Rescuing Neil Postman from the very problem he diagnosed

I started looking for a cartoon based on the opening lines of Neil Postman’s book Amusing ourselves to Death recently, only to find that the cartoonist had taken the original down. The comic itself struck me as ironic, since a core thesis of Postman’s book was how nobody read books anymore, and only ever digested media in small, easy-to-swallow chunks.

The original comic used text from the first page of Postman’s book to try and illustrate just how prophetic Postman’s work was. Both book and cartoon highlighted how the dystopia most relevant to the modern day was not George Orwell’s 1984, but Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. By direct comparison, both aimed to show that totalitarian threats to liberty were far less immediately pressing than, and nowhere near as insidious as, the threat posed by a population that had lost interest in anything that did not provide immediate gratification and amusement.

A key point from Postman’s book, and one that ironically didn’t make it into the cartoon version, was who Postman blamed for this sorry state of affairs. Over the years I’ve watched people who saw the cartoon blame various “elites:” the government, corporations, or media organisations. Postman himself blamed media – but when he said “media” he did *not* mean institutions like CNN or News Limited: he meant “media”, not “the media”. He meant the actual means of communication itself.

Postman was a media ecologist, and was the first to formally coin the term for the style of media study engaged in by people like Marshall McLuhan and Harold Innis. Like all media ecologists, Postman was especially focused on the link between media and epistemology: how does a particular medium affect what is and is not understood to be part of the field of “knowledge”, and what kind of knowledge it might be presumed to be? The core claim of media ecology is that this varies: different mediums create different ways of understanding the world.

For Postman, therefore, addressing the issues he saw in contemporary society could never be achieved by overthrowing some elite group that had created the problems for their own nefarious ends. The problem needed to be addressed by confronting the dangers that were “inherent” to a medium, and this could be done simply by asking what the danger of specific medium was:

…no medium is excessively dangerous if its users understand what its dangers are….This is an instance in which the asking of the questions is sufficient. To ask is to break the spell.”

I say “simply”, but the questions that rise in my mind when I try to do this suggest that it is difficult to apply. Is the medium of today most relevant to examine, “the internet”? Is that the same as or different to “digital media”? Is the dominant medium not either of those, but the specific and most popular subset of both known as “social media”? Even with these questions, the point – start with the medium in your inquiry, not with social groups – seems interesting to me. It avoids what I see as a contemporary bias in everyday thought, which is to always individualise blame for a specific social or cultural arrangement: someone supposedly has to have intended things to be that way. In my view this is far less often the case than lay criticism of contemporary circumstances assumes.