Media Ecologist & Crap Detector
NYU teacher who wrote with a pen, never used email, and argued that television turned news, politics and religion into show business: Huxley’s nightmare, not Orwell’s.
Educator & Media Critic
Postman was a New York professor of English education who spent more than four decades at NYU, wrote with a pen, never used email and owned no computer. His one question was what a medium does to the people who think through it. He answered it first as a classroom rebel with Charles Weingartner, then, after a public U-turn, as a defender of slow, word-centred schooling, and most famously in Amusing Ourselves to Death, which argued that American television had turned news, politics and religion into show business. He was funny, quotable and sometimes looser with history than with rhetoric. The questions have outlived the television set.
Neil Postman was born in New York on 8 March 1931 (in Brooklyn, according to one obituary notice) into a Jewish family. He went upstate to the State University of New York at Fredonia, where he played basketball and graduated in 1953. A military enlistment ended after less than five months. He then took a master’s degree (1955) and a doctorate in education (1958) at Teachers College, Columbia. He and Shelley Ross were married for forty-eight years. After a year in San Francisco State’s English department, New York University hired him in 1959.
Nothing in this start is glamorous, and that matters. Postman was an English-education man whose early books were textbooks for schools, and his first instinct was a teacher’s: the language a problem arrives in decides which answers look possible. Television, computers and test scores later got the same treatment. It was the classroom intuition, scaled up to a whole culture.
At the National Council of Teachers of English convention in Milwaukee in November 1968, Postman gave a talk, later published as ‘The Reformed English Curriculum’, that is credited with publicly introducing ‘media ecology’: the study of media as environments. Who coined the phrase is disputed. His former student Read Mercer Schuchardt credits Marshall McLuhan with the coinage and Postman with first saying it to a lecture audience. In 1971 Postman founded NYU’s graduate programme in media ecology, and by Schuchardt’s account hosted its annual retreat in upstate New York for thirty years.
The book that made his name was Teaching as a Subversive Activity (1969), written with Charles Weingartner. Its first chapter is called ‘Crap Detecting’. The authors recount an interviewer in the early 1960s pressing Ernest Hemingway for the one essential quality of a great writer, and Hemingway answering: ‘In order to be a great writer a person must have a built-in, shockproof crap detector.’ Postman and Weingartner made that the job of schools. Their method was to replace a syllabus of answers with questions, and the book prints its own list, gathered partly from children asked ‘What’s worth knowing?’: ‘What do you worry about most?’, ‘What bothers you most about adults? Why?’, ‘What, if anything, seems to you to be worth dying for?’, ‘Where does knowledge come from?’ Another chapter is titled ‘The Medium is the Message, Of Course’. McLuhan was already in the teacher-training manual.
It was not only theory. An inquiry programme at New Rochelle High School, developed by Postman and Alan Shapiro in 1969–1970, is reported to have run for fifteen years. In 1971 Postman and Weingartner followed with The Soft Revolution, ‘A Student Handbook for Turning Schools Around’, sold as a Delta paperback with a fist gripping a fountain pen over a peace sign on the cover.
Through the late 1970s Postman edited ETC: A Review of General Semantics (1976–1986), the journal of the movement built on Alfred Korzybski’s work on how words shape perception, and in 1976 taught a course on CBS’s Sunrise Semester.
Then, in 1979, he published Teaching as a Conserving Activity and reversed himself in public. The argument is thermostatic: a school should push against whatever the surrounding culture oversupplies. In 1969 that had been rigidity; by 1979 he judged it was television, which he called ‘the major educational enterprise now being undertaken in the United States’. So the school’s job became the opposite of television’s: a curriculum ‘subject-matter-centered, word-centered, reason-centered, future-centered, hierarchical’, not one ‘reduced to twenty-minute modules so that children’s attention will not wander’ (both phrases as quoted by Louis Segesvary in Reason).
Critics noticed the swerve. Segesvary, reviewing the book in December 1980, called the curriculum turn ‘one of the most stunning reversals in Postman’s thought’. He noted that Postman admitted his earlier work had ‘joined in the fun’ of the 1960s, and faulted him for showing no real remorse. The thermostat is Postman’s answer: one principle, opposite prescriptions, because the culture had changed. Whether that is consistency or a convenient metaphor is the reader’s call.
The Disappearance of Childhood leans heavily on Philippe Ariès’s Centuries of Childhood to argue that childhood as a protected stage is a by-product of the printing press. In an oral culture, Postman writes, childhood ended at about seven, when a child commands speech and so knows ‘all the secrets of the tongue’. Literacy created secrets, locked in a code that children had to be schooled into, and so created adulthood. Childhood was the long wait outside that door.
Television, he argued, removes the door: it ‘requires no instruction to grasp its form’, makes no complex demands on mind or behaviour, and ‘does not segregate its audience’. He cited figures of roughly three million children aged two to eleven watching between 11 and 11.30 p.m. He pointed to eleven- and twelve-year-old girls used as erotic objects in advertising (‘the Brooke Shields Phenomenon’) and to a Jordache jeans commercial in which mostly prepubescent schoolchildren are shown ‘driven silly by their undisciplined libidos’.
The history is the soft spot. Ariès’s claim that medieval Europe had no concept of childhood was contested by historians such as Linda Pollock in Forgotten Children (1983). Re-reading Postman in 2009, the philosopher Harry Brighouse noted that he accepts Ariès without reservation, said historians now regard childhood as widely recognised in the Middle Ages, and concluded that Postman ‘overstates the case for the decline and threatened disappearance of childhood’. The sharper observation, that a screen does not sort its audience by age, has aged better than the medieval history.
Amusing Ourselves to Death grew, by most accounts, from a talk on a 1984 Frankfurt Book Fair panel about Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Its foreword is the most quoted thing Postman wrote: ‘Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism … In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.’ The book, he says, is about the possibility that Huxley was right.
The engine is a line about smoke signals. You cannot do philosophy in puffs of smoke: ‘Its form excludes the content.’ Every medium, Postman argues, has such a bias. He was careful to say he had no quarrel with junk (‘The best things on television are its junk’) and to separate a technology, the machine, from a medium, the social use it settles into. His target was serious things presented as entertainment: news, politics, religion (the televangelist chapter is called ‘Shuffle Off to Bethlehem’) and schooling (Sesame Street, he wrote, ‘encourages children to love school only if school is like Sesame Street’).
His case is a concrete comparison. At Peoria, Illinois, on 16 October 1854, Stephen Douglas spoke for three hours. Lincoln, due to reply at similar length, pointed out it was already 5 p.m. and proposed that the crowd go home for dinner and come back for four more hours. They did. At the first of the 1858 debates, in Ottawa on 21 August, the format was an hour for Douglas, an hour and a half for Lincoln and half an hour of rebuttal. When the crowd applauded, Douglas asked for silence, saying he wanted to address their ‘judgment’ and ‘understanding’, not their ‘passions’. Postman’s reading is that this was ‘expository prose lifted whole from the printed page’, and that its audience could follow long, legalistic sentences by ear. Beside it he sets the 1984 Reagan–Mondale debates: five minutes per answer on questions such as Central America, a minute of rebuttal, and next-day verdicts that Reagan’s joke about his age had knocked Mondale out.
Chapter 7 names the grammar of television news after its stock segue, ‘Now … this’. No murder, earthquake or political blunder is so grave that the phrase cannot wipe it away, and he puts the time a viewer is allowed to dwell on it at ‘approximately forty-five seconds’. He then takes television at its most solemn: ABC’s eighty-minute panel after The Day After on 20 November 1983, with no music, no commercials, and Kissinger, McNamara, Elie Wiesel, Carl Sagan, William Buckley and Brent Scowcroft. Each man got about five minutes, called on ‘seriatim, as if they were finalists in a beauty contest’, and almost nobody answered anybody else.
Test the argument against later evidence and it splits. Kiku Adatto’s study for Harvard’s Shorenstein Center (June 1990) measured network evening-news coverage of presidential campaigns and found that the average uninterrupted sound bite from a candidate fell from 42.3 seconds in 1968 to 9.8 seconds in 1988. That is hard data in Postman’s direction, though it measures news clips, not debates, and appeared five years after his book. The nineteenth-century half is shakier. Postman says Lincoln and Douglas wrote their speeches in advance. But the ‘pure print’ he hears reaches us through shorthand reporters for the partisan Chicago papers, whose texts, in the Lincoln scholar Harold Holzer’s words, editors and transcribers ‘improved’ for their own man. Lincoln then edited the clippings into a book for his 1860 campaign, and a modern critical edition (Rodney Davis and Douglas Wilson, 2008) still had to correct garbled transcriptions. Some of the printed quality Postman admired was put there by print. The crowds, as Postman himself notes, also shouted ‘You tell ’em, Abe!’.
The book sold widely; The Villager’s obituary put it at eight languages and some 200,000 copies by 2003. Roger Waters named his 1992 album Amused to Death after it. Introducing the 2005 edition, Postman’s son Andrew quotes a student whose class tried to find a cable channel that disproved the thesis and could only come up with C-SPAN, ‘which no one watches’.
Technopoly opens with Plato’s Phaedrus. The god Theuth presents writing to King Thamus as a sure recipe for memory and wisdom. Thamus answers that the inventor of an art is not the best judge of it, and that writing will make people forgetful. Postman faults Thamus for seeing only the harms (the book insists he is ‘no one-eyed Technophobe’) but keeps the lesson: ‘embedded in every tool is an ideological bias’. His example is the grade. He writes that marking students’ papers began at Cambridge in 1792 at the suggestion of a tutor named William Farish, a claim he took from the historian Keith Hoskin, while conceding in his own note how little is known of Farish. Once a number can be given to the quality of a thought, he argues, it can be given to intelligence, creativity and even sanity.
He sorts cultures into three kinds: tool-using cultures, technocracies, and Technopoly, ‘the submission of all forms of cultural life to the sovereignty of technique and technology’. He finds its first clear statement in Frederick Taylor’s scientific management, and he gives the information age a line people still quote: ‘Information has become a form of garbage.’
The late career was institutional and stubborn. Postman became the School of Education’s only University Professor in 1993 and chaired the Department of Culture and Communication until 2002. He published The End of Education (1995), argued on the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour against putting personal computers in schools, and wrote Building a Bridge to the 18th Century (1999). An NYU colleague said he ‘wrote with a pen, never used e-mail, owned no computer and had no regrets about never going online’. Schuchardt adds that he wore as a badge of honour never having published a refereed scholarly article. He died of lung cancer in Flushing, Queens, on 5 October 2003, aged seventy-two, survived by Shelley, three children and four grandchildren.
The standing charge against him is technological determinism. Writing in the Fibreculture Journal in 2011, Michael Goddard accused Postman of ‘a form of populist technophobia’ that treats people and machines ‘in a monolithic, rather than in a complex way’, with ‘a quite conservative notion of pedagogy’ as the only cure. Postman’s own texts partly anticipate this. He distinguished technology from medium, said television could in principle be used as a lamp or a bookcase but ‘will not be so used, at least in America’, and told an interviewer, ‘I am not a Luddite … I am suspicious of technology.’ Read him as a set of questions to put to any new tool, not as a forecast. What does it make easy? What does it make disappear? Who wins?
Ivan IllichBoth ask when institutions and technologies reverse their stated purposes.
Marshall McLuhanMedia ecology’s defining companion and rival account of form.
