On Reading “Amusing Ourselves to Death,” Chapter 2

Jack Lule
Jack Lule
Sep 6, 2018 · 4 min read

Media as Epistemology is not the most inviting chapter name. But that is what we confront in Chapter 2.

Postman tries to make epistemology into a friendly device. He acknowledges, “Epistemology is a complex and usually opaque subject concerned with the origins and nature of knowledge” (17). He says the relevance of this still opaque subject is that it takes on “definitions of truth and the sources from which such definitions come” (17).

Readers of 2018 will suddenly be alerted in ways perhaps different from readers of the past. In 2018, the very definition of truth is subject to debate. Presidential advisers talk of “alternative facts”. Another says “Truth is not truth.” The President himself says, ““What you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening.” No matter where a reader falls on the political spectrum, the reader of 2018 must admit that the definition of truth — 25+ years after Postman wrote — is a worthy question.

“In particular,” Postman writes, “I want to show that definitions of truth are derived, at least in part, from the character of the media of communication through which information is conveyed” (17).

Readers in 2018 are invited to contemplate whether the current debate over truth can find its origins in the current media of communication. And so we read on.

Postman then needs to navigate other tricky rhetorical ground. He says that the medium of print produced discourse in America that was “generally coherent, serious and rational.” The medium of television produces discourse “shriveled and absurd” (16).

But, Postman hastens to add, he is not filing an elitist claim against the “junk” on television. He wants us to see that shriveled and absurd discourse is the natural product of a medium like television.

To clarify and support, Postman looks to the great critical Northrop Frye and his notion that some words, phrases, characters and other things can achieve “resonance” — a deeper universal significance (17). Hamlet, for example, is more than just a Shakespeare character. He has come to stand for “brooding indecisiveness” (18). Frye concludes that the source of resonance is — metaphor (one of my favorite topics). Hamlet is a metaphor for brooding indecisiveness.

And Postman then takes a wondrous step, though I wish he would have phrased it more powerfully. He says, “Every medium of communication, I am claiming, has resonance, for resonance is metaphor writ large” (18).

It does so, Postman says, “because of the way it directs us to organize our minds and integrate our experience of the world,” and he adds, “the bias of a medium sits heavy, felt but unseen, over a culture.” And: “it is always implicated in the ways we define and regulate our ideas of truth” (18).

Though Postman does not say so, the idea that a medium has a “bias” toward certain ways of communicating is taken from McLuhan and his mentor Harold Innis.

I think Postman, with the addition of metaphor, takes the concept of bias an important step further into language itself. He needs to move us from the bias of a medium into public discourse.

I am not completely sure that Postman would agree but I will try to say put this all in different words: Every medium of communication has a bias toward certain metaphors that organize and define public discourse.

Postman then goes on to show how “truth” offered in speech, such as in trials or dissertation defenses, has become less valued than truth offered in print. And that truth is coming to mean something different in the television age.

He says, “the concept of truth is intimately linked to the biases of forms of expression. Truth does not, and never has, come unadorned” (22).

Postman says he is “not making a case for epistemological relativism. Some ways of truth-telling are better than others, and therefore have a healthier influence on the cultures that adopt them” (24).

He says, “I want to show that in the twentieth century, our notions of truth and our ideas of intelligence have changed as a result of new media displacing the old” (26).

The reader of 2018 again must pause. Arguments over “truth” are now a central part of our public discourse. Has the television age thwarted Postman’s insight and indeed made the concept of truth relative, subjective, a matter of opinion? Or has truth been upended by a rising digital age, a new form of communication?

Postman concludes the chapter with three points: 1) He does not believe that a change in communication media actually, physically, alters people’s minds (some, like McLuhan suggested this). 2) He does not believe that everyone and everything is affected by the change in communication. Some people in the television age will ignore television and not be affected by it. 3) He does not believe that the then-current television-epistemology pollutes everything. It primarily pollutes public discourse. In other parts of life — hospitals and late night living rooms — television can play an enjoyable role.

But as television becomes the main medium of public discourse, “the value of public discourse dangerously declines” (29).

I end the chapter thinking of the snide, snarky, shouting, arguing, conflict-based content that makes up so much of 2018 network news. Our public discourse.

Lehigh University. Professor & Chair, Department of Journalism & Communication; Founding Director, Global Studies. Interests in journalism and society.

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