In Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman compared the public discourse between before and after telegraph invention, he suggested the telegraph altered the very nature of social and personal discourse in American culture."The telegraph made a three-pronged attack on typography 's definition of discourse, introducing on a large scale irrelevance, impotence, and in coherence.”Said in The Peek-a-Boo World chapter. The author believed modern technology from telegraph to television, makes discourse broken, disconnected, and sensationalized. Neil Postman wrote the book in 1980s, the golden age of television, he didn’t foresee the rising new communication technology—the Internet, will create a whole new discourse. Internet amplifying the weakness
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Decentralization, the most important distinction of Internet discourse makes Internet not comparable to the telegraph, radio, and television. Prior to the age of telegraphy, oral and typographic culture are the main stream communication methods, “the American was still a composite of regions, each conversing in its own ways, addressing its own interests.” Then telegraph changed this by “erased state lines, collapsed regions, and wrapping the continent in an information grid”(P65). After telegraph, television brought new scene to public discourse, “gave the epistemological biases of the telegraph and the photograph their most potent expression”, “television is the command center of the new epistemology”(P78). Either the telegraph or the television period, the pubilc discourse share one common characteristic, they both depend on command center, the audience can only be a receiver. So it 's not difficult to understand why the newspaper and television are always the best brainwash machine, they are the best propaganda tools for the dictatorship. But the communication pattern changed thoroughly by the Internet, the information could broadcast and consumed by every person from everywhere the network covered. There is no command center on the web, no one owns the Internet, everyone owns the …show more content…
I choose the word 'assault ' deliberately here, to amplify the point implied in Boorstin 's 'graphic revolution '”(P74), Mr. Postman would probably feel more disappointment about the “assault” on language making by Internet today. As a side effect, Internet not only strangling all paper media like newspaper and magazine, but also eliminating the purity of language. When a blogger post an article, he or she don 't need to take the responsibility of grammar and spell check. Emoji become a normal part of communication language in IM talk. Tweeter limited the length of a tweet in 140—characters, not words. This is the worst time for language as an artistic form, language have been assaulting fiercely internal, language is being tore up. Images, animations, videos building a new discourse style, called multimedia, language only exist as a
Decentralization, the most important distinction of Internet discourse makes Internet not comparable to the telegraph, radio, and television. Prior to the age of telegraphy, oral and typographic culture are the main stream communication methods, “the American was still a composite of regions, each conversing in its own ways, addressing its own interests.” Then telegraph changed this by “erased state lines, collapsed regions, and wrapping the continent in an information grid”(P65). After telegraph, television brought new scene to public discourse, “gave the epistemological biases of the telegraph and the photograph their most potent expression”, “television is the command center of the new epistemology”(P78). Either the telegraph or the television period, the pubilc discourse share one common characteristic, they both depend on command center, the audience can only be a receiver. So it 's not difficult to understand why the newspaper and television are always the best brainwash machine, they are the best propaganda tools for the dictatorship. But the communication pattern changed thoroughly by the Internet, the information could broadcast and consumed by every person from everywhere the network covered. There is no command center on the web, no one owns the Internet, everyone owns the …show more content…
I choose the word 'assault ' deliberately here, to amplify the point implied in Boorstin 's 'graphic revolution '”(P74), Mr. Postman would probably feel more disappointment about the “assault” on language making by Internet today. As a side effect, Internet not only strangling all paper media like newspaper and magazine, but also eliminating the purity of language. When a blogger post an article, he or she don 't need to take the responsibility of grammar and spell check. Emoji become a normal part of communication language in IM talk. Tweeter limited the length of a tweet in 140—characters, not words. This is the worst time for language as an artistic form, language have been assaulting fiercely internal, language is being tore up. Images, animations, videos building a new discourse style, called multimedia, language only exist as a