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.