The Distinctive Postman

 In the last paragraph of "Amusing Ourselves to Death," Postman makes a distinction similar to that of Aldous Huxley's point in "Brave New World." The point is that because we are falling away from typography as a main source of communication, our lack of knowledge will lead to disaster. Like Postman explains about Huxley's book, "For in the end, he was trying to tell us that what afflicted the people in Brave New World was not that they were laughing instead of thinking, but that they did not know what they were laughing about and why they had stopped thinking." Likewise, we will eventually be so uneducated and desperate for entertainment that anything will entertain us, even if we do not understand the concept of it. This is the disaster that the two talk about: the knowledge of the human mind of the future.

Finally, I can Talk!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Friday's "speech fast," if you will, was probably one of the most difficult challenges that I have faced in a while. You really do never realize how blessed you are to be able to talk, and share the same type of communication as your friends use. Without speaking, drawing pictures and acting was very difficult for me, especially because I have no artistic ability with a writing utensil whatsoever, and because I'm not a very good actor either. To be honest, I really didn't participate in my classes at all because I had no idea how to depict or act out the answers to questions without using words. It was by no means easy. In Yearbook, I had to ask Miss Carson a question about my spread and  I sat in front of her making weird gestures, because I didn't have my whiteboard handy, and she would try and guess what I was saying, and she finally got it after about 2 minutes of acting out. This proves Postman's point about how communication is the medium between humans. Without speaking in words that most people understand, there would be no unity between us. No one would be able to get their point across to someone as great as they would be able to if they could speak.

Postman's Parallels

In Chapter One of "Amusing Ourselves to Death," Postman focuses on how technology, over time, is changing the way we communicate with others, whether it be through electronics, specifically the television, different forms of writing, or any other form of communication, and has the potential to cause future problems. Neil Postman refers to these types of communications as "mediums" between man and man, God and man, etc. In the words of Postman, "It [speech] made us human, keeps us human, and in fact defines what human means." In other words, speech is the medium of humanity. It is what connects us all with each other, and Postman reveals how people are finding different ways to communicate with others besides our nature of speaking.

In Postman's speech in the video, he states that the new technological world provides and will continue to provide special problems that the people from the previous eras could never even have imagined. In his concern about the topic of cloning, he mentions that we couldn't just take parts from our clone because they are indeed human beings. Postman describes it as "human beings defining other human beings as non-human things." This is what leads to genocide, according to Neil Postman. I think this is a parallel between Postman's book and the video because both are portraying the problems that technology will cause in the future of society. Also, Neil Postman talks about how Professor Nicholas Negroponte said that we will become closer to technology more than ever, to the point where we will talk to machines, rather than human beings. Negroponte thinks that we will be comfortable talking to inanimate objects, just as we do talking to a friend's answering machine. This is similar to what Postman writes in "Amusing Ourselves to Death," specifically in Chapter one when he talks about how technology of the future will change how we converse, and it will be the medium between everyone and everything.