Neil Postman Future Shock Summary

In 1988, Neil Postman wrote an article, ‘Future Shock,’ that criticized television as the primary cause of the issues with the fall of the human intelligence. In the article, Postman describes how intelligence fell due to various nemeses such as moral fevor, ignorance, cruelty, superstition, neglect, and cowardice. Postman elaborated how Germany went from being the most educated and literate country in the 1920s to a pool of irrational scholars in 1936 after the eradication of art criticism. Art criticism was the primary reason for the high level of intelligence in countries like Germany. He noted that America was established by a group of intellectuals and bodies that went on to ground the various intelligence organizations. Nonetheless, the

American culture has not been an exemption to the degradation of intelligence. He postulates that the introduction of television has by far adversely affected the level of intelligence in the community. Nevertheless, on top of the television, the world is currently dealing with effects that come with the internet and social media. Technological advancements have significantly affected both educational and industrial operations by creating a virtual borderless world with a vast array of information. Social media has become the source of entertainment for many people today. Many presume that it has Last Name 2 increasingly led to the decrease in the level of intelligence in the American society and the world at large. The paper compares the Postman’s article to today’s social media and internet. Discussion According to Postman, America is among the few regions around the globe that intellectual people, full of broad learning, extraordinary influence, and sincere belief, established. Even though there were periods of anti-intellectualism, some individuals were generous to back the intelligence and mastery of the people in the United States. Postman states that it's actually America that began the research in mass literacy which even today many envies. The churches established the system’s foundation of tertiary education that included the Land-Grant Act in the 1860s which created a platform for the formation of state institutions (Postman). Many scholars ran to the nation when the independence of the intellect was impossible in the regions. Steele Commager, an influential historian, named it as the ‘empire of reason.’ However, Postman suggests that Commager would not use the same title for the country today. The rapid decrease in the overall level of intelligence, in the utilization of dialects, the lack of rational and reasonable thinking, and the low capability to concentrate on intricacy. The terrifying displacement of severe, intellectual public dissertation in the region’s culture through the imagery and unimportance of the show business.

However, the decrease in the level of intelligence in America would not entail feeing of scholars, public proclamations, complacency, or any form of barbarisms. There are other various ways of suppressing information, and in this case, is through the American culture. Postman elaborates his point on the degrading American intelligence to two films. He first describes the first movie that involved the South African natives living in the Kalahari desert that was mesmerized by a coca-cola bottle that fell from a plane. The people consequently Last Name 3 believe that the bottle was a gift from their gods. They start to idolize the bottle, and soon members of the community abandon their culture in the fight for the bottle as jealousy and division creep in their society. Postman compares the container to the introduction of new technologies in the world’s culture. The leader of community discards the bottle stating that it does not even produce alluring music. The second movies were about a crook producer who made an unintelligent musical film on Hitler that he believed would fail and he would escape with the millions of

investors. However, the people love the movie, and he ends up in jail (Postman). Nonetheless, Brooks asserted that the success of the film was sort of a prophecy to the adverse change of America’s history, commerce, religion, education, and politics, into kinds of entertainment. The movie predicts that America would turn into a region of small individuals who cannot cope with ambiguity, intricacy, and the improbability of reality. Postman postulates that just like the bottle of coke that fell the emergence of new technologies whose kind change all somber public enterprises to be a joke like a producer’s movie. He suggests that television has become the primal device of such a disaster. It has become the primary focus of the American culture (Postman). Most individuals utilize it as their source of entertainment such as news, politics, weather, and even history. Postman dictates that it is one thing to suggest the television offers us the interesting subject issue and another to state that on the TV all problems are provided as fun. One such example is the presentation of political campaigns. The political candidates relinquish intricacy, content, and language for show business arts such as theatrics, music, celebrities, and imagery. Some candidates go as far as being part of a television commercial, from beverages to soaps, during their campaigns (Postman). Such campaigns explain the reason why America had a Hollywood actor as a President a few years ago. Nonetheless, politics has not been the only sector, as Postman puts it, religion has also seen Last Name 4 the rise of television preachers who are just performers that exploit and manipulate their power and charisma to glorify themselves. Moreover, educational films incorporate cartoons, music, and celebrities to create amusement. The daily news is not an exception as stations now include well-dressed broadcasters, dynamic movies, and music in their footage.

The commercials appear in the press and reduce the matters to entertainment and trivialities. Given that television is the primary channel for public communication, it programs people’s minds through their images and determines the direction the people take. Postman claims that these claims are not a form of criticism of the visual arts, but types of communication become positive or adverse contingent on the link they have to symbols and functions in the social order. Television, the internet, and social media pay a similar role in the society. Since the emergence of technology a few decades ago, the various forms of communication has developed. The internet, being one of them, is primarily an international computer linkage that began over four decades ago. It is a global open linkage of networks depending on the protocol. The latest emergence of the contemporary internet is social media which consists of applications grounded on technological and ideological establishments of Web 2.0 and which facilitate the formation and exchange of use produced content (Haier, Flynn & Sternberg). It is a new kind of interaction

channel. Individuals in the media have virtual identities, and the links amid such personalities make up the structure of social media. Today, there are over a billion users of the social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. They offer people a way to produce information and exchange ideas. Additionally, they have created virtual communities which, according to Rheingold, is a social accumulation which emanates from the interlinked network when individuals conduct public deliberations with adequate human emotions to create links of individualistic links in the cyber area. According to Kaplan, there are several categories of social Last Name 5 media; these include social networks, blogs, gaming worlds, collaborative communities, online content communities, and social worlds. Before its emergence, people used Usenet, email lists, and bulletin boards.