Please Mr. Postman Please Mr. Postman I have just been reading Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death .
Postman observes that the age of typography has been replaced by the age of television.
Typography forced the creator and reader each to organize their thoughts and proceed in an orderly way, the one to the creation, the other to the comprehension of the material. Telegraphy, the fore-runner of television, overwhelmed us with a myriad bits of irrelevant information, and diminished our ability to construct coherent opinions based on fact when we could no longer find just the facts we needed and avoid the ones that did not matter. Along came television, the domain of the ever- shorter sound bite, and turned all information into entertainment, striking the final blow to our ability to select facts and formulate opinions. In an interview in the July Netguide Magazine, he confirms that he sees the computer as essentially being a solitary device, eroding any sense of real community and drowning us in irrelevant information. Postman's prejudices have blinded him to the significance of the Internet.