The Peek-a-Boo World

Professor Neil Postman in his 1985 landmark book Amusing Ourselves to Death offers a brilliant portrait of how television consistently offers us a false view of reality. Here is an excerpt from the start of Chapter 5, "The Peek-a-Boo World":

"Television has become, so to speak, the background radiation of the social and intellectual universe, the all-but-imperceptible residue of the electronic big bang of a century past, so familiar and so thoroughly integrated with American culture that we no longer hear its faint hissing in the background or see the flickering grey light. This, in turn, means that its epistemology goes largely unnoticed. And the peek-a-boo world it has constructed around us no longer seems even strange."

"There is no more disturbing consequence of the electronic and graphic revolution than this: that the world as given to us through television seems natural, not bizarre. For the loss of the sense of the strange is a sign of adjustment, and the extent to which we have adjusted is a measure of the extent to which we have changed. Our culture's adjustment to the epistemology of television is by now almost complete; we have so thoroughly accepted its definitions of truth, knowledge and reality that irrelevance seems to us to be filled with import, and incoherence seems eminently sane."

"It is my object in the rest of this book to make the epistemology of television visible again. I will try to demonstrate by concrete example... that television's conversations promote incoherence and triviality... and that television speaks in only one persistent voice — the voice of entertainment. Beyond that, I will try to demonstrate that to enter the great television conversation, one American cultural institution after another is learning to speak its terms."

"Television, in other words, is transforming our culture into one vast arena for show business. It is entirely possible, of course, that in the end we shall find that delightful, and decide we like it just fine. This is exactly what Aldous Huxley feared was coming, fifty years ago."

Self-Induced Lost Opportunities

"For all the hand-wringing about Generation M, technology is not really the problem... It's not so much that the video is going to rot your brain, it's what you are not doing that's going to rot your life."

– David Levy, Ph.D., University of Washington Information School

Who Needs More Paper?

In the summer of 1963, when my brother and I were just becoming baseball fans, my father took us to see a Mets-Dodgers game at Shea Stadium in Flushing Meadows, New York.

We arrived at the field early, which was a treat for us, and we got to see the players warm-up. Our box seat was rather back from the field, but with hardly anyone in the stands, we ran down to front the railing where John Roseboro, the Dodger's starting catcher, was standing. He spoke to us for a minute or so, and then my brother asked, "Can I touch your glove?" Roseboro said sure.

I can't remember whether or not we asked him for an autograph, but touching his glove, the one with which he caught the fastballs and curveballs of Sandy Koufax and Don Drysdale was a big enough reward. The strength of that memory surpasses any autograph we might have obtained.