The Medium Is The Metaphor Analysis

In ‘The Medium Is the Metaphor,’ chapter 1 of Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman argues that thoughts and ideas are limited by the media of their. In support of his argument, he makes the following three points: primitive peoples where unable to advance philosophically due to their lack of complex language; that important and serious events would not even be contemplated without media attention; and that even older civilizations sought to limit media to control the loyalty of the masses.
Postman first argues that primitive people are unable to debate philosophy due to the limits of their communication systems. He cites how Native American smokes signals “are insufficiently complex to express ideas on the nature of existence”; it’s

simply not possible to explain the complexities of existence and purpose in simple puffs of smoke (Postman 7). Additionally supply limitations would eliminate the possibility of any long term discussions.
Secondly, postman posits that the mental value and thought that we put on events is limited by the media that these events are conveyed through. If people do not have knowledge of an event then logically they cannot think about it, but since the advent of the telegraph and modern media it is now “possible to move decontextualized information over vast spaces at incredible speed” (Postman 8). As such events that we would previously have literally never thought of are now easily accessible and readily thought over as a result.
Finally, Postman cites how ancient civilizations would discourage written media in order to control the thoughts of the masses. He notes that the second commandment specifically instructed the Israelites not to “make unto thee any graven image, any likeness of any thing”, effectively ending all nonverbal communications with foreign cultures (Postman 9). People would be unable to read any competing religious scriptures and couldn’t even think about betraying their religion.