In the Huxleyan prophecy, Big Brother does not watch us, by his choice. We watch him, by ours.
Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business by Neil Postman 2:23pm on August 18, 2018Men always make their gods in their own image.
Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business by Neil Postman 2:22pm on August 18, 2018What the advertiser needs to know is not what is right about the product but what is wrong about the buyer.
Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business by Neil Postman 2:22pm on August 18, 2018One is reminded of George Bernard Shaw’s remark on his first seeing the glittering neon signs of Broadway and 42nd Street at night. It must be beautiful, he said, if you cannot read.
Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business by Neil Postman 2:21pm on August 18, 2018There is no audience so young that it is barred from television. There is no poverty so abject that it must forgo television. There is no education so exalted that it is not modified by television.
Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business by Neil Postman 2:20pm on August 18, 2018Like telegraphy, photography recreates the world as a series of idiosyncratic events. There is no beginning, middle, or end in a world of photographs, as there is none implied by telegraphy. The world is atomized.
Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business by Neil Postman 2:19pm on August 18, 2018The words “true” and “false” come from the universe of language, and no other.
Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business by Neil Postman 2:19pm on August 18, 2018To the telegraph, intelligence meant knowing of lots of things, not knowing about them.
Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business by Neil Postman 2:19pm on August 18, 2018Intelligence implies that one can dwell comfortably without pictures, in a field of concepts and generalizations.
Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business by Neil Postman 2:18pm on August 18, 2018Truth, like time itself, is a product of a conversation man has with himself about and through the techniques of communication he has invented.
Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business by Neil Postman 2:18pm on August 18, 2018A person who reads a book or who watches television or who glances at his watch is not usually interested in how his mind is organized and controlled by these events, still less in what idea of the world is suggested by a book, television, or a watch.
Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business by Neil Postman 2:17pm on August 18, 2018It is an argument that fixes its attention on the forms of human conversation, and postulates that how we are obliged to conduct such conversations will have the strongest possible influence on what ideas we can conveniently express. And what ideas are convenient to express inevitably become the important content of a culture.
Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business by Neil Postman 2:17pm on August 18, 2018What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance.
Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business by Neil Postman 2:16pm on August 18, 2018The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.
Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino 2:16pm on August 18, 2018It is not the voice that commands the story: it is the ear.
Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino 2:14pm on August 18, 2018If you ask, “Why is Thekla’s construction taking such a long time?” the inhabitants continue hoisting sacks, lowering leaded strings, moving long brushes up and down, as they answer, “So that its destruction cannot begin.”
Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino 2:14pm on August 18, 2018There is the city where you arrive for the first time; and there is another city which you leave never to return. Each deserves a different name.
Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino 2:13pm on August 18, 2018As time passes the roles, too, are no longer exactly the same as before; certainly the action they carry forward through intrigues and surprises leads toward some final denouement, which it continues to approach even when the plot seems to thicken more and more and the obstacles increase. If you look into the square in successive moments, you hear how from act to act the dialogue changes, even if the lives of Melania’s inhabitants are too short for them to realize it.
Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino 2:13pm on August 18, 2018Spider-webs of intricate relationships seeking a form
Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino 2:12pm on August 18, 2018Elsewhere is a negative mirror. The traveler recognizes the little that is his, discovering the much he has not had and will never have.
Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino 2:11pm on August 18, 2018