This (by no means exhaustive) survey of Postman’s work reflects on his penetrating analyses of contemporary technology. He focused attention on the ways technology today, especially the television and the computer, inevitably change us. The essential questions he asks us to ask (and answer) are, How does technology affect us? Is it for good or ill? and Must we accept all technological advances? Postman recognized the current dominance and autonomy of technology as well as the concomitant dangers and (...) consequently made the case and the plea for the reassertion of human over technological values. (shrink)

In this article I deal with the impact of digitization on education by revisiting the ideas Neil Postman developed in regard with the omnipresence of screens in the American society of the 1980s and their impact on what it means to grow up and to become an educated person. Arguing, on the one hand, that traditionally education is profoundly related to the initiation into literacy, and on the other hand, that the screen may come to replace the book (...) as the prevailing educational medium, Postman’s theses are worth reconsidering. Moreover I propose to develop further one strain of thought in Postman’s work, viz. the interconnectedness of technological inventions, material practices and ideas regarding what education is all about. As such I analyse in great detail the differences between traditional and digital literacy by looking from a material and practical perspective at how we relate to books and screens. This is not a normative analysis, but one that aims at fleshing out differences in spaces of experience. As such I wind up with suggestions regarding the affordances that a new form of literacy, no longer based on the model of the book, might bring about. (shrink)

Citation:Christodoulou, Marina. “Technopolis as the Technologised Kingdom of God. Fun as Technology, Technology as Religion in the 21st Century. God sive Fun.” Cahiers d'études germaniques N° 74, 2018. La religion au XXIe siècle - Perpectives et enjeux de la discussion autour d'une société post-séculière. Études reunites par Sébastian Hüsch et Max Marcuzzi, 119-132. -/- -------- -/- Neil Postman starts his book Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology (1993)1 with a quote from Paul Goodman’s New Reformation: “Whether or (...) not it draws on new scientific research, technology is a branch of moral philosophy, not of science.” (Postman 1993: motto; Goodman 2010: 40). I would extend Postman’s Technopoly to Technopolis, to give it more of a presence in time and space. Hence, I will use the term Technopoly when I am referring to Postman; the term Technopolis is my own. -/- In his book From Faith to Fun: The Secularisation of Humour, Russel Heddendorf argues that humour is a technology (Heddendorf 2009: 32-34), as it is understood and theorized by Neil Postman in Technopoly. Russel Heddendorf also argues that “Technopoly” is a term correlated with Wittgenstein’s use of the term “worldview” (Weltanschauung) (Heddendorf 2009: 11). -/- I would like to draw on these thoughts to propose that Technopoly (or Technopolis) could be the secularized Kingdom of God, namely that Technology is the Religion of the 21st century, and that Fun is a paradigm of such a Technology / Technique. God is yet another technique or Technology of and in Technopoly. -/- The godless individual in the 21st century, I will argue, is as much a believer as the faithful in the Sacred Religion (term used in opposition to Secular or rather Technological or Technologized Religion, which is Fun). He believes in Fun (as a post-modern form of pleasure), as much as the believer believes, or more accurately, believed in God. In the 21st century, the faithful in Sacred Religion believes in a fun God, as opposed to the serious God of the past. Fun is turning into the Technologized Religion for all; for the faithful in Godly / Sacred Religion, as well for as the unfaithful. Fun (pleasure, humour) is the definitive qualia of 21st century pleasure. The mechanics of Fun make it absolutely functional for controlling people; as Aldous Huxley wrote in Brave New World, people “are controlled by inflicting pleasure” (cited in Heddendorf 2009: 158). Now, indulging in pleasure is having Fun. In the 21st century, nobody is unfaithful, nobody disputes God, because God has been manufactured into Fun. We are living in the most religious century of all. -/- The commodity of God, now inextricably blended into work and leisure ethics and culture, is as unavoidable as survival. You don’t work, you don’t survive, you don’t exist. You work, you are entitled to leisure, or free time – the time (“busy-time”) when you are busy is work. The free time of leisure (“fun-time”) is a time for fun (pleasure). The time dedicated to Fun is culturally (capitalistically) pre-defined; no moment is actually free, each moment that is sold as free is to be bought with Work Time tokens –which is money. Believe is Enjoy. Happiness, achieved through pleasure, and pleasure through Fun, and Life as Play, is the recipe for Teleology in the 21st century. -/- The Technological God (Fun), as the Sacred God before him, is sovereignty’s technique or a social “mode of release”: demonstrations, marches, petitions, freedom of speech, citizen and human rights vindications, are “modes of release”, so that the next day, feeling relieved and released that you are working for a better life and a better world, you can wake up cheerfully to walk to your workplace, feeling it will change because of your marching, or your petition, or your speech, or the mass you attended, or the prayer you said yesterday. Thus life continues unchanging, through postponing hope; the tension of the tragedy is always released (lysis) in catharsis: refreshment for the next day of work. Art, especially cinema, (namely, simulated life) follows the same cathartic principles as real life. Thus, you can keep coping, and hoping in the meantime is of much help. Religion, Art, Science, Therapy, and Technology are all technologies used to market life, sell it or lend it, and humans are buying it back. Fun is free to produce, and expensive to buy. (shrink)

While The Daily Show with Jon Stewart is certainly entertaining, it can also deliver a deeper analysis of our contemporary media environment. Stewart's analysis echoes that of the celebrated New York University media theorist Neil Postman, whose discerning insights seem to ground some of The Daily Show's sharpest comic bits. Much of The Daily Show's sharpest comedy requires its audience to grasp a Postman‐like criticism of television news. In addition, Stewart himself seems to offer a more general (...) critique of today's televised public discourse that is reminiscent of Postman's in several significant ways. This isn't to say, however, that Postman and Stewart are in perfect agreement. For one thing, Postman argues that the transformation of serious discussion into entertainment is all but inevitable when this discussion takes place on television. Stewart, on the other hand, seems to believe that television can do better. (shrink)

Some kinds of “fake news” bits on Saturday Night Live (SNL) become more meaningful when linked back to the work of media theorist Neil Postman. Postman's best‐known book, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, argues that TV journalism will inevitably reflect the influences and biases of television itself. The result is an entertaining but incoherent stream of “disinformation” in a “peek‐a‐boo world” of unfocused and shallow discussion. Using Postman's arguments for (...) structure and support here, this chapter explores similar concerns reflected in the satirical news reporting of SNL. It shows that “Weekend Update” and other such pieces can ground key lessons that help us navigate our increasingly complex media environment, a point that Postman himself considers in his book's closing pages. As our media environment continues to change, it becomes helpful to see Postman's thesis as a valuable philosophical insight, and one that SNL's comedy can illustrate quite effectively. (shrink)

If Neil Postman, were alive today, what would he say to Prensky, the originator of the term, ‘digital native’, about the ways in which teachers should approach the wonders and perils of e-learning in their classrooms? As the Dean of a faculty of education which is devoted to both creating and critiquing a variety of digital teaching and learning strategies in K-12 and adult education contexts, I have kept a close eye on the developing metanarrative of the twenty-first (...) century skills movement. Arguments and anecdotes from the movement’s proponents concerning teachers’ technological accountability and competencies are attractive and compelling to some educators at the same time as they are oppressive and disturbing to others. In order to deconstruct the technophilic discourses of Prensky, Trilling, and Fadel, I juxtapose their work with Postman’s cautionary tales about totalitarian technocracy in schools. Postman wants educators to question their taken-for-granted assumptions about the ways in which they and their students should interact with technology. Prensky and his followers wish to provide educators with effective ways to involve their students in experiential learning partnerships through the use of serious gaming, e-books, crowdsourcing, and Facebook. As the views of Prensky and Postman are contrasted, a number of interesting issues emerge. What, for instance, is the nature of moral development and cultural identity formation when collective intelligence, hypertexts, and virtual relationships displace traditional textbook and face-to-face modes of learning? In this article, therefore, I attempt to synthesize the opposing perspectives of Prensky and Postman in order to establish a balanced and yet critical theory of the nature of e-learning. (shrink)

In 1982, Neil Postman wrote The Disappearance of Childhood. In that work, Postman recounted the invention of childhood in the modern world and its demise at the hands of, among other things, the electronic media. In Postman’s view, television had transformed education into ‘edutainment.’ The implications of this loss were devastating. Taking up where Postman left off I wish to reexamine his claim and amend and update his thesis by suggesting that, after the latest electronic (...) turn, we now live in societies where a meaningful conception of adulthood is disappearing. It is disappearing, in part, because of an impoverished conception of citizenship. Yet it is additionally undermined because, claims to the ascendancy of the ‘knowledge worker’ notwithstanding, the fundamental connection between education and employment is unraveling. In this climate, the purposes of education are constantly queried and scrutinized as its telos is redefined by criteria external to the practice of education: cost-effectiveness, value-for-money, and so on. I suggest that only be reclaiming a meaningful conception of adulthood can education be defended and only by so doing can individuals hope to understand the world around them. (shrink)

This paper, first presented at the spring 1990 conference on Mass Media Ethics in the Information Age, compares and contrasts approaches of five scholars - Harold Innis, Marshall McLuhan, Walter Ong, Neil Postman, and Jacques Ellul - whose works are chief contributions to an influential communications theory that posits that the history of media technologies is central to the history of civilization, that media transformations result in social change, and that changes in the form of media technology alter (...) the structure of consciousness. (shrink)

Ever since computers have been developed, people have dreamt of technological memories. Human memory exhibits crucial limitations with respect to storage capacity, retrievability and transferability - limits that should be overcome by technology. Yet today we are starting to experience the limitations of overcoming these limitations. Pleas are now made to build a certain mode of forgetting into our technologies. As it stands, we are struggling with the tension between technological remembering and forgetting. This article makes an attempt at a (...) deeper philosophical reflection on this tension. First, we sketch a few ideals of technological memory, that have been proposed throughout the last century. Yet lately, different voices have arisen, that point out the dangers and disadvantages of perfect technological remembering. Second, we discuss one of these perspectives and contrast it with the positions in favour of remembering. But this leads us, thirdly, into a discussion on the distinction between technological memory and 'human' memory: these two appear not so easily delineated. How to make sense of, at the same time, the resemblances and the differences between the two? In the ending section, fourthly, we attempt to do so, by way of Marshall McLuhan's theory of technologies as extensions, and Neil Postman's related idea of technology as a 'Faustian bargain'. Technological memory cannot simply imitate human memory, for every technology causes effects we cannot control. But if the 'extending of remembering' makes us eventually regret our greater capabilities and revert to technological forgetting, this 'extending of forgetting' will have its unforeseen consequences as well. In this doubled Faustian bargain, we must ask ourselves towards which of the two sides we have been biased, and how we can reach a balance that combines enforcement with - consciously sought-after - limitations. (shrink)

Today childhood takes place within amultimedia context where education, marketingand entertainment operate together in one bigmelting pot. Childhood is commodified, asituation not everybody seems happy with. Dueto increasing exposure with violence and sexualactivities, for example in children's games,children seem to lose the chance to be realchildren. In the discussions about thiscommodified childhood, innocence and nostalgiaseem omnipresent concepts. In this article wefirst analyse the discourse about the innocenceof childhood as presented by Neil Postman inhis bestseller ``The Disappearance ofChildhood.'' Here, (...) childhood is seen as a periodwhich can mainly be characterised in terms of a``not yet.'' However, Postman's view on childhoodpresents only one side of the romanticcontinuum. The other side – in which the childappears as having a nature of her own – can beillustrated by ``On naïve and sentimentalpoetry,'' an essay written by Friedrich Schillerin 1795. Both opposing views on childhood canlead to a different interpretation of theinnocence of childhood. Finally, Schiller'sdichotomy – the naïve versus thesentimental poet – can be seen as a useful legup to the clarification of nostalgia whichseems to go hand in hand with the feeling ofthe loss of childhood. (shrink)

The new mass media technologies now make information processing and distribution more accessible to people globally. Marshall Mcluhan’s “global village” has given birth to a “global palour”. However, perpetrators of crimes now bask on the philosophy of communication media practitioners that people have the right to know what is happening within and outside their environment. This stance is rapidly dismantling, in an amazing fashion, the hitherto accorded respect for media ethics. Neil Postman, a New York media analyst, describes (...) the creator of technology as the list judge of its consequences, especially with regards to the technology of the media. True, every communication medium is potent with the possibility of occasioning other consequences not directly intended by it. This paper, therefore, attempts to bring to the fore the way communication media are inadvertently promoting crimes and terrorist activities globally. It is the stand of this paper that a global overhaul of mass communication media is needed for balance reportage that would bring about global and meaningful developments of human and material resources under an atmosphere of peace and mutual tolerance. (shrink)

Este texto trata da possível relação entre Filosofia para Crianças e "desaparecimento" da Infância, buscando especialmente em Matthew Lipman e Neil Postman o aporte teórico para pensar o papel da Filosofia perante uma infância em "desaparecimento". Diante da complexidade da temática, não temos a intenção de alcançar respostas, e sim instigar maiores reflexões.

The authors examine the conceptual frameworks and substantive ideas of three authors, Lawrence Cremin, Neil Postman and Christopher Lasch, all of whom view technologies as educators. The authors focus on the television as educator and exposit these thinkers' views about relations between television's education and the education of schools, families and communities. The broader social significance involves an examination of the extent to which television's education impoverishes public discourse, the lifeblood of democracy; and the extent to which television's (...) education weakens parents' efforts to educate their children. Cremin and Postman lead the way in respectively providing a framework of analysis and identifying the problems but Cremin fails to recognize the severity of the problems and Postman does not adequately address them. Lasch's work is most promising, his formu lations fit neatly within Cremin's framework but address the problems in a way that improves upon Postman. (shrink)

Kat Williams and Scott R. Stroud’s essay is about televised debates, but it is also about the value of television in a democracy. In Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman argues that television is devoid of serious content, that it is superficial. But while the debates contain superficialities, they also reveal substantive issues about the candidates, the electorate, and the state of our democracy.

Shifts in technology and ideology blur distinctions between people and machines, nations, and multinationals. Neoliberal economic policies in Mexico clashed with the national identity traditionally fostered by the official educational system. Calling for dialogue not imposed truths, historians rejected at tempts to align textbooks with the new agenda during a 3-year controversy. [Curriculum is] a specially constructed information system whose purpose, in its totality, is to influence, teach, train, or cultivate the mind and character of youth. —Neil Postman (...) (cited in Brosio, 1994, p. 243). (shrink)

In this paper we sketch a new version of aesthetic expressivism. We argue that one advantage of this view is that it explains various putative norms on the formation and revision of aesthetic judgement. We begin by setting out our proposed explananda and a sense in which they can be understood as governing the correct response to putative higher-order evidence in aesthetics. We then summarise some existing discussions of expressivist attempts to explain these norms, and objections raised to them. This (...) will allow us to identify the pitfalls that a good expressivist explanation needs to avoid. Finally, we sketch our preferred version of aesthetic expressivism which includes as a crucial part a hypothesis concerning the distinctive expressive function of aesthetic practice. We then consider how this theory can explain the putative aesthetic norms whilst avoiding the previous objections. (shrink)

This unique book provides an introductory overview of modern theoretical linguistics which manages to be both accessible and humorous without sacrificing either scholarship of insight. In a series of magisterial vignettes Smith emphasizes the perennial necessity of appealing to linguistic theory if we are to gain any real understanding of the phenomena of language. However profound or however trivial the questions we raise and try answer - What exactly does one have to know to count as a speaker of a (...) language? What would it mean for a language to have no vowels? Why do little children call lorries 'lollies'? Precisely what with this sentence is wrong? - we need to recourse to a theory even to make them coherent. In particular, the author argues that we can find solutions to our puzzles, and explanations for these phenomena, if we exploit on the one hand Chomsky's theory of Generative Grammar, and on the other Sperber and Wilson's theory of Relevance. (shrink)

This study continues the anti-realist’s quest for a principled way to avoid Fitch’s paradox. It is proposed that the Cartesian restriction on the anti-realist’s knowability principle ‘ϕ, therefore 3Kϕ’ should be formulated as a consistency requirement not on the premise ϕ of an application of the rule, but rather on the set of assumptions on which the relevant occurrence of ϕ depends. It is stressed, by reference to illustrative proofs, how important it is to have proofs in normal form before (...) applying the proposed restriction. A similar restriction is proposed for the converse inference, the so-called Rule of Factiveness ‘3Kϕ therefore ϕ’. The proposed restriction appears to block another Fitch-style derivation that uses the KK -thesis in order to get around.. (shrink)

The naive anti-realist holds the following principle: (◊K) All truths are knowable. This unrestricted generalization (◊K), as is now well known, falls prey to Fitch’s Paradox (Fitch 1963: 38, Theorem 1). It can be used as the only suspect principle, alongside others that cannot be impugned, to prove quite generally, and constructively, that the set {p, ¬Kp} is inconsistent (Tennant 1997: 261). From this it would follow, intuitionistically, that any proposition that is never actually known to be true (by anyone, (...) at any time) is false; and it would follow, classically, that every truth is known (by someone, at some time). (shrink)

The present paper examined relationships between schizotypy (measured by the Oxford-Liverpool Inventory of Feelings and Experience; O-LIFE scale brief), belief in the paranormal (assessed via the Revised Paranormal Belief Scale; RPBS) and proneness to statistical bias (i.e., perception of randomness and susceptibility to conjunction fallacy). Participants were 254 volunteers recruited via convenience sampling. Probabilistic reasoning problems appeared framed within both standard and paranormal contexts. Analysis revealed positive correlations between the Unusual Experience (UnExp) subscale of O-LIFE and paranormal belief measures [RPBS (...) full scale, traditional paranormal beliefs (TPB) and new age philosophy]. Performance on standard problems correlated negatively with UnExp and belief in the paranormal (particularly the TPB dimension of the RPBS). Consideration of specific problem types revealed that perception of randomness associated more strongly with belief in the paranormal than conjunction; both problem types related similarly to UnExp. Structural equation modeling specified that belief in the paranormal mediated the indirect relationship between UnExp and statistical bias. For problems presented in a paranormal context a framing effect occurred. Whilst UnExp correlated positively with conjunction proneness (controlling for perception of randomness), there was no association between UnExp and perception of randomness (controlling for conjunction). (shrink)

This is a reply to the considerations advanced by Schroeder-Heister and Tranchini as prima facie problematic for the proof-theoretic criterion of paradoxicality, as originally presented in Tennant and subsequently amended in Tennant. Countering these considerations lends new importance to the parallelized forms of elimination rules in natural deduction.

Inferentialism is explained as an attempt to provide an account of meaning that is more sensitive (than the tradition of truth-conditional theorizing deriving from Tarski and Davidson) to what is learned when one masters meanings.

In a recent paper “Safety, Sensitivity, and Differential Support” (Synthese, December 2017), Jose Zalabardo argues that (contra Sosa in Philos Perspect 33(13):141–153,1999) sensitivity can be differentially supported as the correct requirement for propositional knowledge. Zalabardo argues that safety fails to dominate sensitivity; specifically: some cases of knowledge failure can only be explained by sensitivity. In this paper, I resist Zalabardo’s conclusion that domination failure confers differential support for sensitivity. Specifically, I argue that counterexamples to sensitivity undermine differential support for sensitivity. (...) Using Zalabardo’s modal framework, I consider a less demanding modal condition, what I call weak sensitivity, and I explain how weak sensitivity avoids an influential counterexample to sensitivity. However, I argue that we can subvert that counterexample only by abandoning Zalabardo’s case for domination failure. So either way, we cannot differentially support sensitivity. (shrink)

This paper addresses an objection raised by Timothy Williamson to the ‘restriction strategy’ that I proposed, in The Taming of The True, in order to deal with the Fitch paradox. Williamson provides a new version of a Fitch-style argument that purports to show that even the restricted principle of knowability suffers the same fate as the unrestricted one. I show here that the new argument is fallacious. The source of the fallacy is a misunderstanding of the condition used in stating (...) the restricted knowability principle. I also rebut Williamson’s criticism of my argument for the claim that any proposition of the form ‘it is known that ϕ’ is decidable if ϕ is decidable. (shrink)

I am not a deflationist. I believe that truth and falsity are substantial. The truth of a proposition consists in its having a constructive proof, or truthmaker. The falsity of a proposition consists in its having a constructive disproof, or falsitymaker. Such proofs and disproofs will need to be given modulo acceptable premisses. The choice of these premisses will depend on the discourse in question.

We present a logically detailed case-study of Darwinian evolutionary explanation. Special features of Darwin’s explanatory schema made it an unusual theoretical breakthrough, from the point of view of the philosophy of science. The schema employs no theoretical terms, and puts forward no theoretical hypotheses. Instead, it uses three observational generalizations—Variability, Heritability and Differential Reproduction—along with an innocuous assumption of Causal Efficacy, to derive Adaptive Evolution as a necessary consequence. Adaptive Evolution in turn, with one assumption of scale (‘Deep Time’), implies (...) the observational generalization of Adaptation. It is a fascinating methodological task to regiment the premises and make the reasoning both rigorous and clear. Doing so reveals how surprisingly small an amount of mathematics is needed in order to carry out the argument. The investigation also reveals the crucial role played by heritability, and how heritability itself admits of Darwinian explanation. (shrink)