Ep. 268: Neil Postman’s “Amusing Ourselves to Death” (Part One)

0:00 Mark: Foreign. You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a podcast. Some guys were at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 268 is something like, how does the form in which we receive media affect the way we think? And we read Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death, Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, 1985. For more information, please visit partiallyexaminedlife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer in Madison, Wisconsin, of whom all images are graven.

0:33 Seth: This is Seth Paskin shifting from my ear to my eye as my organ of language in Austin, Texas.

0:40 Wes: This is Wes Alwan, still trying to get over my addiction to the telegraph in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

0:47 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey binge watching Kung Fu in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:52 Brian: And this is Brian Hurt, like Alice, searching for order in a world of semantic nonsense, or trying to in Lincoln, Nebraska.

1:00 Mark: All right, so this is a topic that is long, long been on our radar. Marshall McLuhan was someone that Wes had suggested we do very early on, and Postman is including and updating, well, to 1985. Marshall McLuhan. It is a popular book, but it seems like a good one to get us to have a good discussion about this topic.

1:23 Dylan: We also have done the two books that he contrasts at the beginning of Dystopian Futures tied to media, 1984 and brave new World.

1:33 Seth: Yes, and there might be some precedent in the history of philosophy about the difference between speaking and writing and how that all works.

1:45 Dylan: Pray tell, what could you be thinking of?

1:48 Mark: There's a lot of name dropping. Plato and the Phaedrus and Tocqueville and Sontag, Barthes Dewey doesn't really go into a lot of detail on these people, but it is suggestive. We were thinking of doing this as a pretty much pop topic, thus Brian's presence. Brian, do you want to kind of start us off what you thought of this book?

2:07 Brian: Yeah, I was really ashamed of myself that I was reading. Okay, this is a podcast and the air quotes won't work at all. But I was reading this book about the. I don't want to say the death of print, but the change of how we perceive information, how we think, even based on the fact that we're watching TV instead of the noble art of reading. And of course, I listened to the audiobook and actually listened to it on a pretty fast speed. And I'm not saying I was totally paying attention all the time. In fact, at one point I let it put me to sleep, but I was. I Did the honorable thing and I picked it back up in the morning where I think I nodded off. Okay. This is where I reveal my priors and how many episodes of Partially Examined life I've listened to.

2:47 Mark: If you must.

2:48 Brian: It's a prime number, so you know it's more than one. And I've listened to a number of them. It really just has to do with what is going to tickle my fancy. And most often it has to do with things that aren't necessarily just about what strikes me as a philosophical tome. And this wasn't. This seems very much to be popular writing that touches on a lot of philosophical things. But it's closer to being academic writing, perhaps with a pop flare, than it is a true work of scholarship. You guys have read it all. Am I right or wrong about that?

3:19 Dylan: Yeah, it's a popular book.

3:20 Seth: It's definitely too entertaining to be academic.

3:22 Brian: All right.

3:25 Dylan: It's also clearly, it's a cultural criticism.

3:28 Wes: That's what it is.

3:29 Brian: But it is full of shit enough to be academic.

3:31 Mark: But I was thinking that this fell under the pel rubric because we did Allan Bloom before. So it's a similar kind of critique of how everything's going. The students today, their attention doesn't stand. They don't know how to engage things which. That one, Wes, you recommended, but you said you found this a very paltry meal. Can you elaborate?

3:51 Wes: Is that what I said?

3:52 Mark: I don't believe those were your words.

3:53 Wes: Those are my exact words.

3:54 Brian: He told me it was a thin gruel. I don't know.

3:57 Seth: Wes doesn't mince words like that.

4:01 Dylan: It's part of his intermittent fasting routine.

4:04 Wes: I don't know what it is. There was a time probably when I would have been. I would have found this book very entertaining. Is that good or bad? I don't know. It seems very, very boring. It's well trodden ground. There's a lot of vague claims for which the evidence, it's. There's not really definitive evidence from a philosophical perspective.

4:26 Seth: If, or at least from a pel perspective, in reading this book, what's at stake is nothing less than what is the appropriate way to engage with others about ideas of this magnitude. And we've discussed on this podcast many times the format of audio files and long form conversations versus systematic written works, Platonic dialogues versus treatises versus aphoristic approaches. And the point he's making, not necessarily about philosophy, but about political discourse is the form in which you choose to engage and do political discourse determines the type of political Discourse you can have.

And he's making a point about epistemology, but I think it's an interesting question for philosophy. What is the form of discourse? What is the form of engagement with other people? Written words, spoken word, conversation, monologue, soliloquy, metaphor? What can you convey in these forms? What can't you convey? And what are the opportunities for expression and the limitations of expression in different forms? And I think that's ultimately what comes out of the book for me.

5:44 Mark: Yes. And the statement of that thesis pretty much right up front is what I found most interesting. And then structurally, the book, he goes through some history that. From the transition from an oral culture to a written culture and what we got out of that, what a written culture is like. And that's where he would bring in folks like Tocqueville and just the quality of intellectual discourse that went on with the advent of the printing press, and then contrast that with the age of show business that came with the advent of television. So, as you would expect, this gets rid of context.

This gets rid of the actual sequence of one idea presented after another. You know, in a book that you have a large amount of text to get through, whereas on TV the assumption is that you can tune in at any moment and you should be able to understand what's going on. And that really impoverishes the level of discourse. So he kind of goes through how that was a result of the introduction of the telegraph, and there's a lot of other details like that. So I found his description of the TV age, the age of show business, though entertaining, less illuminating than just this idea in the first part of the book that, yes, the medium is the message or the medium is the metaphor, is his.

His new version of that, which is a way of making it more vague. I don't know, does that seem a good place to start to say what we understood from this book about McLuhan, that thing and how he changes it.

7:10 Brian: As he described all this, I kept seeing it in my mind as the discourse version of the Sapir Whorf hypothesis of language. This idea that the language you speak in has the material impact on the way you actually think and the way you interact with the world. And I think that there's something to it. I don't think there's anything definitely wrong about his observations of, for example, the speed at which information can be delivered, or in fact, that information can't actually be delivered at any speed at all faster than actually one person to the next.

The telegraph being the thing that made that Possible changing what we even view to be information. That's all fine and good. What really lost me on this, or where I just don't fundamentally agree, is this idea that just because in modern times we have television and information has become this new kind of thing that really just looks like entertainment. Books didn't disappear, did they? I mean, this kind of discourse is still possible. I just feel like we've read Mark Twain and they were entertaining themselves in other ways besides listening to Lincoln and Douglas debate each other in the 1800s, right.

They were the king's royal camelopard, and they were looking through holes in the fence at things going on. So that's what they did then for their kicks, and then they reverted to reading and for this lofty rational argument moment that was happening back then, according to our author. And I think that kind of rational argument, your podcast, is a testament to that. It still can be done today, but when we want to have our kicks, we turn on the TV. Or. Well, of course, in 1985, we did. No, I don't have a TV or not one that actually shows me television more than anything else.

I feel like this whole thing is laden with value judgments of what's good and what's bad that's kind of underlying the surface this whole way through. Be honest and state it instead of just implying it all the time with these smug descriptions of what a gross world our. He makes 1985 really seem like the movie the Running Man. Like, I'd buy that for a dollar. It's like, well, I don't think it was quite that crazy, but maybe 2021 is. I don't know.

9:15 Dylan: I'd like us to get some more of, like, what this epistemology media's epistemology question is. Or maybe it's nothing more complicated than seeing how far you want to take the medium is the message versus what Brian was just saying, something softer, which is the medium affects the message. You don't get a message without a medium, and there are limits on there. But he wants to go as far as saying the medium is the message, which to me is saying as much as that the form of what you are doing is the content of what you're doing. It holds all the epistemological content, which, when I say it that way, I think it probably makes it clear that I think it's going too far.

And I don't know that he. Except for pointing to McLuhan, I don't know that he makes much of an argument for it except to point out examples about how things have changed as a result of media changing. But that seems to do nothing more than say that the message is affected

10:15 Brian: by the medium or maybe is enabled by the medium.

10:18 Dylan: All of those can be true, right? To me, it's utterly uncontroversial that there are things enabled and disenabled by the medium in which you interact with your thoughts, the kind of language you use. That's true in written words, that's true in mathematics. There's a very interesting account to be made of why writing numbers in Arabic numerals makes a difference compared to other ways of writing them, and why certain symbologies make a big difference in the way in which you think and write mathematically. And I am certain the same thing is true.

In fact, there are lots of arguments about the very language that you're using, whether it enables weaker and stronger thinking right by the structure of its language. And there are plenty of philosophers that will argue that. But that's different to me than it being the same thing as the message, right? Because then at that point, it seems to me that you're making a claim that everything there is to say about it is in the form of what you're saying.

11:18 Mark: Well, yeah, I think it's an intentional hyperbole to start. In addition to the overt content, the message of a communication, there's something about the style in which it is conveyed that is much more important and orienting than the contents of any particular communication. So Postman's example with TV is that whatever the individual show might say, and of course they can say any number of things, and they can be purposefully lighter or attempt to be heavier, but according to Postman, the overall message is that TV is wonderful. It's telling you to love TV, he says.

11:58 Dylan: On page 18, he says the way of characterizing this is. Every medium of communication I'm claiming, has resonance. For resonance is metaphor writ large. Whatever the original limited context of its use may have been, A medium has the power to fly far beyond that context into new and unexpected ones because of the way it directs us to organize our minds and integrate our experience of the world. It imposes itself on our consciousness and social institutions in myriad forms. It sometimes has the power to become implicated in our concepts of piety or goodness or beauty. And it is always implicated in the ways we define and regulate our ideas of truth.

12:33 Wes: I was going to bring us back to page nine and the top of page ten where he tells us that speech is sort of the primal and indispensable Medium. And then he's going to kind of throw out the idea that how people think about time and space will be greatly influenced by the grammatical features of their language. Which I don't think that's actually uncontroversial, but it's a sexy thing to say, especially back then. But going down a little bit in explaining what McLuhan meant by saying that the medium is the message, he says the following. His aphorism, however, is in need of amendment.

Because as it stands, it may lead one to confuse a message with a metaphor. A message denotes a specific concrete statement about the world. But the forms of our media, including the symbols through which they permit conversation, do not make such statements. They are rather like metaphors working by unobtrusive but powerful implication to enforce their special definitions of reality. Whether we are experiencing the world through the lens of speech or the printed word or the television camera, our media metaphors classify the world for us. Sequence it, frame it, enlarge it, reduce it, color it, argue a case for what the world is like.

So I think we could relate this to some of the stuff we've done before about, say, conceptual schemes. Or we might think of the different media as different languages, in a way. And these different conceptual schemes or different languages will give us a different way of talking about the world that prejudices us in one way or. Or another. So that it's not exactly that the medium is the message or the medium is the metaphor, but the medium is the conceptual scheme via which we interpret the world or it influences the way we interpret the world.

Something like that. I don't know. Someone help me and explain this better.

14:16 Seth: At the root level, I think what the medium is, the message is saying is that you have to not just look at what's communicated, but also the way in which it's communicated. The form, the syntax. There's no such thing as a neutral or a pure form of transmission or communication. So at the very basic level, I think that's what that means. And, Wes, in the place you were referring to, what he's talking about is the structure of the metaphor, is that they structure the way in which things can be framed and actually represented. At one level, McLuhan was saying, Take a look at the way things are conveyed and not just what is conveyed.

And then he's saying, take a look at how the way things are conveyed actually determines what can be conveyed in terms of the tropes, the metaphors, the structure, and so forth. Then tying that back mark to what you were talking about with Television, for example, he says, and this is kind of one of the themes through the book is once TV is established as a medium for entertainment, then everything that's on there becomes entertainment. I'm just thinking about this now because I'm looking at the zoom video feeds of the five of us white guys sitting here in front of split screens with headphones in or on.

People might want to listen to us talking, but this would not make good television. And it would not make good television because we are not entertaining while we're talking. It's good for audio, it's not good for video. His point is that the metaphor, if you will, it's not the right term. But the form of communication that TV is allied with is entertainment. So anything that is on television, consciously or unconsciously, must become entertainment, must ally itself with entertainment. So you, as a consumer of information, can't see something on television and not think of it as entertainment in the same way that you might consume it from somewhere else and think of it as something other than entertainment.

16:18 Dylan: So he certainly makes that claim. Yes, at 100%. And I guess I found myself wanting to evaluate that claim a little bit about the role of entertainment in any kind of communication at all. And whether it could be that he's right, but he's wrong about it being endemic to the medium itself, but is a fact of its history. That could be a possibility. It could be that he's right about it, that it's endemic and completely a factor in there. I mean, things that come to mind are, for instance, in his analysis of the Fall from the. From Typography to Entertainment and Communication and Show Business.

I think he arguably cherry picks lots of written word examples that highlight his thesis and ignores the gargantuan amount of entertaining written word. Just stuff that was just written to be entertaining or not to do either thing. And it also seems to me that he isn't taking seriously the idea that the medium could be used in other ways. And so it makes me wonder if I found myself just thinking that most medias that I can think of have this character of there being entertaining aspects to that communication that are required in order to capture people's attention.

And there are also contemplative aspects of it.

17:43 Wes: Yeah, I don't think the objective of entertainment is objectionable, per se, for him. Right. So if you have someone like Dickens, Right. Who's serializing novels and he's an amazing writer, but basically he's very obviously, everything he does is geared towards entertaining the public. And I think he tells a story, right, Of Dickens being basically a celebrity and getting lots of attention when he was out in public. But regardless of that intent, there's something he thinks about a typographic metaphor, about the written word, which has the effect of making people more thoughtful and more capable of rational argument.

18:23 Dylan: And well, it's that last piece, right, the rational argument. He wants to claim that because when you engage in writing, you have to engage in, you engage in propositional discourse. And so the problem with television is really the old problem of images, that you can't have reason with just images. And so therefore, because it becomes dominated by images. And he has this criticism about like, you know, the Telegraph isn't exactly images, but it becomes a paucity of the media is too thin to support actual propositional discussion and arguments that can be truth laden. And therefore it becomes a meager mode of communication.

19:07 Mark: So I want to separate out a little bit the capacity of the medium to support complex arguments from the requirement of the medium to hold your attention. So for instance, for pretty much Pop, we just did an Aaron Sorkin episode and in his masterclass, he's talking about the difference between writing for plays, writing for film and writing for tv. So these are all visual medium, you're there, but because like a play, just the sociological circumstance, you've paid for a seat, you're sitting there. If you find it boring in the first two minutes, you don't just get up and leave.

You've made a significant investment, less so in a movie and no investment at all in tv. Right. This is postman's objection to tv is that because you've made no investment, in the same way that picking up a book, you know, getting a hold of a book, you've made some sort of investment. So probably, you know, your expectation is this is not going to be super interesting immediately. I, I'll give it a couple pages at least before, you know, that's not the way everybody reads. But I think thinking of it this way helps then explain why the age of the Internet, our attention spans are even shorter that it's not that, because we've gone back to reading.

Therefore we've reclaimed the virtues of the age of typography. No, in fact it's gotten worse because the investment in getting a hold of the material is even less than on tv.

20:28 Brian: So there's no way we can just do the show pretending it's 1985 and we're just going to. Boy, can you believe that television is the apex of our idiot culture. Well, I guess this is, this is where things end. It was awfully charming to see where, where we've landed.

20:44 Wes: And it's very quaint.

20:45 Brian: Reagan's America, I guess that's the worst Republican president will ever see. So Postman thinks so very little of information consumers. Once I have the idiot box or the feelies that I can give myself to for gratification, that feels like it's intellectual gratification maybe, but it ain't. It's just entertainment. We have no chance to go back to these other ways of thinking. I mean, we code switch all the time with language. I don't know why we can't do that with this course. And we do. And this may not be good television, the five of us, depending on what you're in the mood for, it might not be good radio either.

Because this is going to require at least a little bit of thinking in a way that maybe sometimes you just want to listen to something that is just going to engage you at a lower level. I shouldn't dwell on the tone of the book, but it does. It's his own damn fault for him making me think about these things. But the way this is written impacts the way that I'm taking it in. So screw you, Postman. I hope you're not dead, because now I just spoke ill of a dead guy. He is dead. I love that guy.

21:48 Dylan: And his son wrote the introduction.

21:50 Brian: Well, then screw him.

21:53 Mark: So the capacity then for extended argumentation, I mean, you could very easily say we've had instances here where we purposefully pick something that was lectures because we figure that if it's lectures that were changed into a book, the person had to stand and say these words in front of people. And so even if they were written with a very clear argument in mind, there's a certain responsibility that comes from presentation. And Postman wants to emphasize that TV is a one way medium, but still, if someone is giving a speech, if someone is trying to explain something and it doesn't make any freaking sense, then you're not going to get the message.

And so there's something about the oral culture that television actually captures that is preferable to the way a lot of philosophers in particular, and you know, maybe this is our problem with Postman is that he is a little too breezy with some of what he's saying, that he's more like someone giving a sermon. And if he's going to throw out Roland Barthes and TV has become a myth, then in an interactive media somebody would stop him and like, like, wait, what are you talking about? Can you give us at least a couple paragraphs on what that actually amounts to?

And not just name, drop it and give one sentence as if we know what you're talking about.

23:08 Brian: Which is pretty damn ironic considering that Neil Postman's analog writing shortly after the distribution and spread of the printing press would be saying the same damn thing about this. Saying that we used to have priests or teachers at the Agora who could share knowledge in. The democratization of. Of knowledge actually kind of spoiled it for everybody, because now we can have uneducated people being able to engage and likely sully what was considered to be noble or elevated thought.

23:38 Wes: I don't know.

23:39 Brian: I think this is just the kids these days argument all over again. And God help us, in whatever the next 50 years brings and what discourse has become, we're going to be looking at the Internet age fondly saying, well, at least we weren't shitting on ourselves the way we are now in the year 2071. So I guess I won't be around

23:58 Mark: for it when we get to fecal communication. Is that what you're saying, Brian?

24:01 Brian: When we get back to fecal communication,

24:03 Seth: we go around sniffing each other's butts like dogs.

24:07 Mark: We leave scents for each other. This is my territory, that kind of thing.

24:10 Seth: Yeah, that's a rich form of communication,

24:12 Brian: the advent of language. Just as soon as we had words, we stopped just saying what we meant through action.

24:18 Wes: Right.

24:18 Brian: Taking what you wanted by force or through cooperation was a pretty pure way of getting your wants known or your wants not met. And as soon as we found a way to talk, we found a way to lie or talk around things. So there wasn't one day we were talking in the day before. We weren't, but thanks.

24:36 Seth: Rousseau.

24:37 Wes: Rousseau, Hobbes.

24:40 Mark: You're reminding me, Brian, though, of the film the Invention of Lying, where that is a big deal of saying something that is not imagining a world in which no one understands that you can dissemble.

24:51 Brian: The Thermians in Galaxy Quest, I believe, they did not understand what lying was, thank goodness. Otherwise that movie never would have happened.

25:02 Seth: So, you guys, when you were reading this, did you not extend the concept? Were you just so resistant and hostile to both the medium and the message that you didn't just intuitively extend his critique to the modern handheld device and social media and the way that we consume information now? That was the first place my mind went. But you're just like, oh, well, I'm reading this on my Kindle on my phone.

25:29 Dylan: I actually read the book Good on Paper I should clarify with a pencil. You should finish your thought, Seth, because it sounds like it fed your own indignation about the age of the Internet and you wanted to double down on that. Or is it something different?

25:43 Seth: No, no. Well, I might want to double down on it just to be a prick. But I read this and the references are obviously extremely dated. He talks about Dionne Warwick and Shecky Greene. I can see by the looks on your faces you guys don't even know who they are.

25:59 Brian: Don't you dare say another bad word about Shecky Greene or we're going to have. We're going to have problems.

26:04 Seth: No, it's a cultural touchstone. So then I thought, okay, well, thinking through the thesis of the medium is the metaphor and him comparing typography to television. Then my natural updating of the book was because I think this is, was it 85 or 95? And then the reprint with the commentary was just 10 years later. I was like, okay, well, let's talk about social media on handheld devices as the new medium. I mean, television is still very prominent, I think, in everybody's life, you know, at least most people's lives in the most of the world. But not just the form in which social media has become a news outlet or an information delivery system, but also the algorithmic and distributed way in which what gets shown and how it gets shown, it's not programmatic.

I mean, in his world we have the evolution first from like major television networks to cable television where there was this proliferation of. And now we have this sort of further evolution to streaming and consumption via handheld devices, which if you talk about the interaction, if tv, makes you mute and dumb and passive with respect to your participation, it at least does so where you could be in physical contact with and sharing that same experience with others. But with the phone, you literally and for the listeners, I'm sticking my hand right up in front of my camera as if I'm holding the phone away from my face to block these guys out.

It creates the solipsistic looped in world where you're twice removed from the possibility of having any kind of meaningful engagement. Anyway, argue that his thesis that he argues it well or poorly, that it's correct or incorrect, that he marshals evidence or not. This is the type of thought provoking inference that it gave me.

27:58 Brian: As much as I maybe have sounded like I'm completely harshing on this, I find his analytical approach pretty convincing. I just don't always agree with these grand conclusions he draws from them, which is why I Did, like you, Seth, think about how we apply what he has said so far to our current times. And there's really this irony to the fact that so much of the social media or the Internet experience is tied back to the written word and that we've gone from this dominance of the visual with TV. And of course it's memes and it's YouTube, but it's also message boards and Reddit and we've gone back to. Even if we sometimes argue with people you'll never agree with and you're just really just yelling at each other.

28:38 Dylan: But.

28:39 Brian: But it looks like discourse, even if it isn't actual discourse all the time. And did we turn a corner backwards on this a little bit in modern times in a way that we weren't. The 1980s had seen some sort of death of. Did it come back, in a way, the idea that we had gone to this visual medium of television had gone away from the written word. And where we are now with the Internet, this idea that we are once again engaging in something like discourse through Facebook posts, through Reddit, through things like that, have we clawed back in some form something that we had lost in the entertainment age of the 80s.

29:21 Mark: So something from McLuhan might help here. In addition to the medium is the message. There's the idea of hot and cool media. So hot media is one that is very information dense and does not let you then participate, whereas a cool media is much more fragmented. In fact, we just in Pretty Much Pop just did an animation episode. It talked about if you do line drawings and things, then those invite the reader to fill in more. And we had in this podcast Sartre on literature, talking about the cooperative enterprise between the writer and the reader.

So I think the overall message there is that hot media bad because it doesn't give you time to think. TV is just blaring at you. It is one way. Whereas cool media, like a book, is interactive. You get to stop, do it at your own pace. It invites you to think. Well, an actual interactive media like the Internet seems like it should be better because it actually requires you to answer. I think one could still try to make the argument that no. In fact, the Internet is even hotter because there's just so much coming at you from all these different directions and the way that you're encouraged to respond.

You could use metaphor, like Twitter's character limit, like Postman's thing, about how much could you really communicate through smoke signals. That's an obvious way that the medium would affect the messages. Well, if you have to Type with your thumb whatever you're going to say. Or you're sending emails to people and they don't want to read long emails. I mean, just people's tolerance for long messaging has gotten very short. So even though Reddit or something like that, you can do towers of text, you can also be sure that nobody's going to read your goddamn towers of text.

31:01 Seth: Tldr.

31:03 Brian: Well, too long. Didn't read is too long to say. So you have to shorten that to TL. Dr. That's right.

31:10 Seth: Does social media make, let's call it digital media interactive in a way that television as a digital medium is not? Have social media platforms enable the kind of interactivity. I think then we have to circle back to what Postman's talking about when he's talking about the typographic culture and the Lincoln Douglas debates. So I didn't go and verify his references or anything like this, but his claim is essentially that there was a point in time in the United States when concerned citizens would sit and listen to politicians argue for three and a half hours in person, then break for dinner and then come back to finish the dialogue.

And they had not just the patience and the capacity to sit and consume and listen to those, but the capacity to understand what was being argued, to retain in memory the arguments, so that when the counterpoint was presented, they appreciated and understood what was being referenced and could recall it from memory. And that if we think about today, the idea of anybody enduring a three hour conversation, a debate, and yet we have the partially examined life, which is a two hour conversation, not in person and on camera. Is it a counterpoint to Postman's thesis that social media allows people to engage in a digital manner?

I think at one level, yes. At another level, have you ever tried to have a deep political or philosophical argument with somebody on Facebook or Twitter? It just doesn't work. Right. First of all, it's not a discourse. You're not live. And we revert back to video as a substitute for in person. You can't have that kind of interaction on a short form written medium, no matter how dynamic it is.

33:02 Mark: I mean, in some ways it's just having a really detailed interaction is almost hopeless. And like, the only place that I see that I really like it is like Leibniz read Locke's whole book and he wrote a whole book responding to Locke point by point, trying to represent Locke's, using the best scholarship of his time to represent Locke's arguments as charitably as possible and respond to that. So in academic discourse, we actually do see this back and forth with detail, but we don't get that in almost any other venue, because usually, even when written things are responding to each other, they're not actually paying that much attention to each other, sort of talking past each other.

And when you're talking with somebody in person, unless you have a mission like we do here, to at least try to have some level of rigor and response, and by the time we get to the end of this, our listeners will understand basically what we've been talking about and have some of the ins and outs. I just think it's way too easy for people to be talking past each other and not paying attention to each other. And yes, TV is a particularly inhospitable environment for it, and YouTube is a particularly inhospitable environment for it. And so the media that are trained by those.

I think that's Postman's larger point, is that we don't code switch, as you were saying, Brian, because our brains have already been affected by TV as of 1985 or the Internet of now. So that when we try to go back and code switch to the other way, unless you have specific sort of professional training, professional standards to do so, then it's going to be just as vapid. And if people look at the. Was it Jordan Peterson and Zizek having a big debate, you know, that was like a highly publicized Internet debate. And then people noticed how much those two guys just completely talk past each other, just how even though it was not like watching Trump v.

Biden and constant interruptions and that complete nonsense, it was still, in the end, almost as unhelpful, for whatever reason, if their minds or the minds of the audience, why these two figures are so popular, trained by Internet or TV standards, that's almost

35:10 Brian: like having someone point out the professor who says, and then you can't stop hearing it. Like, listen to two people talk sometime, and are they really, really talking or are they just nodding and waiting for the other person to be done so they can say what they wanted to say? Which is pretty much what I was doing now, if you saw me nodding, Mark. But of course, I didn't verify either what Postman said about the Lincoln Douglas type debates. It seemed like there was a lot of rhetoric and shenanigans of artistic flourish with language, maybe a little bit more than truly all these thoughts that everyone in the audience was. I mean, it was probably something of a social gathering. And I don't want to say that wasn't true, but I Just have my doubts that it was quite the way he describes it.

35:49 Seth: Obviously there's some sort of romantic picture being painted, but there's a movie out right now with Tom Hanks, and he plays a character who travels around and reads newspaper headlines to people. That in the typographic age, there were still a tremendous number of illiterate people. They may have had the capacity to listen for hours on end and consume arguments and all that, but it doesn't make them typographic. Right. If they were illiterate, it just means they're still very much part of the oral tradition, which, again, is no judgment. I think he would still.

Postman would still prefer typographic culture than an oral culture over a television culture. Right. Ultimately, what's important for him is the idea of public discourse. I've used the term political, but I think really it's about how in a functioning, healthy society can you have public discourse about topics that are of import? And it seems that his thesis is, you know, what he's claiming is it's most important to have a culture where people can read. And that the debate happens predominantly through the written word, augmented by discourse, preferably in person.

But the moving pictures and the television and other forms of representation are fundamentally such that they degrade or make impossible meaningful public engagement about important shared issues.

37:15 Dylan: And isn't the core part there again, the prevalence of images as opposed to sentences. I'm just thinking of like the brass tacks content of what he's claiming as being the paucity there, that the medium, it can't handle the truth. Right. It can't handle truth value distinctions, for instance, it can't hold in itself a conversation about judgment without making the judgment that he's right or wrong. That seems to me to be the ultimate claim that as a medium, it can't do that.

37:51 Seth: So go to the book you brought me in mind of this section. I'm on page 49 in the typographic Mind. One must begin, I think, by pointing to the obvious fact that the written word and an oratory based upon it has a content that's italicized. A semantic, paraphrasable, propositional content. This may sound odd, but since I shall be arguing soon enough that much of our discourse today has only a marginal propositional content, I must stress the point here. Whenever language is the principal medium of communication, especially language controlled by the rigors of print, an idea, a fact, a claim is the inevitable result. The idea may be banal, the fact irrelevant, the claim false, but there is no escape from Meaning when language is the instrument guiding one's thought.

38:41 Dylan: Let me join that up with a section on page 51. On the facing page, he refers to this guy, Walter Ong, which I don't think matters says, to engage the written word means to follow a line of thought which requires considerable powers of classifying, inference making and reasoning. It means to uncover lies, confusions and overgeneralizations, to detect abuses of logic and common sense. It also means to weigh ideas, to compare and contrast assertions, to connect one generalization to another. To accomplish this, one must achieve a certain distance from the words themselves, which is, in fact, encouraged by the isolated and impersonal text.

This is why a good reader does not cheer an apt sentence or pause to applaud even an inspired paragraph. Analytic thought is too busy for that and too detached. So I was kind of following him along a little bit until I got to the end. And then the fact that he said that made me just realize he's just overreaching.

39:41 Seth: Overreaching to say that emotional detachment from written versus performative acts.

39:46 Dylan: Yes. When he says the good reader does not cheer an apt sentence or pause to applaud even an inspired paragraph, that's just baloney. That's just not even true.

39:55 Brian: See, Dylan threw up a little too in his mouth when he read that. Which was actually proof against the thing.

40:01 Dylan: Exactly. Maybe this is the criticism that, you know, when writing is entertaining, it therefore loses its content. But I've certainly had plenty of experiences where I had emotional reactions to writing. I cheered the sentence, the turn of phrase itself. When I got to that, that, to me was like a capstone of his line of thinking, which made me really want to question how far I was willing to go with him at the beginning earlier about the notion that there's something about the medium that has real propositional content in it. And I think it's probably true that it's very, very hard for straight up images to do that without including the commentary that's made verbally.

But I think the notion that we don't judge the written word routinely on the basis of its aesthetic appeal, and I don't mean typographically necessarily, though that might be true too. But I mean in the turn of phrase itself, in its entertainment value.

41:03 Wes: So, yeah, I had the same reaction, Dylan, as you, to this. I thought that is obviously not true.

41:09 Mark: Wes has described so many texts as being like crack to him.

41:12 Wes: Yes, heroin. I prefer heroin as the metaphor. You know, if you were to defend him, you would say something like the following. I think you could defend them along two different lines. The first one is to say that he's talking about something like the difference, when we think about aesthetics, the difference between mere gratification and higher level aesthetic pleasure, which you could kind of transfer that onto this. Or one might think about this in terms of responding to a text aesthetically or rationally, and then responding to it because it titillates you.

You could read something and say, yeah, you know, that's what I think, and pump your fist. Or you could be titillated by it, you could be distracted by it. But there's something about this particular typographic tradition that he's talking about, and I think he has a point which can support a different kind of response. Even if you're responding to it aesthetically, even if you read a beautiful passage and think, oh my God, that's great, and you really want to applaud or you do a little dance or whatever. I think if we read him more charitably here, it's consistent with that.

It's just he's getting at two different sorts of celebration. One which you might think of as more akin to a detached aesthetic response, and the other as akin to mere gratification, mere charm, as Kant would put it. Right? Just being taken in by the charms of something.

42:37 Mark: So just before we wrap up the first half here, I guess I just want to make it clear to everybody what he says his goal is with the whole book, since we haven't really said that, which is to make explicit this environment in which we are swimming. It's sort of a Heideggerian thing. We're thinking we've already been affected terminally by the culture of television and now the culture of Internet. And so what is the solution to that? Well, there's no real. It's not going backwards. It's not, watch less tv. We need to foreground these things that are merely implicit.

We need to figure out the kind of analysis that he's doing, is what he actually wants to be put in schools. So people are interrogating their way of dealing with the world. And that at least will soften its effects, allow us to question this thing that might otherwise seem completely natural and like it's always existed. Even if some of these historical analyses are wrong. And he's over romanticizing the past and how thoughtful everybody was and overstating how dire it is now and denying that we can code switch back to the old ways, I think the hope is still that he wants to enable us to code switch by Making these things explicit.

If you want to hear more of that, we're going to have a part two of this discussion. That'll be the next thing in your feed. Go to it.