Media Gives Knowledge/Power to the People

Throughout Amusing Ourselves to Death, Postman protests about technology’s advancements in entertainment such as the telegraph and television sets. He makes claims suggesting that headlines from T.V and telegraphs have made the importance and truth of news and knowledge decrease.

Postman makes it clear that he loves typography. Typography requires people to read, think and understand while TV presents us with pictures and sounds to explain subjects for us; ultimately, making us stupid and lazy. He expresses this when stating: “our notions of truth and our ideas of intelligence have changed as a result of new media displacing the old” (26). Postman argues that constant imports of news headlines provided by TVs and telegraphs have polluted our minds with irrelevant information. He supports this claim when stating: “to the telegraph, intelligence meant knowing of a lot of things, not knowing about them” (70). I don’t think this is a problem anymore because for a form of discourse to provide a reader with a headline and no information behind it is unfair and one-sided. He is wrong when he makes statements like this. He thinks just because TV provides us with quickly summarized  interminable news, people cannot grasp real information. He then goes on claiming that “(...)sped-up electronic media has no order or meaning and is not to be taken seriously. There is no murder so brutal, no earthquake so devastating(…)” (98). This opened my eyes because some of this is true. It seems that almost everyday we are seeing tragedy, political corruption, celebrity gossip, and weather updates on our phones and TVs. This “news” has become routine and as my previous history teacher always said, “when something bad happens to one person it’s a tragedy but when it happens to many people it becomes a statistic”. I would like to believe that people are not blind to facts and stand up for what is right. We are not and should not be unbothered and “used to” seeing terrorist attacks on the news. People read those headlines, do research, take action, and raise awareness on the subject.Thanks to what Postman expresses as “irrelevant” headlines, people are informed about the world around them. We are not like a Fahrenheit 451 society that is unsympathetic to tragic news. We will continue to watch the news and be activists because knowledge is power and the media gives power to the people.

Julia Enzmann