Amusing Ourselves to Death娱乐消遣至死.pptx

;;;;;;; It is natural to say that Neil Postman’s prophecy is the inheritance and negation of Aldous Huxley’s predictions. In this book, the world with strong metaphorical sense of “Amusing to death” described by Neil Postman which is the manipulated by the mass medium is expounded upon; the “Peek-a-Boo world,” which is characterized by fragmentation, instantaneity and photography, is analyzed in terms of its negative influence on children’s physical and mental development, with the author’s hope to be able to arouse again the world’s attention to children’s growing environments and their educational methods.;The Medium is the Metaphor;;.;;The Peek-a-Boo World;The Peek-a-Boo World;In addition, “photograph” means “writing with light.” He says this is perhaps ironic, given that photography and writing, he will argue, have nothing in common. He claims that photography, on its own, can only deal with concrete particularities. It cannot deal with abstract, remote, internal, or invisible content. What’s more, photographs, like the telegraph, isolate information from its context. Nothing outside the frame of the photograph is visible. Postman argue that the photograph and the telegraph gave each other a pseudo-context. Brief sound bites of language, accompanied by a photographic image, became a popular item of consumption—whether in politics, entertainment, or advertising. But this pseudo-context is only a false refuge of sorts, for a culture “overwhelmed by irrelevance, incoherence, and impotence.” ;Postman wraps up this chapter by noting that the culture of the image, the relentless de-contextualization and irrelevancy that saturates our everyday lives, goes basically unnoticed. In other words, there seems something totally natural about this kind of communication of information. This, contends, Postman, is the most pernicious effect of television culture: to make that which ought to seem strange into something apparently natural. His goal, he says, is to “mak