Arguments Against Neil Postman's "Amusing Ourselves to Death"

Amusing Ourselves to Death, by Neil Postman, is dramatic to say the very least. It is a drawn out hyperbolization of the idea that television dumbs down the audience using it. Neil Postman has taken an old wives tail and made it seem scientifically sound in an effort to scare the world into reading and ignoring other mediums of communication such as television, and computers. When he infers that the entertainment value of today's television and computer programming is a drawback to the learning process, as well as information absorption as a whole, he makes technology seem as though it is fit for people of ignorance. To me, he is painting the picture that people of true intelligence are beyond the mediocrity that is technology's ability to accurately convey ideas.

There is a plethora of ideas out there that are conveyed in a much simpler way through the use of television or computers. My interpretation of Postman's argument is that if a medium makes a complicated idea (or issue) easier to comprehend then it allows the mind of a viewer to become lazy resulting in a lower IQ of the overall community. However, my argument is "what good is teaching if we do not use every tool we can to ensure that the person being taught can rap their mind around an idea?"

One of the first things I learned when I was being taught how to study was that everybody learns differently. Some people absorb information better visually, some people are hands on learners, some people listen and just remember things and some people read information and that is all they need. If a person is a visual learner the only way we could ever teach them about dinosaurs (since they cannot have the experience) is by allowing them to see them, otherwise how would they picture them? We show them still images of bone structures, and extrapolations of those bone structures to try and convey what the dinosaur actually looked like. We show videos that are demonstrative of how scientists believe dinosaurs moved. Instead of simply reading a speech given by a president, we now have the opportunity to watch the speech being given, allowing us to sense emotion and accurately detect the severity of a situation.

Technology is what enables modern day teachers to reach out and teach every type of learner, and ensure they can all have the same advantages to learning. Technology is an enabler not a road block, and it is my belief that postman was way off base in thinking that making learning entertaining is limiting; if anything it makes the venue of learning limitless.