Neil Postman

Tecnópolis es esa fase de nuestra civilización en la que la tecnología ejerce un monopolio total sobre la cultura y la sociedad. Tecnópolis es un mundo en el que la principal meta del pensamiento y el trabajo humano es la eficiencia; en el que el cálculo técnico es en todos los sentidos superior al juicio humano; y en el que los problemas sociales tratan de solucionarse casi exclusivamente mediante el juicio de los «expertos», en detrimento de una participación política efectiva en las decisiones que afectan a nuestro modo de vida.

Neil Postman, con Huxley, se pregunta "de que nos reímos y por qué hemos dejado de pensar", y dirige sus respuestas a la televisión y a su modo entretenido de presentar, que ha transformado drásticamente la politica, la educacion, el periodismo, la ciencia y la religion. Recordando la frase del actor presidente norteamericano Ronald Reagan ("La politica es igual que el show business"), Postman se lamenta de la muerte de la palabra impresa, con pasion de profesor y melancolia de sabio historiador.

Originally published in 1985, Neil Postman's groundbreaking polemic about the corrosive effects oftelevision on our politics and public discourse has been hailed as a twenty-first-century book published in the twentieth century. Now, with television joined by more sophisticated electronic media - from the Internet to cell phones to DVDs - it has taken on even greater significance. Amusing Ourselves to Death is a prophetic look at what happens when politics, journalism, education, and even religion become subject to the demands of entertainment. It is also a blueprint for regaining controlof our media, so that they can serve our highest goals.

Postman plantea la crisis que atraviesa la educación como el fracaso de los dioses que han regido nuestras sociedades hasta ahora. Ni las ideologías nacionalistas, ni las nuevas tecnologías, ni el consumismo exacerbado han sido capaces de proporcionar una base estable a la educacion. El fin de la educacion ofrece una serie de propuestas para que la escuela recupere una funcioneducativa que sustituya el enfoque instructivo dominante, demasiado pendiente de teorias pedagogicas efimeras, de intereses politicos particulares y de cubrir las lagunas educativas que otrora se resolvian en el seno de la estructura familiar

An important guide to understanding what you''re getting--and not getting--from TV news. Postman and Powers warn that anyone who relies exclusively on TV for a knowledge of the world is making a serious mistake and suggest ways to intelligently evaluate TV news shows.

At a time when we are reexamining our values, reeling from the pace of change, witnessing the clash between good instincts and "pragmatism," dealing with the angst of a new millennium, Neil Postman, one of our most distinguished observers of contemporary society, provides for us a source of guidance and inspiration. In Building a Bridge to the Eighteenth Century he revisits the Enlightenment, that great flowering of ideas that provided a humane direction for the future -- ideas that formed our nation and that we would do well to embrace anew.He turns our attention to Goethe, Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, Kant, Edward Gibbon, Adam Smith, Thomas Paine, Jefferson, and Franklin, and to their then-radical thinking about inductive science, religious and political freedom, popular education, rational commerce, the nation-state, progress, and happiness.Postman calls for a future connected to traditions that provide sane authority and meaningful purpose -- as opposed to an overreliance on technology and an increasing disregard for the lessons of history. And he argues passionately for specific new guidelines in the education of our children, with renewed emphasis on developing the intellect as successfully as we are developing a computer-driven world.Witty, provocative, and brilliantly reasoned, Building a Bridge to the Eighteenth Century is Neil Postmans most radical, and most commonsensical, book yet.

In a series of feisty and ultimately hopeful essays, one of Americas sharpest social critics casts a shrewd eye over contemporary culture to reveal the worst -- and the best -- of our habits of discourse, tendencies in education, and obsessions with technological novelty. Readers will find themselves rethinking many of their bedrock assumptions: Should education transmit culture or defend us against it? Is technological innovation progress or a peculiarly American addiction? When everyone watches the same television programs -- and television producers dont discriminate between the audiences for Sesame Street and Dynasty -- is childhood anything more than a sentimental concept? Writing in the traditions of Orwell and H.L. Mencken, Neil Postman sends shock waves of wit and critical intelligence through the cultural wasteland.

In this comprehensive response to the education crisis, the author of Teaching as a Subversive Activity returns to the subject that established his reputation as one of our most insightful social critics. Postman presents useful models with which schools can restore a sense of purpose, tolerance, and a respect for learning.

A no-holds-barred assault on outdated teaching methodswith dramatic and practical proposals on how education can be made relevant to todays world.Praise for Teaching As a Subversive ActivityA healthy dose of Postman and Weingartner is a good thing: if they make even a dent in the pious . . . American classroom, the book will be worthwhile.New York Times Book Review Teaching and knowledge are subversive in that they necessarily substitute awareness for guesswork, and knowledge for experience. Experience is no use in the world of Apollo 8. It is simply necessary to know. However, it is also necessary to know the effect of Apollo 8 in creating a new Global Theatre in which student and teacher alike are looking for roles. Postman and Weingartner make excellent theatrical producers in the new Global Theatre.Marshall McLuhan It will take courage to read this book . . . but those who are asking honest questionswhats wrong with the worlds in which we live, how do we build communication bridges cross the Generation Gap, what do they want from us?these people will squirm in the discovery that the answers are really within themselves.Saturday Review Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner go beyond the now-familiar indictments of American education to propose basic ways of liberating both teachers and students from becoming personnel rather than people . . . the authors have created what may become a primer of the new education Their book is intended for anyone, teacher or not, who is concerned with sanity and survival in a world of precipitously rapid change, and its worth your reading.Playboy This challenging, liberating book can unlock not only teachers but anyone for whom language and learning are not dead.Nat Hentoff

From the vogue for nubile models to the explosion in the juvenile crime rate, this modern classic of social history and media traces the precipitous decline of childhood in America todayand the corresponding threat to the notion of adulthood.Deftly marshaling a vast array of historical and demographic research, Neil Postman, author of Technopoly, suggests that childhood is a relatively recent invention, which came into being as the new medium of print imposed divisions between children and adults. But now these divisions are eroding under the barrage of television, which turns the adult secrets of sex and violence into poprular entertainment and pitches both news and advertising at the intellectual level of ten-year-olds.Informative, alarming, and aphorisitc, The Disappearance of Childhood is a triumph of history and prophecy.

A witty, often terrifying that chronicles our transformation into a society that is shaped by technologyfrom the acclaimed author of Amusing Ourselves to Death."A provocative book ... A tool for fighting back against the tools that run our lives." Dallas Morning NewsThe story of our societys transformation into a Technopoly: a society that no longer merely uses technology as a support system but instead is shaped by itwith radical consequences for the meanings of politics, art, education, intelligence, and truth.

What happens when media and politics become forms of entertainment? As our world begins to look more and more like Orwells 1984, Neils Postmans essential guide to the modern media is more relevant than ever."Its unlikely that Trump has ever read Amusing Ourselves to Death, but his ascent would not have surprised Postman. -CNNOriginally published in 1985, Neil Postmans groundbreaking polemic about the corrosive effects of television on our politics and public discourse has been hailed as a twenty-first-century book published in the twentieth century. Now, with television joined by more sophisticated electronic mediafrom the Internet to cell phones to DVDsit has taken on even greater significance. Amusing Ourselves to Death is a prophetic look at what happens when politics, journalism, education, and even religion become subject to the demands of entertainment. It is also a blueprint for regaining control of our media, so that they can serve our highest goals.A brilliant, powerful, and important book. This is an indictment that Postman has laid down and, so far as I can see, an irrefutable one. Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post Book World

En la gran tradición intelectual de disidencia ante la civilización industrial presente en Estados Unidos con autores como H.D. Thoreau, Lewis Mumford, Rachel Carson, Carolyn Merchant, Theodore Roszak o Nicholas Carr, Neil Postman sobresale como uno de los mayores criticos de la tecnologia del siglo veinte. Nacido en 1931 en Nueva York, Postman se hizo celebre con Divertirse hasta morir (1986), critica de como la television reducia la politica, la historia y el periodismo a mero entretenimiento, trivializando el discurso publico; y con Tecnopolis. La rendicion de la cultura a la tecnologia (1992, que ya publicamos en 2018), denuncia del monopolio tecnologico sobre nuestras vidas. Por un ateismo tecnologico. La cultura frente a la civilizacion informatica reune siete ensayos y conferencias, de 1987 a 2000, donde expone sus criticas hacia la television y las nuevas tecnologias. Frente al entusiasmo ante los progresos de la comunicacion y la informatica, su voz se alzo, casi solitaria, para advertirnos de las graves consecuencias de aceptar sin precaucion toda innovacion tecnica. En una civilizacion que vuelve sagrados los ordenadores y la television, y convierte en fetiche toda innovacion, Postman abogaba por armarse de un ateismo tecnologico con el que defender todo lo que mereciera la pena preservar de una cultura. Postman fallecio en 2003, y no pudo comprobar hasta que punto se harian realidad sus predicciones sobre el peligro de un mundo entregado a la tecnologia y al imperio de la superficialidad. Pero sus enseñanzas y advertencias resuenan hoy con fuerza, asi como su llamamiento a que nuestra cultura trate de alzar defensas frente a una civilizacion entregada al reino informatico. Neil Postman refuto uno de los mayores lugares comunesde nuestra sociedad: la creencia en que la tecnologiapuede resolver todos los males de la humanidad. ―THE GUARDIAN

Amusing Ourselves to Death has established itself as a key text in cultural and media studies. Television, Postman argues, has taken the place of the printed word at the center of our culture, and in doing so has trivialised the once serious and coherent discussion of all public affairs. Even our political and religious leaders today depend more on camera angles and showmanship than on reason and rhetoric. Postman makes a convincing, often wittily argued, case that we are moving not towards George Orwell's vision of the future but towards Aldous Huxley's Brave New World in which people become addicted to technologies which take away their capacities to think: their critical faculties are destroyed and their sense of history is lost.