Amusing Ourselves To Death Neil Postman Analysis
Synthesis Essay
If a question was asked, any question, today’s automatic answer is to find the solution through technology. We’ve grown dependant on the ticking of clocks, the virtual world of the internet, and the convenience of our phones. A difficult concept for us to grasp, however, is merely thirty years ago most of these did not existed.
So how has this affected our minds? Have we turned our brains into a living computer, or are we so dependent on outside answers that we’ve ceased thinking for ourselves? In today’s society we’ve entered a state of ignorant bliss about how little knowledge and wisdom we truly hold. Neil Postman (1984), the author of “Amusing Ourselves to Death” and an educator, tackled the now apparent fact that unlike George Orwell’s prediction that our rights to thinking would be ripped away, Aldous Huxley’s prediction that we will gladly hand them away voluntarily has become more and more true. Both Orwell and Huxley are English authors. (Postman, 1984)
We allow our information to be fed to us by the …show more content…
Books created worlds we’ve never seen, they questioned our philosophical purpose, and they answered it. From manuals to stories, books have been handed down as a collection of knowledge; but for the first time in millennia we’re raising entire generations who have never read a novel, short story or even a poem. David McCullough (2008), author of “The Love of Learning” defines for us the difference between facts and wisdom. Data is irrelevant until we have made the judgment to make it important and learn from it. We cannot memorize facts and call ourselves learned; we must look a layer deeper and find what the facts mean to us. “Learning is acquired mainly from books, and most readily from great books.” (McCullough, 2008, p. 2) Without books we are only being fed data, numbers and words without any true meaning. (McCullough,
If a question was asked, any question, today’s automatic answer is to find the solution through technology. We’ve grown dependant on the ticking of clocks, the virtual world of the internet, and the convenience of our phones. A difficult concept for us to grasp, however, is merely thirty years ago most of these did not existed.
So how has this affected our minds? Have we turned our brains into a living computer, or are we so dependent on outside answers that we’ve ceased thinking for ourselves? In today’s society we’ve entered a state of ignorant bliss about how little knowledge and wisdom we truly hold. Neil Postman (1984), the author of “Amusing Ourselves to Death” and an educator, tackled the now apparent fact that unlike George Orwell’s prediction that our rights to thinking would be ripped away, Aldous Huxley’s prediction that we will gladly hand them away voluntarily has become more and more true. Both Orwell and Huxley are English authors. (Postman, 1984)
We allow our information to be fed to us by the …show more content…
Books created worlds we’ve never seen, they questioned our philosophical purpose, and they answered it. From manuals to stories, books have been handed down as a collection of knowledge; but for the first time in millennia we’re raising entire generations who have never read a novel, short story or even a poem. David McCullough (2008), author of “The Love of Learning” defines for us the difference between facts and wisdom. Data is irrelevant until we have made the judgment to make it important and learn from it. We cannot memorize facts and call ourselves learned; we must look a layer deeper and find what the facts mean to us. “Learning is acquired mainly from books, and most readily from great books.” (McCullough, 2008, p. 2) Without books we are only being fed data, numbers and words without any true meaning. (McCullough,