In Fact...

NEIL POSTMAN

Neil Postman, who died October 5, was author of many well-known books on language and education, a contributor to this magazine and a valued member of its editorial board (though he did not always agree with our editorials on Israel). He was our house McLuhanite. At one meeting, speaking on technology, he delivered a lecture on automatic car windows. Why were they needed? He'd always thought rolling up the window by hand crank was perfectly satisfactory. You realized that if you thought about the need for automatic car windows a few days, you'd cover all the social, economic and moral issues of modern capitalist technology. He liked to say, "What is the question to which this is the answer?" As professor of culture and communication at New York University, Postman was a foe of language pollution. "If we are to resolve some of our more reachable, moral, social, and political problems," he once wrote, "we will require, as precondition, a relatively clean semantic environment." In a Nation essay on TV news he observed, "If knowledge is power, if the function of information is to modify or provide direction to action, then it is almost precisely true that TV news shows give nearly no information and even less knowledge. Except of course through their commercials. One can be told about Bounty, Braniff and Burger King, and then do something in relation to them.... Everything on a TV news show is arranged so that it is unnecessary, undesirable and, in any event, very difficult to attend to the sense of what is depicted." Neil Postman fought for meaning against obfuscation. He insisted that clarity of thought requires clarity of language. He made us think about the cultural consequences of technological change.

THE BOSS ON BUSH

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