bleckblog: musings of a community college english teacher

I'm still working my way through Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death and looking out the window, watching the snow fall, and hoping it will stop so I can go for a bike ride. This is spring break for me, and it's snowing! Yes, Spokane is about 2200 feet above sea level, but crimany! I got drenched on Sunday when I rode in a downpour. Today I'm headed for Riverside State Park to ride in the trees, which should keep me a little drier, both from above and below.

As I said, I'm still reading Postman. I finished the first section and while he is focusing on television, and writing in the mid-1980's, I can tie much of his argument, or at least I try, to the internet and blogging. I don't know how much I'll write, but there are a number of passages in the text (Penguin: New York, 1985) that are compelling.

Much of his discussion is about decontextualized information, thanks to the rise of the telegraph. The question he asks us to ask of ourselves about the information to which we have access, via the newspaper, radio, tv, internet or what have you, is what use is it: "How often does it occur that information provided you on the morning radio or television , or in the morning newspaper, causes you to alter your plans for the day, or to take some action you would otherwise not have taken, or provides insight into some problem you are required to solve?" (68). Of course, he goes on to answer this question for us: nada. And I find that hard to argue with. Mainstream media does not provide me the information I need to get on with my life. It provides me with decontextualized facts about which I can do little or nothing.

On the other hand, blogs, books, listservs and some websites do provide me the information I need, at least when it comes to my work-a-day world and teaching. Postman's book is helping me prepaare to teach a class. Since I use blogs in my classes, other blogs help me with that as well, and producing (which Postman doens't focus much on) a blog here helps me to understand what I'm trying to get my students to do. But so much of the web fits Postman's answer to a 't': it's a wasteland, but I think everyone who can think rationally knows that.

Of course, I have no answer. This information may just be so much decontextualized fact, or fancy. But it also holds some promise to not be so decontextualized through linking and backtracking. But I won't be providing a whole lot of links just so I can link. That's like the ubiquitous animated .gif found on many webpages, and the bulk of what I read in the Spokesman-Review and heard on Spokane Public Radio this morning, utterly useless.

A discussion I was having with myself while reading Postman this morning was how easily I am seduced as a reader. Being a better than average reader, or so I assume, I found myself agreeing with many of his assertions, that reading is in decline due to television, and now the internet, that logic is largely irrelevant in most communication today (no more propositional rhetoric), how "imagery [does] not merely function as a supplement to language, but bid[s] to replace it as our dominant means for construing, understanding and testing reality" (74).

When examining this point, Postman traces the (d)evolution of advertising from a propositional rhetoric to the point, at the end of the 19th century, where "advertisers no longer assumed rationality on the part of their potential customers" (60). This lack of rationality was seen in the use of slogans, illustrations and photographs, not of which attempted to reason with those potential customers, but instead sought to motivate or manipulate, to close the deal. That this has become the primary rhetorical strategy of advertising is something I wouldn't waste my time arguing. All anyone need do is watch a few ads and it should be clear that such is the case. But, for my teaching, it becomes all the more clear that students need to get some practice in looking at these rhetorics, these modes of discourse, so they can better see where they stand in the world, better see what the world thinks of them. Since we could argue that the age of print is dead or dying (what Postman calls the Age of Exposition) and being replaced by the age of the image (which Postman calls the Age of Show Business) it would seem all the more important to teach students to read not just expository rhetoric/discourse, but electronic discourse as well.

I don't know where I'm going here, but I think I'll wrap this baby up and consider working on my fyc syllabus.