In chapter 1 of Amusing Ourselves to Death, author Neil Postman explains the decline of humans gaining knowledge from print, and the rise of gaining information from images. Throughout the chapter, Postman gives several examples such as clocks, smoke signals, and graven images which proves that there is a rise in gaining information from images, and proves Marshal McLuhan's aphorism "medium is the message" (Postman 8) to be accurate. Although Postman makes these overt claims throughout the chapter, his concluding claim is significantly less obvious. In the final paragraph of chapter 1, Postman states, "We do not see nature or intelligence or human motivation or ideology as "it" is but only our languages are. And our languages are our media. Our media are our metaphors. Our metaphors create the content of our culture" (15), implying that the things that we view and hear on television (media), "creates a fixed conception in our minds" (13) that alters human culture. I definitely agree with Postman's claim. He refers to President William Howard Taft unlikely becoming president in today's time because the "the shape of a man's body is largely irrelevant to the shape of his ideas when he is addressing a public in writing... but it is quite relevant on television" (7). I felt that this example was one of Postman's strongest points because in most recent history, there have not been any significantly overweight presidents, not because an overweight person cannot run for presidency, but because an overweight, unhealthy United States leader does not fulfill our fixed conceptions of what a president should look like. I also thought that Postman's example of how clocks have changed the metaphor for time and how we view time itself was a very strong point. He basically says that before clocks, time was measured by the sun and the earth's season, and now time is measured by a machine that uses minutes and seconds.
A question that I though about when reading chapter 1 was, is this argument still accurate in today's time? Postman wrote this book in 1984 when technology was nothing compared to what we have now. One of Postman's main arguments was that television, or media, played a key role in the decline of gaining knowledge from print and the rise of gaining information from images, but in today's time, twice as much information can be accessed on the internet through online web browsers. Because of the Internets vast amounts of data that can be found with ease in a matter of seconds, personally do not think that Postman's argument is still accurate in our current age.
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