7/10

Postman wrote this polemic on Television in 1984. The World Wide Web was incepted in 1989. We'd have to wait until 2006 till Twitter launches and the 2010s until it takes over public discourse but the obsolescence of the all-might Television since then lends the book a certain retro-futuristic aspect...for a lack of words. That's not to say it's rendered irrelevant because its core arguments still resounds strongly as ever if not stronger.

- Cultures are defined by their medium of communication.
- Mediums have their own latent biases.
- No medium is fit for all discourse.

I think the average informed citizen of today's world, with their temporal proximity to Facebook genocides and The Culture War, has an intuition if not a deep understanding of what Postman was furiously gesturing at then, especially the last point. Sure, the specific form of the dangers warned of herein don't apply anymore but I think there's something to be gained from his appeals and attitude to just how critical the subject matter. To use his own words:

For no medium is excessively dangerous if its users understand what its dangers are.

...only through a deep and unfailing awareness of the structure and effects of information, through a demystification of media, is there any hope of our gaining some measure of control over television, or the computer, or any other medium.

This statement in particular and the few solutions he proposes to that effect lead me to raise different questions like:

- What comes after understanding?
- Has any historical civilization ever manged to master it's prime mediums instead of being controlled by it?
- Any great attempts?
- How many of those attempts involved on thought cops, dogma, censorship?

His few solutions don't try to address these and in part because this is a short book but in part, I imagine...no, I sense from his words he understands the enormity of the challenge. I do share his belief that there's hope, slim as it is but at the end of this book, all I'm able to is wring my hands wait until someone comes up with something better than "boycott Meta" .