

Well you know what? Nearly a century ago, many pundits told Alexander Graham Bell that it wasn't natural for people to communicate through wires. Today, the telephone is a fundamental part of our lives.

"I'm passionate about on-line chatting. And I'm afraid that the positive aspects of this new communications medium will fall by the wayside in light of all this negative attention."

Humans are compelling and chat fills a need for socialization. I enjoy having real-time conversations with people all over the world who share specialized interests, whether it's bird watching or raising a 2-year-old. We are living through a phenomenal communications revolution.

On-line chatting provides the opportunity to meet people on the inside before you meet them on the outside. When you meet them on the outside, first, you get a lot of preconceived notions about who they are, and often you don't get past that. When you meet people on-line, you don't have to deal with biases or preconceptions -- yours or theirs.

On-line chat will not replace other forms of communication like face to face, phone talks, e-mails, and traditional letters. It is just another option in life's great buffet.

Chat mirrors society; it doesn't define it. The biggest complaint I hear about chat is that it is completely banal with no worthwhile conversation. Chat may be banal 90 percent of the time, but isn't that true of what's available in real life? To find good conversation, you have to look for it. Relationships formed in chat rooms aren't any deeper or more trivial than relationships folks develop in real life?

On-line chatting is an incredible way to take a class, share business information, have a high school reunion, communicate directly with your favorite celebrity and do a host of other activities that we haven't even thought of yet. It celebrates human connections and adds to rather than detracts from other types of human relations.

So, next time you see a sensational headline about on-line chat, think about the tremendous communications breakthroughs possible with the technology rather than the occasional oddball or "addict" who might be occupying cyberspace with the rest of us well-intentioned chatters.

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