Neil Postman: Amusing Ourselves to Death

            Neil Postman was a special type of a man and considered that he was not an expert on anything, and yet he was ready to express his opinion on every subject under the sun. The person's mind was continuously working at jokes, headlines and different ideas. This infected an individual when he met Mr. Postman and that could be responded to only with humor, and even that was likely to bring out more ideas. There were a lot of people who knew him - in excess of a hundred thousand or so - had first met his humor. This was also reflected in the books that he wrote. Each of these is also a source of propaganda for his views and written like an essay. The first was "The Disappearance of Childhood" in 1982, and this was on the infantile nature of American culture. The next book was in 1985 and a satire on entertainment and was named "Amusing Ourselves to Death". The last was in 1993 called "technopoly" and this criticized the fall of culture to technology. He had an excellent intellectual pose along with poise in public meetings and all this rode on the back of his capacity for humor. He always felt that he was the civilized man in a barbaric setting. This setting gradually changed into television and was concerned with the dots, and pursued him all his life. (Neil Postman (1931-2003): Some Recollections).

             Now let us look at what is this television and how it connects with people. In the United States it first started transmission in New York and the British play, "The Man with the Flower in His Mouth" was broadcast there in July 1930. Thus one can say that television started off in the heart of United States and the television station was located in South Eastern New York at the mouth of the Hudson River. The station began broadcasting seven days a week on July 21, 1931. This was a television channel or station that broadcast on the terrestrial mode as that was the only mode available then. The bandwidth was then highly confined and this led to a high control by the government.

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