A Momentary Taste of Being

After I completed my review of Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior , I was offered a review copy of Click:The Magic of Instant Connections , a book about which I had some doubts and reservations because the subject matter wasn't of the same compelling interest (to me) as that of Sway . Nevertheless, I had enjoyed the first book so much, I thought I had nothing to lose and much to gain by taking up the second. And I'm glad that I did.  While the subject matter is not of the same caliber of interest as the first, I found myself gradually warming to the premise.  More than that, the authors indicated that it was their opinion that these magical connections did not have to be happenstance--that there were circumstances and practices that could help cultivate them.  Finally, the magic connections were not all about e-Harmony or e-Chemisty or e-I'm-Desperate-for-Any-Sort-of-Date; indeed, these were in the minority.  Most of the "clicks" described were t...

I've always found network news confusing, terrifying, deeply depressing, and deeply disengaging.  My father and teachers frequently insisted that I imbibe from this foul stream on a daily basis.  As soon as I came to an age where I could make my own determinations I fled from it as far as I could go.  And Postman actually pinpoints why all these things should be our natural reactions to the production. from Amusing Ourselves to Death Neil Postman All television news programs being, end, and are somewhere in between punctuated with music. I have found very few Americans who regard this custom as peculiar. . . What has music to do with the news? Why is it there? It is there, I assume, for the same reason music is used in the theater and films--to create a mood and provide a leitmotif for the entertainment. If there were no music--as is the case when any television program is interrupted for a new flash--viewers would expect something truly alarming, possibly life-alter...

The last excerpts last night may have gotten a little ahead of where I wanted to be as I chronicle notes for this book.  So I'm going to take a couple of steps back and record some observations, one of which I'm still evaluating, but which I find persuasive. from Amusing Ourselves to Death Neil Postman It may be true, as Frederick Jackson Turner wrote, that the spirit that fired the American mind was the fact of an ever-expanding frontier. But it is also true, as Paul Anderson has written, the "it is no mere figure of speech to say that farm boys followed the plow with book in hand, be it Shakespeare, Emerson, or Thoreau." For it was not only a frontier mentality that led Kansas to be the first state to permit women to vote in school elections, or Wyoming the first state to grant complete equality in the franchise. Women were probably more adept readers than men, and even in the frontier states the principal means of public discourse issued from the printed word....

The fall of American Reason as chronicled: from Amusing Ourselves to Death Neil Postman The solution to these problems, [the vast distances and spaces separating American communities from one another in the time of the frontier] as every school child used to know, was electricity. To no one's surprise, it was an American who found a practical way to put electricity in the service of communication and, in doing so, eliminated the problem of space once and for all.  I refer, of course, to Samuel Finley Breese Morse, America's first true "spaceman." His telegraph erased state lines, collapsed regions, and, by wrapping the continent in an information grid, created the possibility of a unified American discourse. But at a considerable cost. For telegraphy did something that Morse did not foresee when he prophesied that telegraphy would make "one neighborhood of the whole country." It destroyed the prevailing definition of information, and in doing so gave ...

from Amusing Ourselves to Death Neil Postman The influence of the printed word in every arena of public discourse was insistent and powerful not merely because of the quantity of printed matter but because of its monopoly .  This point cannot be stressed enough, especially for those who are reluctant to acknowledge profound differences in the media environments of then and now. One sometimes hears it said, for example, that there is more printed matter available today than ever before, which is undoubtedly true. But from the seventeenth century to the late nineteenth century, printed matter was virtually all that was available. There were no movies to see, radio to hear, photographic displays to look at, records to play.  There was no television. Public business was channeled into and expressed through print, which became the model, the metaphor, and the measure of all discourse. The resonances of the lineal, analytical structure of print, and in particular, of expository ...

It is fitting to begin this with the appropriate word from Frost: Fire and Ice Robert Frost Some say the world will end in fire; Some say in ice. From what I've tasted of desire I hold with those who favor fire. But if it had to perish twice, I think I know enough of hate To say that for destruction ice Is also great And would suffice. And I follow with a book that is now very old news, but one that I had not encountered before in actual book form (mostly in excerpts here and there).  I saw it on the bargain tables at Borders (thus my two visits) and debated the question of simplicity v. desire and finally decided that rather than the three I really wanted, I would get only this one that I was fairly certain I would read. In commenting on the complementary dystopias of Orwell and Huxley, Postman has this to say: from Amusing Ourselves to Death Neil Postman Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwe...