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Remember: in order for a perception to change one must be frustrated in one's actions or change one's purpose.

Neil Postman

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Neil Postman
Age: 72 †
Born: 1931
Born: March 8
Died: 2003
Died: October 5
Author
Communication Scholar
Essayist
Journalist
Media Critic
Pedagogue
Sociologist
University Teacher
Writer
New York City
New York
Change
Remember
Must
Frustrated
Actions
Perception
Purpose
Action
Order

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Typography fostered the modern idea of individuality, but it destroyed the medieval sense of community and integration.
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An educated mind is practiced in the uses of reason, which inevitably leads to a skeptical outlook.
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People in distress will sometimes prefer a problem that is familiar to a solution that is not.
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The whole problem with news on television comes down to this: all the words uttered in an hour of news coverage could be printed on a page of a newspaper. And the world cannot be understood in one page.
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A metaphor is not an ornament. It is an organ of perception. Through metaphors, we see the world as one thing or another.
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We can make the trains run on time but if they are not going where we want them to go, why bother?
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Public schooling does not serve a public it creates a pubic.
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The making of adaptable, curious, open, questioning people has nothing to do with vocational training and everything to do with humanistic and scientific studies.
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The spectacle we find in true religions has as its purpose enchantment, not entertainment. The distinction is critical. By endowing things with magic, enchantment is a means through which we may gain access to sacredness. Entertainment is the means through which we distance ourselves from it.
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Computers are merely ingenious devices to fulfill unimportant functions. The computer revolution is an explosion of nonsense.
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The past is strapped to our backs. We do not have to see it we can always feel it. People gather bundles of sticks to build bridges they never cross. People in distress will sometimes prefer a problem that is familiar to a solution that is not.
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Make no mistake about it: the labeling of someone's language as 'sexist' involves a political judgment and implies the desirability of a particular sociological doctrine. One may be in favor of that doctrine (as I believe I am) but it is quite another matter to force writers by edicts and censorship into accepting it.
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Children enter school as question marks and leave as periods.
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[It] is not that television is entertaining but that it has made entertainment itself the natural format for the representation of all experience. […] The problem is not that television presents us with entertaining subject matter but that all subject matter is presented as entertaining. (87)
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Printing links the present with forever. It carries personal identity into realms unknown.
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I believe I am not mistaken in saying that Christianity is a demanding and serious religion. When it is delivered as easy and amusing, it is another kind of religion altogether.
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The problem in the 19th century with information was that we lived in a culture of information scarcity, and so humanity addressed that problem beginning with photography and telegraphy and the - in the 1840s. We tried to solve the problem of overcoming the limitations of space, time, and form.
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...there must be a sequence to learning, that perseverance and a certain measure of perspiration are indispensable, that individual pleasures must frequently be submerged in the interests of group cohesion, and that learning to be critical and to think conceptually and rigorously do not come easily to the young but are hard-fought victories.
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There is no escaping from ourselves. The human dilemma is as it has always been, and we solve nothing fundamental by cloaking ourselves in technological glory.
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When media make war against each other, it is a case of world-views in collision.
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