Saw this interview of Neil Postman:
Observations:
- From 1988, so a lot of contrast (three and a half decades have passed)
- Mentions discontinuity as an issue
- How a big change of the past two decades (speaking then) was people getting conditioned to discontinuity and wild juxtaposition on television
- How people wouldn't accept this out-of-context advertisement in a book they were reading
- Perhaps some of the long-form podcasts (Joe Rogan, Lex Fridman, many others) are a reaction to this, where people want continuity, since that's the only way to have serious discussions
- "The zapper makes every viewer his/her own director" and "... creates a very impatient audience" and "... has their tolerance span reduced" … could it be any more true of the internet today?
- Musing on how "video recorders might change television" … but ridiculously utopian (now), hoping that "television would become serious", when exactly the opposite happened
- "Language as a means of public communication has become less relevant" (how people wouldn't listen to debates from (then) a century ago, and wouldn't understand the Gettysburg Address)
- A "different kind of information" in the image (and the internet only slices-and-dices images even more -- I'd even say that it has converted text to images in the way that things are read on the internet)
- "Information crisis", where we used to have a scarcity of information, and school would give them a set of solid, reliable information, and now we have information satiation, a new problem of now knowing what is relevant (mentions Hirsch and his list)