Neil Postman Sixteen Years On

Neil Postman died sixteen years ago today. The sadness I feel still is hard to describe.

In the e-mail that brought me news of his death from lung cancer at the age of 72, Lance Strate described Neil, very accurately, as "the mentor of hundreds, in fact thousands of graduate students, and so the loss is personal as well as professional. We will miss him as a friend, colleague, teacher, and father."

I have to say right off the bat that I was not one of those people to whom Lance refers. I cannot claim Neil Postman as a mentor. A teacher and an inspiration? Yes. But not a mentor. Frankly, he frightened and intimidated me (not deliberately, of course; the insecurities were all mine) and reminded me of my own self-perceived intellectual inadequacies. (In fairness to the topic, if anyone deserves credit – or perhaps I should say blame – for mentoring me, it would be Neil’s NYU colleague Christine Nystrom, who was able to encourage and coax from me my best thinking and writing.) Yet Neil supported and helped me in so many ways--academically, professionally, personally—and, as it turns out, influenced my thinking far more deeply than I understood at the time, that the shock of his passing has barely abated in ten years. How I’d love to sit and talk with him now about our shared media ecology.

I first heard of Neil Postman while working on my Master’s Degree in Communication at New York Institute of Technology around 1976. A couple of serendipitous events occurred. One, I took a course with a professor named Irving Weingarten who, during my time at NYIT, defended his dissertation and received his Doctorate in Media Ecology from New York University and introduced me to Neil’s work. Two, I took a course with Philip Miele – “Vocabulary of the Media Critic” – whose core text was Harold Innis’s “The Bias of Communication.” I had, of course, read Marshall McLuhan’s “Understanding Media” as an undergraduate – depending on your point of view, either essential reading or de rigueur at the time – and was of course fascinated by him and his aphoristic probes. But I had an uneasy feeling that one could make of much of McLuhan’s wisdom just about anything one wanted. A Nostrodamus for the electronic age. There was great vision and imagination – even poetry – in McLuhan’s probes but not a whole lot of specificity.

Innis, on the other hand, supplied the structure and method that I felt lacking in McLuhan’s work. Innis told me, in different words, that the medium is the message. But he also supplied me with historical examples that provided a foundation upon which I could build an understanding of exactly what that phrase meant. And Irv Weingarten turned me on to Neil’s writing and the concept of a “media ecology,” so similar to what I was reading in McLuhan but so much more grounded in common sense and reason. My first encounter with Neil’s work was “Crazy Talk, Stupid Talk” (1977), followed almost immediately by “Teaching as a Subversive Activity” (1969). By the time I was awarded my Master’s degree in 1980, I knew I had to get into that “Media Ecology” program at NYU. Money, work, life being what they are, it took me six more years.

Neil was a humble, funny, gregarious person who, at the same time, was a towering, imposing figure. He was also, at the time of my arrival, the author of a new book that everyone seemed to be talking about, “Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in an Age of Show Business.” At the risk of repeating myself, I had enormous difficulty finding the same comfort level with Neil as so many others in the program so easily managed to do. At first, my end of our infrequent exchanges were limited pretty much to a stumbling “Yes, sir” and “No, sir” and “I’m not sure, sir.” Oh, I answered questions and gave my opinion when called upon to do so, but I’m pretty sure my mouth dried and my tongue tied every time I had to speak with him. At the end of the first semester, in our “Seminar in Media Ecology: Analysis,” my colleagues and I in the class of ‘90 cohort had to write and submit a brief (mine was 35 pages) history of a medium, after which we defended it orally in front of Neil and Chris Nystrom. I’ll never forget the feeling of horror and humiliation as I sat across from the two of them and watched Neil hold my paper between his thumb and forefinger, dangling it to his side as though it were a soiled tissue picked up from the floor, while he leaned back in his chair, took a deep drag on his cigarette, paused, and said only this: “Peter…your writing is so…florid…” Chris rescued me, even remarking that she enjoyed my writing, but if I could have melted into the woodwork at that moment, I surely would have. I must also say (with considerable pride but also immeasurable relief) that in time Neil came to appreciate and perhaps even respect both my writing and my thinking.

Over the years, I learned so much from Neil, as well as from Chris, Terry Moran, Henry Perkinson, John Mayher, and others. It was impossible not to learn in this program. I learned about and read the works of John Dewey, George Herbert Mead, Alfred Korzybski, I.A. Richards; of Alfred North Whitehead and Suzanne Langer; of Lewis Mumford and Jacques Ellul; of Marx, Engels, and Freud; of Aristotle, Augustine, and Aquinas; and of course, of Marshall McLuhan. For Neil, there was no educational replacement for the information technology of the Gutenberg era, the printed book. As he explained to Jay Rosen with typical understatement, “We’re just trying to give people a good liberal arts education,” and that good liberal arts education was the education of literacy, the education of the Enlightenment. I got to know Neil Postman as an eminently reasonable – and rational – man; but a man for whom reason was simply one piece of the human intellect, incomplete without its complementary counterpart, imagination. And the imagination, seat of the emotional life, was the foundation of empathy.

“From the beginning,” Neil said in the keynote address at the inaugural convention of the Media Ecology Association, “we were a group of moralists.” This appealed to me, because I am something of a media moralist myself. It was what attracted me to the program in the first place. I could see this moralism subtly in Innis, more overtly in Ellul. But it was absent in McLuhan. McLuhan had once said “A moral point of view too often substitutes for understanding in technological matters” (I have an imaginary discussion of this point with McLuhan here). I couldn’t understand why, in the act of understanding media, one would not be moved to improve the situation of the people that those media serve. And so my affinity for Neil’s thinking grew. “It was our idea,” Neil continued in his 2000 keynote, “to have an academic department that would focus its attention on the media environment, with a particular interest in understanding how and if our media ecology was making us better or worse. Not everyone thought that this was a good idea—Marshall McLuhan, for one. Although McLuhan had suggested that we start such a department at NYU, he did not have in mind that we ought to interest ourselves in whether or not new media, especially electronic media, would make us better or worse. He reminded me several times of the lines in Stephen Vincent Benét’s long poem John Brown’s Body. At the end of the poem, Benét makes reference to the Industrial Revolution and finishes with these lines:

“Say neither, it is blessed nor cursed.

“Say only ‘It is here.’

“No room for moralists there. McLuhan claimed that we ought to take the same point of view in thinking about modern media: that they are neither blessed nor cursed, only that they are here. He thought that this moral neutrality would give the best opportunity to learn exactly how new media do their stuff. If one spent too much time on the question of whether or not that stuff was good, one would be distracted from truly understanding media. As a consequence, although I believe McLuhan liked me, I feel sure he would not have much liked my books, which he would have thought too moralistic, rabbinical or, if not that, certainly too judgmental.”

Neil Postman was a true heir to the legacy of the Enlightenment: a proponent of propositional language and thought who wrote clear, concise, rational prose; a man of imagination and transcendence who knew that humans were more than the sum of their material parts. Far from being the Luddite he is generally accused of being, Neil rejected the idea that all technological change constituted “progress” and refused to be controlled by technology – or the people who market them – but enthusiastically embraced those technologies – and only those – that measurably improved the quality of human life. And he did not apologize for that.

He did not hesitate to point a finger at the mendacity of marketers who sell newness for its own sake or to ridicule the baseless and unsupported claims of the acolytes of our new digital religion. “Through the computer, the heralds say, we will make education better, religion better, politics better, our minds better — best of all, ourselves better. This is, of course, nonsense, and only the young or the ignorant or the foolish could believe it.”

But throughout human history, Neil also acknowledged, it was technologies that shaped the information, psychic, and spiritual environments that allowed people to make things better. In true humanist fashion, Neil left us some questions to think about when trying to make judgments about which value system would be served by a given technology: “The first question is this: To what extent does a medium contribute to the uses and development of rational thought? Here is a second question: To what extent does a medium contribute to the development of democratic processes? A third question—related to the previous two—is: To what extent do new media give greater access to meaningful information? Here is a final question: To what extent do new media enhance or diminish our moral sense, our capacity for goodness?” Neil would never rejectaAny technology that provided suitable answers to those questions.

Ten brief years after his death, one of my fondest memories of Neil is sitting in the courtyard of Fordham's Lincoln Center campus at lunchtime during the first MEA conference. My Mom had just died, and I was nursing my Dad through his final (three year) illness. Much of my personal life, at that moment, was a shambles. Neil came and sat with me and we just talked about life--its difficulty, its tragedy, and its beauty. I was impressed not so much by what he said – what does one say, after all, to someone who believes his life is falling apart? – but by the sheer humanity of the gesture. I really don’t remember the specifics of our conversation, but I’ll never forget the moment. One of the reasons that Neil was the teacher, thinker, and writer that we know him to be is that he was – for all the criticisms of his "Luddite" work – wholly alive and in love with life and the phenomenon of human intelligence. He had a profound faith in ALL of us. Those moments with Neil – no longer the “towering figure” I stammered before but the compassionate friend who listened to me – are burned into my memory forever.

Ten years ago this semester I began a new phase in my career and my life out here on the prairie, and I was unable to attend the various memorials and social events in Neil's honor. I was unable to be in NY for his funeral, although I would dearly have loved to pay my respects in person to all who knew Neil. My sympathies remain with all of you who continue to mourn Neil's passing, just as my joy will always be with those of you who celebrate his life and carry on his work. I am proud to count myself among your ranks. I honestly believe it is time for a “Neil Postman Renaissance.” We need a corrective to the orgy of technophilia that has surrounded this false information “revolution” for the last two decades. We need a direction and while Neil Postman is not that direction – and would blanch at any suggestion to the contrary – his work may provide with clues to that direction.

At the end of his 2000 MEA keynote, Neil (who was snarky before snarky was cool) made it clear that he, if no one else, envisioned Media Ecology as a logical extension of Enlightenment and Renaissance humanism, in which no answers are given, but methods for questioning are constantly improved and the end of this intellectual activity is the improvement of the human condition. He concluded “by saying that as I understand the whole point of media ecology, it exists to further our insights into how we stand as human beings, how we are doing morally in the journey we are taking. There may be some of you who think of yourselves as media ecologists who disagree with what I have just said. If that is the case, you are wrong.”

Neil Postman Bibliography

Author

•Building a Bridge to the Eighteenth Century:  Ideas from the Past that Can Improve Our Future.  New York: Knopf, 1999.

•The End of Education: Redefining the Value of School.  New York, Knopf, 1995

•The Disappearance of Childhood:  Redefining the Value of School.  New York: Vintage Books, 1994, c.1982.

•Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology.  New York: Vintage Books, 1993

•Conscientious Objection:  Stirring Up Trouble About Language, Technology and Education.  New York: Vintage Books, 1992, c.1988.

•Amusing Ourselves to Death:  Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business.  New York: Penguin, 1985

•Teaching as a Conserving Activity.  New York: Delacorte Press, 1979.

•Crazy Talk, Stupid Talk:  How We Defeat Ourselves by the Way We Talk and What to Do About It.  New York: Delacorte Press, 1976.

•Teaching as a Subversive Activity.  New York: Delta Book Publishing, 1971, c.1969.

•Languages of Discovery.  New York: Holt, Reinhart and Winston, 1967.

•The Uses of Language.  New York: Holt, Reinhart and Winston, 1967.

•Exploring Your Language.  New York:  Holt, Reinhart and Winston, 1966.

•Linguistics: A Revolution in Teaching.  New York: Delta Book Publishing, 1966.

•The New English: A Forward Look.  New York: Holt, Reinhart and Winston, 1965.

•Discovering Your Language.  New York: Holt, Reinhart and Winston, 1963.

•Television and the Teaching of English.  New York: Appleton Centruy Croft, 1961.

Co-author

•with Donald N. Wood.  Post-Intellectualism and the Decline of Democracy:  The Failure of Reason and Responsibility in the Twentieth Century.  Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1996.

•with Steve Powers.  How to Watch TV News.  New York: Penguin, 1992.

•et al.  Myths, Men and Beer:  an Analysis of Beer Commercials on Broadcast Television.  Church Falls, VA.:  Foundation for Traffic Safety, 1987.

•with Charles Weingartner.  The School Book: for People Who Want to Know What all the Hollering Is About.  New York: Delacorte Press, 1973.

•with Charles Weingartner.  How to Recognize a Good School.  Bloomington: Phi Delta Kappa Educational Foundation, 1973.

•with  Charles Weingartner.  The Soft Revolution:  A Student Handbook for Turning Schools Around.  New York: Delacorte Press, 1971.

•with Charles Weingartner.  Teaching as a Subversive Activity.  New York: Delacorte Press, 1979, c. 1969.

•with Charles Weingartner.  Linguistics:  A Revolution in Teaching.  New York: Delacorte Press, 1966.

•with Howard C. Damon.  The Language of Discovery.  New York:  Delacotre Press, 1965.

•with Howard C. Damon.  Language and System.  New York: Holt, Reinhart and Winston, 1965.

•et al.  Television and the Teaching of English.  New York: Appleton Century Crofts, 1961.

Editor

•Language in America: A Report on Our Deteriorating Semantic Environment.  New York: Pegasus, 1969.

•The Roots of Fanaticism.  Ed. with Howard C. Damon.  New York: Holt Reinhart and Winston, 1965.

Articles

•“Science and the Story that We Need.   First Things.  No. 69 (1997), 29-32.

•“Making a Living, Making a Life: Technology Reconsidered.”  College Board Review.  No. 176-177 (1995), 8-13.

•“Virtual Students, Digital Classroom.”  The Nation. No. 261 ign (1995), 377-378ff.

•“The American Experiment”  Education Week, Vol. 15 (1995), 56.

•“Error of Our Ways.”  Teacher Magazine.  Vol. 6 (1995), 32-37.

•“Technology as Dazzling Distraction.”  The Education Digest.  Vol. 59 (1994), 25-28.

•“Deus Machina”  Technos.  Vol. 1 (1992), 16-18.

•with Camille Paglia.  “She Wants Her TV! He Wants His Book!”  Harper’s Vol. 282 (1991), 44-51, 54-55.

•“What is a Conservative? (And Why Reagan Is Not One).”  Utne Reader (Mar/Ap, 1989), 75.

•“Learning by Story.”  The Atlantic.  No. 264 (1989) 119-124.

•“The Educationist as Painkiller.”  English Education.  (1988), 7-17.

•“The Blurring of Childhood and the Media.”  Religious Education, Vol. 82 (1987) 293-295.

•“The Limits of Language.”  Etc.  Vol. 43 (1986), 227-235.

•“TV News as Vaudeville.”  The Quill.  Vol. 74 (1986), 18-23.

•“Media and Technology as Educators.”  Yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education. (1985), 183-200.

•“Social Science as Theology.”  Etc.  Vol. 41 (1984), 22-32.

•“The Day Our Children Disappear: Predictions of a Media Ecologist.”  Phi Delta Kappa.  Vol. 62 (1981), 382-386.

•“Fine Tuning the Balance Between Education and Media Culture.”  Teacher.  Vol. 98 (1980), 28-30.

•“Language Education in a Knowledge Context.”  Etc.  Vol. 37 (1980), 25-37.

•“Landmarks in the Literature: the Limits of Language.”  New York University Education Quarterly.  Vol. 11 (1979), 29-32.

•“The Ascent of Humanity: a Coherent Curriculum.”  Educational Leadership.  Vol. 37 (1980), 300-303

•“Order in the Classroom!”  Atlantic.  Vol. 244 (1979) 35-38.

•“The First Curriculum.”  Phi Delta Kappa.  Vol. 61 (1979), 163-168.

•“The Information Environment.”  Etc.  Vol. 36 (1979), 234-245.

•“Landmarks in Literature: Where Have All the Critics Gone?”  New York University Education Quarterly. Vol. 9 (1977), 28-31.

•“What an Educator Means When He Says…”  Journal of the International Association of Pupil Personnel Workers.  Vol. 20 (1976), 153-156.

•“Whatever I Call It, It Is.”  Etc.  Vol. 31 (1974), 37-44.

•with Charles Weingartner.  “Two Tests to Take - to Find Out if Yours Is a Great School.”  American School Board Journal.  Vol. 161 (1974), 23-26.

•“Media Ecology: A Growing Perspective.”  Media Ecology Review.  Vol. 3 (1973), 10-11.

•“Illich, Pro and Con.”  Social Policy.  Vol. 2 (1971), 33-42.

•“The New Literacy”  Grade Teacher.   Vol. 88 (1971), 2-52.

•“The Politics of Reading.”  Harvard Educational Review.  Vol. 40 (1970), 244-252.

My New Book -- "Cultural Defiance, Cultural Deviance" -- is Available

Long-term followers of IN THE DARK (there ARE a few, you know) will remember that my blog productivity drops whenever I'm working on a book, as it did with The Metaphysics of Media (which won the Lewis Mumford Award for Outstanding Scholarship in the Ecology of Technics for 2010) and Why the Irish Speak English (Winner of the Marshall McLuhan Award for Outstanding Book in the Field of Media Ecology for 2007). 

 

So my output on IN THE DARK has been pretty spare in the last year or so as I worked on my third book, a collection of essays titled Cultural Defiance, Cultural Deviance. CD/CD is a set of ten essays I've written over several years, some written as peer-reviewed articles and presentations, some written as nothing more than flights of imagination, but all with a nod to the notion that, if reality is a socially-constructed phenomenon, we ought to have a hand in the process and not out-source that construction to multi-national infotainment corporations.

 

While CD/CD is out only a week, it has garnered some praise from early reviewers:

To the names of McLuhan, Postman, Ellul, and Ong, please now add Peter K. Fallon.  This isn’t so much a book as it is a placeholder for polymaths.  This isn’t a collection of essays unified by a theme or subject, but rather a collection of discrete objects subjected to the same methodology.  They are historical, analogical, probing, semantic, linguistic, and psychological.  And not religious but spiritual, in the best sense of that beaten dead horse… If you read the essays collected herein, even some of them, you will have committed the cultural heresy of the title.  You will have committed the act of contemplation, in defiance of the noise, rush, bright colors, and distraction from the unmitigated disaster of technological society’s clustercuss all around you.  And that will be a deviant thing to do. –ReadMercer Schuchardt, Wheaton College (from the Foreword)

 

Neil Postman suggested that all of the social and behavioral sciences would be best understood as a form of moral theology. Without a doubt, he would have heartily approved of this well-written and thoughtful collection of essays by Peter K Fallon, who writes in the tradition of Jacques Ellul, Walter Ong, Marshall McLuhan, and Postman himself, and brings deep insight, grounded in the media ecology intellectual tradition, coupled with a sharp wielding of ethical criteria, to matters of contemporary and universal human concern. – Lance Strate, Professor of Communication and Media Studies, Fordham University

 

Both a student of renowned Communications theorist Neil Postman and the winner of the Media Ecology Association's Lewis Mumford Award (named for Postman’s own intellectual hero), Peter K. Fallon is the perfect tour guide through our techno-mediated environment. He adheres scrupulously to Postman's conception of media ecology as nothing less than an exploration of the ways in which our communication habits and technologies enhance or impede our chances for survival… In the words and spirit of Jacques Ellul--one of the intellectual heirs Fallon pays homage to in the book--"Contemplation as Defiance/Deviance" is "a call to the sleeper to awake." – Eric Goodman, Producer, Composer, Performer: Thus Spoke the Spectacle

 

For nearly two decades, Peter K. Fallon worked for NBC News. Today, he is a media scholar and a powerful critic of the television he once produced… These essays by a writer of conscience and acute observation insist on the continuity between our media and our moral lives. Fallon’s evident passion for the potential of media, and his pointed criticisms of the moments when television and other media betray their promise, affect all who read his thoughtful books. – Anne-Marie Cusac, George Polk Award-winning investigative journalist; author, Cruel and Unusual: The Culture of Punishment in America

 Here is a link to some quotes from the book on Goodreads, and here is the table of contents:

Thanks for reading.

Happy 80th Birthday, Neil Postman

“Children are the living messages we send to a time we will not see.” -- Neil Postman (The Disappearance of Childhood, 1982)

A note from Lance Strate:

Friends, today is the 80th anniversary of Neil Postman's birth, and by way of honoring his memory, I want to ask you, and especially those of you who have blogs and websites and/or are on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and the like, to help in an effort to correct an injustice that exists online.

Neil's most memorable quote is, “Children are the living messages we send to a time we will not see.” But if you Google that quote, you'll find that more often than not, it is attributed to someone else, specifically John W. Whitehead (the rightwing lawyer who represented Paula Jones against Bill Clinton).

Naturally, this is upsetting for many of us, and it is pretty much impossible to get websites to change their listings, but we can drive themdown in the Google rankings by posting in searchable sites that Neil Postman wrote “Children are the living messages we send to a time we will not see.”

So, we have a begun a campaign on this day to spread the word, and set the online record straight, at least as much as possible.

Glad to help, Lance. And anyone reading this who'd like to set the record straight, feel free to post this great quote from one of America's great thinkers of the last century.

What Neil Postman Thinks About the Internet... (my imaginary conversation)

Some of us Facebook types have been having a discussion on the "Neil Postman Appreciation Group" brought up by Bob Berkman: What would Neil Postman say about Facebook, and "scholarly" social networking sites like Academia.edu. Well, I started thinking about it and realized he's already answered the question, several times over. In the last ten years or so of his life, Neil spent a lot of time asking the questions he outlined in "Building a Bridge..." So, in judging the value of Facebook -- or of digital social networking in general -- we might ask "what is the problem for which Facebook is the solution?"

Imagining the discussion that followed when I began to argue in favor of social networking, I believe it would go something like this:

Peter: Facebook keeps me in contact with people I don't see on a daily basis.
Neil: What, have you forgotten how to write? Peter, I remember you telling me in 1986 about how you wrote letters every week to your cousins in Ireland, about how you were a dedicated -- and habitual -- letter writer. What happened to you?
PKF: Writing all those letters took a lot of time and a lot of energy. With Facebook all I have to do is send someone a private message and they get it instantly.
NP: Does it take any less time or energy to sit and think and write a beautifully-crafted letter -- or "message" -- on Facebook than it did when you were writing and sending letters through the mail?
PKF: Well, actually, I don't really tend to write as much on Facebook as I used to in a letter. It's usually just a couple of lines.
NP: Why is that, Peter?
PKF: Well, for one thing I tend to "bump into" (in a disembodied sort of way) one or another of my cousins rather frequently online, and we exchange pleasantries almost on a daily basis. Not as much time passes between our moments of contact, and I don't feel as though I have to provide a comprehensive chronicle of recent events. Besides, that's what my "wall" is for.
NP: Uh-huh. And do you share everything on your wall? Do you share the same sorts of details of your life on your very public profile page that you once did, in letters, with your cousins?
PKF: Ummm...no.
NP: And so would you say that your interactions with your cousins have changed?
PKF: Yeah, I suppose so. They're far more frequent, but not nearly as deep. But isn't that my fault? You're not suggesting that Facebook has done this to me.
NP: No, Peter, but this is also my point: You have done this. But you have done this with Facebook. Facebook giveth, and Facebook taketh away. You have adopted Facebook as a convenience but told yourself that it is (as you consider all new technologies to be) a necessity. This was a choice involving no coercion or compromise of your intelligence or agency. You have accepted, unquestioningly, your culture's assumptions that, in all matters, but especially those of information, more is better than less and faster is better than slower. And you have accepted this knowing full well (as I taught you) that speed, quantity, and convenience are values in their own right and must compete with other values which you might (because you once did) hold in higher esteem. So you did this, Peter, and you continue to do this, beyond all logic. What's wrong with you?
PKF: I don't think you understand the enormity of the change our culture is going through at this moment, Neil...
NP: (~~wry grin~~)
PKF:...I mean, this digital thing is not all bad. It gives us "small people" -- as BP Chairman Carl-Henric Svanberg calls us -- the power to communicate widely with a potentially global audience. In this sense, it is every bit as revolutionary as Gutenberg's printing press. There has been an enormous proliferation of voices in the last ten years resulting in new ideas and new perspectives that otherwise might never have surfaced in a culture of top-down networks and mass communication.
NP: Sure, Peter, I can see that. But to what end?
PKF: Huh? Isn't the opening up of channels of communication to enfranchise the information-disenfranchised an end in itself?
NP: I'm not so sure. Do you ever read Jacques Ellul?
PKF: (~~petulantly~~) Yes...
NP: And perhaps a bit of Thoreau?
PKF: Yes...
NP: Well, then you ought to know that our whole approach, as a species, to the relationship between means and ends has changed. Our technologies, Thoreau said, are nothing more than im--
PKF:...improved means to an unimproved end, yes...I know...
NP: Ahem...Yes...and Ellul reminds us that the values of a technological society present us with a certain...imperative...with which we seem only too happy to conform, namely: to do, to act, to respond, to achieve, to produce, without much regard for what it is, exactly, we are doing, acting on, responding to, achieving, or producing. Technology, as I taught you (and you should have learned by now), answers the human question "how." Ethics answers the human question "why" and it is this question that seems more and more to go missing in our culture. Is giving a voice to those who have none a good in and of itself? Perhaps, and perhaps not. Our culture certainly tells us it is. The values of postmodern, highly technologically-developed "democracies" certainly support this point of view.
But isn't it at all instructive to ask, in the first place, whether those who heretofore have had no voice have anything, finally, to say?
PKF: But isn't this how knowledge increases and spreads, Neil? By opening up channels of information to allow more diverse points of view?
NP: This is how INFORMATION spreads, Peter, not necessarily knowledge. Knowledge is another story. To paraphrase Henri Poincare, knowledge is made up of facts, as a house is made of bricks. But knowledge is no more merely a pile of facts than a house is merely a pile of bricks. There is an epistemology at work here, Peter, and a curriculum. And there is a method. Critical thought, based on propositional language, is foundational to the construction of bodies of knowledge. The ability to discern -- and reject -- useless, irrelevant, and trivial information does not necessarily come easily to the human being. It takes years of hard work and practice to develop the literate mind and the rigors of critical thought. And without these all we have are piles of facts -- and in the digital world, truly prodigious piles of facts. Nicholas Carr asked the wrong question, and in doing so created a strawman argument that proponents of the digital epistemologies have gleefully attacked and destroyed: will Google make us stupid? He misses the point: human beings evolved stupid. We're stupid to begin with. Literacy and critical, propositional thought is the therapeutic intervention we invented to cure our stupidity. Digital technologies, to the extent that they provide us with a shortcut to "information" (again, without regard to the quality of the information) that bypasses these thought processes, don't make us stupid, but counteract the therapies that we ourselves invented to ameliorate our stupidity. Epistemology, curriculum, and method cannot be separated without consequence.
So what digital technologies have done, perhaps, in empowering the information-disenfranchised (as you call them) is not to have spread knowledge, but to have spread stupidity.
PKF: But many of my friends and colleagues insist that these digital technologies support propositional thought, that people are reading more as a result of the internet, and kindle, and iPads, and all the other various venues and applications. Can you deny that?
NP: I can neither confirm nor deny that, and I'll confess to you that I hope -- and pray -- that it is true. But I'll also confess to you that I have my doubts and remain skeptical about such suggestions based on my observations of human behavior, especially where technology is involved.
PKF: Why?
NP: Peter, are you aware of what the two most widely used applications of the internet are?
PKF: Ummm...yes, as a matter of fact.
NP: Well? What are you waiting for?
PKF: E-mail and pornography.
NP: Yes. Virtually 100% of internet users have one or more active e-mail accounts. Nearly 70% of internet users download and view pornography. Now, don't think I'm a prude, Peter (many people believe I am, you know), I'm not condemning people for engaging in an expressive form that is as old as the species. It just serves as an illustration of my point. Given a medium (one that is, in a sense, the accretion of all previous media) that allows for engagement with both propositionally-structured information and presentationally-structured information, people will choose titillation, excitement, and amusement everytime. Reading is difficult work and unnatural; sensory experience is not. I'm reminded of Christine Nystrom's article -- you remember Christine, don't you?
PKF: Of course I do. She was my dissertation chair.
NP: (~~annoyed~~) Oh, yes. That's right, she was. Well, anyhow, I'm reminded of something she once wrote called "literacy as deviance." Her point was that human beings invented writing and eventually print only because we were, at those points, insufficiently technologically advanced to invent television. All of human technological development, she suggested, is aimed at constructing tools that more and more accurately mimic human sensory experience. Hence, our infatuation with "virtual reality" (as though actual reality were not real enough), and her observation that alphabetic writing was merely a detour on this path.At any rate, whether you call it an iPad, or an e-book, or a schmindle, what you're really talking about is a computer hooked to the internet. Come to think of it, what kind of environment are we living in when you can make phone calls on a book? But I digress. As long as we're talking about computers with multiple applications, only one of those being to access text, we're very likely, I believe, to find that people will use them to look at pictures or movies, or listen to music just as frequently -- if not more -- as to read text.There are, of course, the other issues of what we're reading (to go back to our earlier discussion of information) and how we're reading (if you wanted to discuss Sven Birkerts's ideas of the deeply interior experience of "deep reading"), but I think you get my point. I am skeptical about the ability of digital technologies to support the epistemology, curriculum, and method of print culture. Extremely skeptical.
PKF: Listen, Neil, my friend Robert Berkman wanted me to ask you a question...
NP: How long have you known Bob Berkman?
PKF: Well, we've actually never met, but ---
NP: So why do you call him your friend? Look at how new technologies change our language!
PKF: Well, he's a Facebook friend...I know it's not the same thing, Neil, but, look, he's a nice guy, he's smart and asks good questions, suggests good answers -- and his profile picture always has a smile!
NP: Just get on with it, Peter. I don't have all day. I'm playing Bridge later with McLuhan, Innis, and Ong...
PKF: Well, Bob thought you might be more amenable to giving your approval to sites like Academia.edu...
NP: What's that? That's a new one to me...
PKF: It's a website for scholars. You have your own page -- a profile page that links to personal information, research interests and activities, etc. Other scholars can "follow" your work, and you can upload your research and get comments from other scholars.
NP: Why in the world would you want to do that?
PKF: Well, again Neil, it's this idea of opening up channels of communication, getting reactions from diverse perspectives, generating synergy...
NP: Synergy, schminergy, Peter. You're talking gobbledy-gook here...Peter, let me ask you a question.
PKF: By all means.
NP: You've written a book now, correct?
PKF: Ummm...actually, my second book just came out. It's called "The Meta --
NP: Yes, yes, whatever. My point is, did you write this book by yourself, or did you organize a committee to write it for you?
PKF: I wrote it myself, Neil, but there were a lot of things I was writing about that were, quite honestly, beyond the boundaries of my expertise and personal and academic experiences. I found it both useful and necessary to have the manuscript read, at various stages, by philosophers and theologians to make sure I was miving in the right direction.
NP: And did you find these philosophers and theologians on Academia.edu?
PKF: No.
NP: Why not?
PKF: Well, I don't know most people on that website ---
NP: You don't know Bob Berkman but you call him your friend...
PKF: But that's Facebook, and that's different. What we're talking about now is--
NP: Facebook with another name. You didn't put your work up on Academia.edu for comments, and you wouldn't have accepted comments or criticisms that were offered on Academia.edu because you don't know who is leaving them. Oh, you may see their names there, but that doesn't mean you "know" them. Instead, you found your readers where?
PKF: Oh, these were people I knew personally and respected. These were people who others know and respect too.
NP: Another question, Peter, beyond the specific issue of specialized response. You didn't write chapters of this book and post them to get others' responses?
PKF: No.
NP: If you had, would you have modified or changed your manuscript in any way?
PKF: No.
NP: Why not?
PKF: Oh, simple: this was my book based on my ideas. I've had this experience before in conversations about this book, and about the perspective from which I wrote it. People can't touch my data, but they hate my conclusions. We get into arguments about "the meaning of it all," and, at the end of the day, people are just resistant to points of view that stray too far from their comfort zones. I thought about posting excerpts on Academia.edu, and in fact did post excerpts on Goodreads.com -- which is more interested in literary merit than scholarship -- but decided to avoid Academia.edu. I thought there's be too much pressure to conform to more mainstream points of view.
NP: You can tell Bob Berkman that I agree. My books, for better or worse, have all been mine.

(Anyway, that's how I imagine the conversation going...)