Forms of Rhetoric: What are we really learning?

Neil Postman makes me swoon. His book, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business may have been first published in 1985, but it is absolutely still relevant today.

I share with you a paragraph from his last chapter, entitled “The Huxleyan Warning”, in which he discusses the dangers of television:

The problem… does not reside in what people watch. The problem is that we watch. The solution must be found in how we watch. For I believe it may fairly be said that we have yet to learn what television is. And the reason is that there has been no worthwhile discussion, let alone widespread public understanding, of what information is and how it gives direction to a culture. There is a certain poignancy in this, since there are no people who more frequently and enthusiastically use such phrases as “the information age,” “the information explosion,” and “the information society”. We have apparently advanced to the point where we have grasped the idea that a change in the forms, volume, speed and context of information means something, but we have not got any further.

I wonder what his thoughts are on the Internet, and what he would think of the idea of having a rhetoric blog… after all, a screen’s a screen, isn’t it? Is the computer so very different from the television?

I love rhetoric.