He is the first to acknowledge that a similar conclusion has been drawn over the years by many others, including the likes of Plato, Louis Mumford, Jacques Ellul, Harold Adams Innis, and, of course, Marshall McLuhan. As a media ecologist, Postman rejects McLuhan's deliberately neutral commentary on the emergence of a new global village, and decries instead what he sees to be the demise of American culture, offering where he can solutions and suggestions for halting the erosion of a literate tradition. McLuhan used his understanding of how media function to tailor his message to media's requirements. Postman on the other hand deliberately resists pressures to reduce his ideas to contextless fragments, offering instead fully articulated, lucid arguments requiring readers to follow a number of carefully presented premises to a logical conclusion. For adherence to the traditional values of a typographic culture is the crux of Postman's philosophy.
School is old times and old biases.
For that reason, it is more valuable to us than most people realize, but, in any case, provides a clear contrast to the newer system of perception and thought that television represents. By putting television and school side by side, we can see where we are going and what we are leaving, which is exactly what we need to know. For Postman, adherence to tradition, then, is not a Luddite stance. But as a media ecologist, he argues that tradition is of fundamental importance because it provides the means to an objective, balanced perspective which is our only defense against unmitigated technological advancement. It is about how the meanings of information and education change as new technologies intrude upon a culture, how the meanings of truth, law, and intelligence differ among oral cultures, writing cultures, printing cultures, electronic cultures.