Postman, Thamus, and Facebook (again)

I like Neil Postman; I’m sympathetic to many of his concerns insofar as they can be applied to new media today – and perhaps that’s why I find him so frustrating at times. I’ve been going through his Amusing Ourselves to Death for another class and while he can sound a bit extreme at times in that book, I thought that in the opening chapter to Technology, Literacy, and Progress he took some arguments to a hyperbolic level without letting his readers in on the fun.

Using an excerpt from Plato’s Phaedrus Postman accommodates Thamus’s concerns about writing (as a new technology) to Postman’s own time and the flourishing of new technologies (particularly the computer and television). His argument is not so much that these new technologies will damage our memory and knowledge (these conclusions, according to Postman and Thamus are moot points) – rather Postman suggests that these technologies are paradigm-changers that significantly alter the way in which we understand concepts like memory and knowledge (as well as everything from politics to love).

At times Postman sounds like he is favoring archaic definitions of words and lamenting their malleability while blaming changes in language entirely on technology – as if language was not prone to fluctuation within oral cultures. But at the same time there is something deeper than definitions that technologies can change. I have written elsewhere about how Facebook has great potential to detrimentally change the way we understand larger concepts. What is our Facebook generation going to consider “news-worthy” when their primary interface for Facebook interactions is a “News Feed” that is filled with everything from Farmville scores to friend updates and inside jokes (with links to “actual news” occasionally interspersed). The infamous “Like” button (interestingly synonymous with the thumbs-up symbol) is another interesting test case. Obviously “liking” something can have a number of different meanings and motivations on Facebook. My “likes” are often political: I use them to maintain relationships and fulfill obligations. They can also mean “I’m too lazy to actually interact with this post” or “I know exactly how she said that!” or “That’s funny” or “What an idiot”. More could be said about the fact that your only options on Facebook are silence, comments, or like; there is no room for a convenient dislike and it hardly affords itself to the hard work of love. Much has been said about these things and more (consider friends, communities, relationships, etc.), but the point is that it is hard to disagree with Postman’s conclusions even if arguments seem a bit silly.

Lastly, I just want to juxtapose two quotes: one from this piece and one from last week’s Bolter reading. Postman follows the Ong and Havelock line of thinking that gives technology a certain sense of agency where writing, for example, is responsible for impoverished memories. At one point Postman speaks of the “early stages of a technology’s intrusion into culture” as if it were a rodent that steadily destroys a garden of its own volition (35). Culture remains helpless as technology forcefully subdues her from without. Bolter takes a radically different approach when he writes: “It is not a question of seeing writing as an external technological force that influences or changes cultural practice; instead, writing is always a part of culture… they are not separate agents that can act on culture from the outside” (19).

Facebook didn’t happen to us. We demonstrated a need and once it was filled we continued to shape it as it shaped us. Technology and culture share a cyclical relationship but it is not as if they are two equal parties. The fact that technologies can’t be understood apart from the cultures from which they sprouted should be obvious when we see how the same technologies are used or manifested in different cultures. Google is used (and designed) differently in China than it is elsewhere in the world. In global technologies (e.g., YouTube) it is easy to see marked differences in how different cultures use the same space (e.g., content, frequency, participation, duration, etc.).

I think Postman has a lot of valid concerns, but I wish he’d get to them in a more palatable fashion. As a final case-in-point, despite his missteps along the way, he finishes with this seemingly incontrovertible conclusion: “New technologies alter the structure of our interests: the things we think about. They alter the character of our symbols: the things we think with. And they alter the nature of community: the arena in which thoughts develop” (39, italics original).