Finally finished Amusing Ourselves to Death. I’m happy I’m on the track.
Will I survive the world after the Postman’s book? Wish to see the test of time. No Instagram for good.
I’m haunted by this notion of TV and modern media presented by Postman. Yet I’m contemplating that my life is way better as a result of the web and YouTube. I require quite a while to digest all this.
My idea of discontinuity of action (one that seeks a better term) is ever present. I wish to buy others things that essentially justifies the hours in which I sell my soul to the work. This of course does not occur as the same to the ones of which I do this for. This is driving me increasingly frustrated and crazy.
The life of cats is so strange. They walk in a world dominated by creatures twenty times their size and reside in their homes and machinery. It is hard to live in a world that hardly has a place for you. The amount of alienation… Unbelievable…
When the world is about 10 things, you can excel in them so much that one cannot imagine, and when there are a thousand things, it doesn’t matter how much you excel in one of them.
All Americans are Marxists, for we believe nothing if not that history is moving us toward some preordained paradise and that technology is the force behind that movement.
What is the antidote to a culture’s being drained by laughter?
In order to command an audience large enough to make a difference, one would have to make the programs vastly amusing, in the television style. Thus, the act of criticism itself would, in the end, be co-opted by television. The parodists would become celebrities, would star in movies, and would end up making television commercials.
The first [
Introduce the alphabet to a culture and you change its cognitive habits, its social relations, its notions of community, history and religion. Introduce the printing press with movable type, and you do the same. Introduce speed-of-light transmission of images and you make a cultural revolution. Without a vote. Without polemics. Without guerrilla resistance. Here is ideology, pure if not serene. Here is ideology without words, and all the more powerful for their absence. All that is required to make it stick is a population that devoutly believes in the inevitability of progress.
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- Thou shalt have no prerequisites
- Thou shalt induce no perplexity
- Thou shalt avoid exposition like the ten plagues visited upon Egypt
Cicero remarked that the purpose of education is to free the student from the tyranny of the present, which cannot be pleasurable for those, like the young, who are struggling hard to do the opposite—that is, accommodate themselves to the present.