While searching for schools, I had discovered of the department Postman founded at NYU, and after watching this amazing interview of him, I decided to read more of his work. The first book I picked up was Amusing Ourselves to Death, and it forever changed the way I thought about media and information in our contemporary society. (My later reading of Technopoly had a similar effect on how I think about technology)

AOtD’s foreword, written in 1985, resonates quite loudly in today’s information landscape:

We were keeping our eye on 1984. When the year came and the prophecy didn’t, thoughtful Americans sang softly in praise of themselves. The roots of liberal democracy had held. Wherever else the terror had happened, we, at least, had not been visited by Orwellian nightmares.

But we had forgotten that alongside Orwell’s dark vision, there was another – slightly older, slightly less well known, equally chilling: Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley’s vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.

What 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. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions”. In 1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.

This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right.

I had the distinct privilege of learning from Dr. Postman for a short time before his death in 2003, but his legacy lives on at the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication, the Media Ecology Association, and now this wonderful comic version of AOtD’s foreword, created by Stuart McMillen:

[via Question Technology]

::UPDATE:: You can watch an amazing lecture by Dr. Postman on “Technology & Society” here (broken into 7 parts). And yes, the irony that the Internet is keeping Neil’s legacy alive isn’t lost on me….

[S]everal veterans of the White House have noted in conversations over the past two years that the secure video does not lend itself to open, vigorous debate. Instead, it can squelch it. The picture is being piped into too many places; field commanders don’t want to speak their mind to the president if their immediate superiors at the Pentagon or Central Command are tuned in, too. There may be recordings for posterity, or presidential libraries.

One recently departed National Security Council official noted earlier this year that in his view, the problem is that the system is largely in the hands of war-fighters; only on a rare day, and only toward the end of his presidency, did members of Provincial Reconstruction Teams and other aid workers involved in nation-building pop up on Mr. Bush’s screen.

“The technology tends to skew the nature of the advice you hear,” this former N.S.C. member said, declining to speak on the record because the sessions he witnessed were classified. “You spend a lot more time talking about hitting a house of full of bad guys in Waziristan than you do talking about why our effort to build schools and roads is moving so slowly.”

Today, however, I came across one of my favorite essays by the late Neil Postman, cultural critic and founder of my PhD-granting department at NYU, and felt compelled to interrupt my break from blogging to share it.

The essay, “Five Things We Need to Know About Technological Change,” was delivered by Postman in 1998 to a gathering of theologians and religious leaders in Denver, Colorado.  Postman remarked on the things we should all endeavor to understand about how society is impacted by technological innovation. In it, he said that “technological change is not additive, it’s ecological”, and that in order for us to comprehend, manage, and even embrace the rapid changes brought on by the technological advancement happening all around us, we need to understand that technology doesn’t just add to society — it transforms it.

His concluding remarks continue to be apt 10 years later he first uttered them:

And so, these are my five ideas about technological change. First, that we always pay a price for technology; the greater the technology, the greater the price. Second, that there are always winners and losers, and that the winners always try to persuade the losers that they are really winners. Third, that there is embedded in every great technology an epistemological, political or social prejudice. Sometimes that bias is greatly to our advantage. Sometimes it is not. The printing press annihilated the oral tradition; telegraphy annihilated space; television has humiliated the word; the computer, perhaps, will degrade community life. And so on. Fourth, technological change is not additive; it is ecological, which means, it changes everything and is, therefore, too important to be left entirely in the hands of Bill Gates. And fifth, technology tends to become mythic; that is, perceived as part of the natural order of things, and therefore tends to control more of our lives than is good for us.

If we had more time, I could supply some additional important things about technological change but I will stand by these for the moment, and will close with this thought. In the past, we experienced technological change in the manner of sleep-walkers. Our unspoken slogan has been “technology über alles,” and we have been willing to shape our lives to fit the requirements of technology, not the requirements of culture. This is a form of stupidity, especially in an age of vast technological change. We need to proceed with our eyes wide open so that we many use technology rather than be used by it.

I recommend it for anyone who has always wondered “what is Media Ecology?”

I will presenting my paper “Media Ecology & Values in Design: A Combined Approach to Understanding the Biases of Media Technology” at the 6th Annual Convention of the Media Ecology Association at Fordham University today. The abstract:

In recent years, a field known as Values in Design has emerged to identify, understand, anticipate and address the ethical and value biases of media and information technologies. Upon developing a dialectical model of how bias exists in technology, this paper makes a case for the dual relevance of Value Sensitive Design to Media Ecology. I argue that bringing the two approaches together would be mutually beneficial, resulting in richer investigations into the biases in media technology.

The paper can be downloaded here, and my slide presentation here.

Source: Educational Technology, January 15, 1976. Vol. VII, Number 1. Back Cover

(Thanks to Richard Graham)