"Of course, in television's presentation of the "news of the day," we may see the Now...this" mode of discourse in it's boldest and most embarrassing… - Neil Postman

"Of course, in television's presentation of the "news of the day," we may see the Now...this" mode of discourse in it's boldest and most embarrassing form. For there, we are presented not only with fragmented news but news without context, without consequences, without value, and therefore without essential seriousness; that is to say, news as pure entertainment.

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About Neil Postman

Neil Postman (8 March 1931 - 5 October 2003) was an American author, educator, media theorist and cultural critic, who eschewed technology, including personal computers in school and cruise control in cars, and is best known for twenty books regarding technology and education and his association with New York University for more than forty years.

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Additional quotes by Neil Postman

These include the beliefs that the primary, if not the only, goal of human labor and thought is efficiency; that technical calculation is in all respects superior to human judgment; that in fact human judgment cannot be trusted, because it is plagued by laxity, ambiguity, and unnecessary complexity; that subjectivity is an obstacle to clear thinking; that what cannot be measured either does not exist or is of no value; and that the affairs of citizens are best guided and conducted by experts.

[It] is not that television is entertaining but that it has made entertainment itself the natural format for the representation of all experience. […] The problem is not that television presents us with entertaining subject matter but that all subject matter is presented as entertaining. (87)

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In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, print put forward a definition of intelligence that gave priority to the objective, rational use of the mind and at the same time encouraged forms of public discourse with serious, logically ordered content. It is no accident that the Age of Reason was coexistent with that growth of a print culture, first in Europe and then in America.

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