Neil Postman Quotes

the day Johannes Gutenberg finished his wooden printing press in 1440. Western civilization turned onto a path toward more efficient, accessible communication of knowledge.]

People sometimes announce that we have entered 'the information age' as if information did not exist in other times. I think that every age was an age of information, each in its own way and according to the available media.

We are living, we have long been told, in the Information Age. Yet now we are faced with the sickening suspicion that technology has run ahead of us.

Ever since the arrival of printing - thought to be the invention of the devil because it would put false opinions into people's minds - people have been arguing that new technology would have disastrous consequences for language.

What gunpowder did for war the printing press has done for the mind.

I think the iPhone was as significant an invention as the Gutenburg press, in terms of the future of humanity.

Ever since I first used a computer in the early '80s, I've thought of it as a fundamentally new medium for the dissemination of ideas which can transform people's lives and the society we live in.

We live in an age of rapid mass media, television, Internet. They determine our tempo, not books.

Technology brought in the mass media and technology is now taking it away.

The information highway will transform our culture as dramatically as Gutenberg's press did the Middle Ages.

The Internet has been the most fundamental change during my lifetime and for hundreds of years. Someone the other day said, "It's the biggest thing since Gutenberg," and then someone else said "No, it's the biggest thing since the invention of writing."

Before that, they thought talking movies might eliminate radio as well. But radio just keeps getting stronger.

It is the framework which changes with each new technology and not just the picture within the frame.

We all grew up, our grandmothers and mothers had about three channels to watch, so we watched those soaps and now, a generation has grown up with the Internet and computers and video games.

We do live in this age of new media.

Every technology, including the printing press, comes at some price.

When people say that the Internet is going to make us all geniuses, that was said about the telegraph. On the other hand, when they say the Internet is going to make us stupid, that also was said about the telegraph.

Kids today are smarter than we ever were. And they've got computers, too, which is awesome. They're scary to me.

If you look at the history of technology over a couple hundred years, it's all about time compression and making the globe smaller. It's had positive effects, all the ones that we know. So we're much less likely to have the kind of terrible misunderstandings that led to World War I, for example.

Every time a new technology comes along, we feel we're about to break through to a place where we will not be able to recover. The advent of broadcast radio confused people. It delighted people, of course, but it also changed the world.

This is a very different world. Much of it is new. What has happened is that information technology has politicized the world…It’s a world where most of the big problems spill over national boundaries.

These new technologies are not yet inevitable. But if they blossom fully into being, freedom may irrevocably perish.

… the telephone was only a convenience permitting Americans to do more orally and with less effort than what they had been doing before.

The coming of the wireless Era will make war impossible, because it will make war ridiculous.

In the end the question is: Who is to be master, man or his machines? As long as the control over technology rests primarily on economic calculation, the victor is not likely to be man.