Neil Postman

Neil Postman's career had an odd trajectory. It's a bit dramatic but ultimately fair to say that he was mugged by reality, lived to tell the tale, and was then destroyed by the tale he told.

For the longest time Postman was caught up in the fashionable trends of the 60s and 70s: media studies (he was a disciple of Marshall McLuhan), linguistics, and new approaches to education. His best-known book was called Teaching as a Subversive Activity.

Then in 1980 something changed. He wrote a book called Teaching as a Conserving Activity, which didn't exactly repudiate his earlier work, but showed a growing recognition that while education is the means by which we pass our traditions along to our children, what was in those days being passed off as education was in fact highly destructive of tradition. It's hard to imagine what sort of stink bomb this was for his colleagues, but the wider world took no notice. And then came three very different and very important works, books which qualify Neil Postman as one of the most perceptive social observers to grace modern times.

(To order all three books, choose The Neil Postman Collection.)

First up in 1982 was The Disappearance of Childhood. Although not his most important book, it is probably his best, because (a) it is brief, (b) it offers a novel thesis that explains many puzzling trends in current society, and (c) its prose is so lucid that often the careful reader has to stop and admire the paragraph he just read. Postman's thesis is that childhood is a modern invention, developed in response to the printing press; but now that we are no longer a print-oriented culture, childhood has become irrelevant and is now nearly gone.

In 1986 he published his most important book, Amusing Ourselves to Death. Often dismissed as merely a polemic against television, its thesis is actually far deeper. Postman makes the case that between 1850 and 1950 there was a profound change in American public discourse, from rational to emotional, from thinking through issues to simply reacting to issues. Mass media—magazines, newspapers, radio, and television—together with advertising has made us into a trivial people, one that confuses thought with entertainment. The reason we consider this his most important book is that there is a clear course of action for those who are persuaded: eliminate mass media from your life. Many folks who read this book have proceeded to do just that.

Amusing Ourselves to Death was and is still widely read, and after writing it Postman enjoyed some celebrity. But he chose not to capitalize on it (essays and interviews are close to nonexistent), sticking to his teaching at Columbia University and spending the next seven years working on a new book.

In 1993 came Technopoly, and many who were waiting weren't sure what to make of it. We think that although it isn't his best or most important book, it may be his most valuable. It examines a pernicious trend in modern society, the unquestioning acceptance of technological progress, and makes two observations. First, technology is not neutral—its use will inevitably have an effect on the society that employs it, not always benign. Second, that modern society has gone from using technology to worshiping it.

Although Technopoly was not the end of Postman's writing career, it turned out to be his last important book, for a very good reason—he could no longer stand to write books which despaired of their topic and had no constructive advice to make. Even Technopoly ends with a feeble and unconvincing list of suggestions for how to deal with the evil trends he had so skillfully unearthed. The introduction to his next book, The End of Education, explicitly states that he will never write another book that is not constructive.

Neil Postman is no longer with us, and it is a sad thing that his work is incomplete. But he left us with three vital books, and we're grateful for that.