![]() Pickersgill photographs deviceless people pretending to have mobile devices in their hands. Our digital devices undermine social interactions by isolating us, as demonstrated by the remarkable artistic work of Eric Pickersgill. ![]() Yet all citizens are undergoing this same transformation. “Television has by its power to control the time, attention, and cognitive habits of our youth gained the power to control their education.” Certainly this is truer now when our youth-many of whom are learning virtually (perhaps an oxymoron?)-are educated by the vast, untamed wilderness of the Internet and social media. Postman also recognized that technology was changing our mental processes and social habits. The woman lost her job less than twenty-four hours later. A videotaped confrontation between a black, male birdwatcher and a white, female dog owner in New York City’s Central Park in May was posted to Twitter and received 40 million views. “We face the rapid dissolution of the assumptions of an education organized around the slow-moving printed word, and the equally rapid emergence of a new education based on the speed-of-light electronic message.” What Postman perceived in television has been dramatically intensified by smartphones and social media. “Our own tribe is undergoing a vast and trembling shift from the magic of writing to the magic of electronics,” he cautioned. Indeed, it’s pretty obvious that our digital age, in innumerable ways, aggravates our social and political distemper. Postman called television a propagator of “irrelevance, impotence, and incoherence.” That seems an apt description of the first presidential debate, as well as of broader trends we have witnessed this year. In Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, Postman criticized television as a medium of information that, regardless of its content, caused Americans to understand all of public discourse through the lens of entertainment. ![]() Thirty-five years ago, New York University professor of communication Neil Postman predicted the political and social implosion we have witnessed in 2020. Biden, in turn, called the celebrity president a “ clown.” The whole thing appeared a bit like a reality TV show gone off the rails this is perhaps appropriate, given that Trump was himself the host of a long-running reality TV competition. Trump constantly derided Biden’s 47-year political record, and told him he lacked the “blood” to govern. “ Chaotic,” “ vicious,” and “ ugly“ were some of the words used to describe the sharp exchanges between President Trump and Democratic nominee Joe Biden. Few Americans, one imagines, walked away from the first presidential debate this year feeling optimistic about national politics. ![]()
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