Are there any good critiques of Neil Postman out there?

September 9, 2014 12:19 PM

So I was assigned Amusing Ourselves to Death as a freshman, and strongly disliked it; much of it was over my head, and my takeaway then was that he was merely a reactionary who believed "Print good. Electronic media bad." However, I'm older and hopefully smarter and I'd like to come at it fresh, and see if I can get more out of it.

His writing is dense, though, and I am in need of some other books, articles or reviews that look at him critically (in approval as well as in disagreement) so that I can wrap my brain around it better. Basically I'd like to understand his school of criticism and what others have thought and said in response.

When I go online, all I can find is approving mentions or summaries of his arguments, which aren't what I need.

posted by emjaybee to Media & Arts (6 answers total)

The media ecology article on Wikipedia has some good references and notes.
posted by michaelh at 12:46 PM on September 9, 2014

I'd go back to Marshall McLuhan, whom Postman owes a lot.
posted by Emperor SnooKloze at 1:45 PM on September 9, 2014

I, too, hated that book. I hated the class in which I read it, which was a sort of "technology and society" course in the sociology department meant as a moralistic critique of technology designed to induce suicide in engineering students. Kind of like a three hour lecture from Jaron Lanier, but probably less entertaining.
posted by deathpanels at 2:45 PM on September 9, 2014 [3 favorites]

I *taught* that book to freshmen; it was awful. The only reason I have any positive regard for it now is that I bought Roger Water's album of the same name, which is loosely inspired by the Postman book and does, to my mind, a much more humane and thought-provoking job of describing the problem. Sorry I can't offer a critical review or article! But it's a great album. Everyone and their dog has a guest appearance on it. Marv Albert even provides color commentary for a televised war.
posted by helpthebear at 3:51 PM on September 9, 2014 [1 favorite]

Try Postman's Technopoly instead. I read both Amusing Ourselves to Death & Techopoly back in college and found Technopoly a better articulation of his concerns about Technology & Culture and is not as polemical as Amusing Ourselves to Death. I don't agree with all of the premises he lays out in the Technopoly but I do think its an important work in the Media Ecology field that is worth reading if you are interested in those sorts of things.
posted by KingEdRa at 7:11 PM on September 9, 2014 [2 favorites]

Response by poster: Well, ya'll are making me feel a little better for not liking it. Online it's almost all glowing reviews, at least in the first six layers of Google or so.

Possibly no one has yet written the scathing critique all highly regarded scholars get eventually.

But I will try Technopoly.
posted by emjaybee at 7:12 AM on September 10, 2014