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

May 2, 2021 by Mark Linsenmayer Leave a Comment

https://podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/traffic.libsyn.com/secure/partiallyexaminedlife/PREVIEW-PEL_ep_268pt2_4-6-21.mp3

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 13:20 — 12.3MB)

Subscribe to get Part 2 of this episode in its entirety. Citizens can get it here.

Continuing from part one on Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business with guest Brian Hirt.

This preview looks more closely at Postman's claim that the written word is much more suited for providing context than television. After all, television does retain some of the virtues of the pre-literate speechifying culture that Socrates preferred over writing. We debate whether some of our favorite books could be made into good films and consider Postman's "commandments of TV":

  • Thou shalt have no prerequisites
  • Thou shalt induce on perplexity
  • Thou shalt avoid exposition like the ten plagues visited upon Egypt

In the full episode, we discuss Postman's claims about how these commandments damage various aspects of our culture: education, politics, news, and religion. Is TV as bad for these institutions as Postman says, or are there advantages to, for instance, watching a televised (Zoom?) course over attending a large lecture in person? And of course, we talk more about how all this applies to the Internet.

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The Partially Examined Life is a philosophy podcast by some guys who were at one point set on doing philosophy for a living but then thought better of it. Each episode, we pick a text and chat about it with some balance between insight and flippancy. You don’t have to know any philosophy, or even to have read the text we’re talking about to (mostly) follow and (hopefully) enjoy the discussion

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