“Human intelligence,” the cultural critic Neil Postman once wrote, “is among the most fragile things in nature. It doesn’t take much to distra

Are we becoming a post-literate society?

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2024-12-27 23:00:08

“Human intelligence,” the cultural critic Neil Postman once wrote, “is among the most fragile things in nature. It doesn’t take much to distract it, suppress it, or even annihilate it.”

The year was 1988, a former Hollywood actor was in the White House, and Postman was worried about the ascendancy of pictures over words in American media, culture and politics. Television “conditions our minds to apprehend the world through fragmented pictures and forces other media to orient themselves in that direction,” he argued in an essay in his book Conscientious Objections. “A culture does not have to force scholars to flee to render them impotent. A culture does not have to burn books to assure that they will not be read . . . There are other ways to achieve stupidity.”

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