March 8, 1931

 

Neil Postman (March 8, 1931 to October 5, 2003) was an American social historian. His analysis of modern culture was outlined in various books such as Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (1985) and Conscientious Objections: Stirring Up Trouble About Language, Technology and Education (1988). Postman was born in New York City, and was on the faculty of NYU, in the department of communication arts. Here is an excerpt from The disappearance of childhood (1982)

The mass produced image changed...information itself from discursive to nondiscursive, from propositional to presentational, from rationalistic to emotive. Language is an abstraction from experience, where pictures are concrete representations of experience...Words and pictures are different universes of discourse, for a word is always and foremost an idea, a figment, so to speak, of imagination. There does not exist in nature any such thing as “cat” or “work” or “wine"...