How people think about time and space, and about things and processes, will be greatly influenced by the grammatical features of their language.
– Postman, 1985: 10
While provocative, Postman in effect summarizes McLuhan’s original proposition that “the medium is the message” but loads it with a value proposition, failing to present any evidence to support this subjective self-described “lamentation”. (Postman, 1985: 8). Rather than present an analysis of society’s current media landscape, Postman presents an “end-of-society” point of view in which he sees the rise of one media over another. This position presents an “either/or” scenario in which both typography (print, speech) cannot exist concurrently with television (image, sound, video). In discussing how his argument originates from studying the Bible, he writes, “The God of the Hews was to exist in the Word and through the Word, an unprecedented conception requiring the highest order of abstract thinking. Iconography thus became blasphemy so that a new kind of God could enter a culture.” (Postman, 1985: 9). However, this restriction to word over image is a method of controlling the distribution of the message. In this way, religion could be diseminent only to and through the literate and educated. However, image does not require this same level of literacy and its production was more widespread. As Postman places value of word over image, he attempts to continue this control over communication to a selected group and protect this position over power, effectively gatekeeping “the message”.
Postman’s distain for image-based communication is driven by his notion that this medium itself cannot reflect an “elevated” level of discourse. He writes, “You cannot do political philosphy on television. Its form works against the content.” (Postman, 1985: 7), Yet his examples of this are troublesome and dismissive: Las Vegas as a model for future cities in which public discourse is through the form of entertainment; the presentation of news is only by ‘the beautiful’ who disregard their scripts and research; and “fat people are effectively excluded from running for high political office.” (Postman, 1985: 4) He even admits that these examples are clichés! This lack of substaintial evidence for his argument is explict in his blasé approach to citing references. Without bothering to find the original source, he writes, “We are all, as Huxley says someplace, Great Abbreviators” (Postman, 1985: 6). Unfortunately, this approach is common throughout the entire chapter and leads to an antedotal argument.
This is not to say that Postman does not present valuable thoughts. The idea that what tools a culture uses to communicate fundamentally influence “the formation of the culture’s intellectual and social preoccupations” is insightful (Postman, 1985: 9). Yet, McLuhan, and later Langdon Winner in “Do Artifacts Have Politics?” (1980) both discuss this point without placing value judgements or declaring “end of the world” scenarios. Key to meaningful discussions of the media landscape and its effects is the decoupling of analysis from value judgement, something Postman fails to do in “The Medium is the Metaphor.”
