Fergus Cassidy

Neil Postman (obituary)

JUST two days. That's all that separated Neil Postman from seeing his own words made flesh in the form of Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.

As Arnie cut a swathe through his opponents, fulfiling the latest installment in this rags to riches American dream, Postman was lying in a hospital bed dying of cancer. He never got to see one of his nightmares come through.

Almost 20 years earlier, Postman saw it coming: "More and more candidates will be required to defend or exploit the characters they have played in movies or on television, rather than their political ideas".

Neil Postman, professor, teacher and writer, died on 5 October, just as the Arnie election bandwagon was reaching its climax via television. A frenzy which Postman had spoken and written about often "as the most significant American cultural fact of the second half of the twentieth century: the decline of the Age of Typography and ascendancy of the Age of Television".

He would have expected his own death to be completely overshadowed by a creature carved from television. Indeed he might have wanted it that way. He abhorred television news as entertainment, with its theme music and "talking hairdos".

How he would have appreciated and laughed heartily watching The Terminator being sworn in. The irony of it. "We may have reached the point", he once wrote "where cosmetics has replaced ideology as the field of expertise over which a politician must have complete control".

The election would have reaffirmed Postman's belief that in today's image-based society, there's no way that a 300lb man could become the president of the United States. William Taft did but it was in 1909 the age of print.

Neil Postman was a print man, first and foremost. He was a big big fan of words, printed and spoken. Discourse not images as he was fond of saying.

He was born in Manhattan, New York on 8 March 1931. Following his masters degree he taught at the New York University for 44 years and was chair of the department of culture and communications until last year.

In 1970 he founded the university's media ecology program, alongside his mentor Marshall McLuhan, who proclaimed that 'the medium is the message'. Postman adapted this to 'the medium is the metaphor'.

Teaching was an enormous challenge to him, something that required constant reappraisal and reform. He lectured all over the world and in 1988 received the Distinguished Teaching Award, NYU's highest honour.

He also wrote a lot. He penned articles for the New York Times, the Washington Post, the LA Times, Le Monde and was contributing editor to The Nation for ten years. He wrote over 20 books, the most widely read being his 1985 critique of television 'Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Showbusiness' (Viking 1985), which sold over 200,000 copies and was translated into eight languages.

Sport was also another of his passions. A besotted follower of the Brooklyn Dodgers baseball team, he played basketball while an undergraduate and followed it and football very keenly. This love of sport, plus his interest in World War II movies, belied the criticisms of him as some lofty and stuffy professor intent on preventing the masses from enjoying television.

He had a good sense of humour, which some have described as quintessential Nu Yawk. Having three children himself (and four grandchildren) made him speak out forcefully for childhood at every opportunity. In 'The Disappearance of Childhood' (Vintage 1994) he wrote: "The lives of our children are shaped by what they see and hear in the media. Children are the living messages we send to a time we will not see".

Expanding further, he explained that "if all the secrets of adulthood, including sex, illness and death, are opened to children, cynicism, apathy or arrogance replace curiosity for them, short circuiting education and moral development".

His legacy, though, will not just be his critique of media, but also as a great agent provocateur when it comes to technology in general. In the early 1990s computers were starting to generate heat and Postman was drawn to the flame.

He wasn't against computers, he just had a lot of questions he wanted to raise. Such as "to whom will the computer give greater power and freedom, and whose power and freedom will be reduced?".

He was drawn to paradox: "The clock was invented by men [Benedictine monks] who wanted to devote themselves more rigorously to God; and it ended as the technology of greatest use to men who wished to devote themselves to the accumulation of money. Technology always has unforeseen consequences, and it is not always clear, at the beginning, who or what will win, and who or what will lose".

Postman was neither a pessimist or a Luddite but he did have a unique approach to technology. In his last book, 'Building a Bridge to the 18th Century' (Knopf 1999), he was adamant that the problems we face are no more "stunning, disorienting or complex than those we faced in the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries". It wasn't the problems that mattered so much as how we approach them.

In the conclusion of his biggest selling book, Postman said: "For in the end what afflicted the people in [Huxley's] 'Brave New World' was not that they were laughing instead of thinking, but that they did now know what they were laughing about and why they had stopped thinking".

Something he never did.

Hasta la vista, Neil.

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Links

'An Echoing Silence in His Wake': a tribute to Postman by Peter Kavanagh in The Globe and Mail on 11 October.

'Informing Ourselves to Death': a speech by Postman at a meeting of the German Informatics Society in October 1990 in Stuttgart.

'Five Things We Need to Know about Technological Change': conference speech by Postman given in Denver, Colorado in March 1998.