Tuesday, February 22, 2011

Amusing Ourselves To Death Conclusion

The distinction he makes in the last chapter is the difference between laughing and thinking. He is telling us that the danger of the age of television is that we do not why we are laughing anymore, and we do not understand why we have stopped thinking. This distinction matters because it is the whole reason of the book, it shows us the true decline in the world caused by the age of television. That if we do not do anything about it we will keep being entertained by the mindless shows we watch and sooner or later lose the ability altogether to think for ourselves. In the end Postman is saying all these mindless entertaining shows will be funny to us know but they will control the way we think if we keep watching them.

Sunday, February 6, 2011

A Day Without Talking

It was so hard to go a whole school day without talking and having everyone look at me weird when I tried to draw a picture to explain what I was trying to say. A interesting experience I had with not being able to talk on Friday was lunch. It was so hard to sit there and have all my friends around  talking and all I could do was sit there and listen to the conversations. I never realized how much I relayed on talking during lunch or in the halls between classes until Friday.  All my friends knew I couldn't talk all day but it was still frustrating when they would forget then start talking to me and all I wanted to do was answer but couldn't. No talking for a day was very hard and people take stuff the wrong way when you can't talk and answer their questions or have a conversation with them.

Friday, February 4, 2011

Postmans Speech

Neil Postman mentions many famous quotes from people in his speech one that really sticks out was the one Henry David Thoreau's that says "All inventions are an improved way to means of an unimproved end." That is so true about our society today that everything we do is always being improved yet we are never truly happy with what we have. We always want it bigger and better in the end. As he said in the books we started off with smoke signals as the first way of communication and slowly built on that and have a whole new way in the 21th Century of communication such as texting, emails and instant messaging. We started of so simple and yet now we think we have it so easy yet it is probably just going to hurt us in the end. As he says in the video we are going to turn into "pets of our computers" from not communicating directly with people around us. He says that we are going to start talking to inantimate objects of we keep up with the texting people when we are in the same house let alone in the same room. Lastly he is basically saying that their are many different mediums of communication and we are just taking the easy way out and it is going to hurt us in the end that we need to talk to people face to face more often then texting them.

Also he talks about the cloning of animals that has happened and the cloning of humans that they want to try to help improve our lives. The cloning is basically the scientists messing with the way God made us and everyone else having us rely on science and technology to make us look better or save our lives. We are going to rely on that colon to save us if we need a new heart or lung to save us. He says in the book that our 27th President William Taft how was bigger than most presidents today would not make it if he ran into today's world because he does not fit the image we have created. That people do not want to listen to a fat president talk that they want a some what good looking one. We have created this image in society that if your basically not perfect looking you can not be on TV or in magazines. The fact that we have some many shows based around plastic surgery today is supporting that we may need colons someday for everyone because they could improve our lives when we need them. All this technology is doing is taking away from our lives and we are not improving ourselves or society we are just taking away from how God made us and they way he wanted us to be in our lives.