A Neighborhood of Strangers

After reading Neil Postman’s, Amusing Ourselves to Death, the chapter that caught my attention was Chapter 5, The Peek-a-Boo World.  This chapter is about how real human to human communication has been lost by the telegraph, the photograph, and finally, television.  He writes that we now live in a peek-a-boo world where all of our electronic devices give us only short pops of information that are entertaining but don’t really make sense.

Postman states that in the 1840’s, information could only travel as fast as human beings could carry it.  The written word was meaningful and relevant to people in their lives.  With the invention of electricity, the forms of communication changed.  The telegraph made information into a commodity that didn’t need to be tied to any function.  One day after Morse demonstrated the telegraph’s ability, the first known use of the telegraph by a newspaper occurred. People could now receive news from all over the world, not just local news. Postman states, “The telegraph may have made the country into “one neighborhood,” but it was a peculiar one, populated by strangers who knew nothing but the most superficial facts about each other” (67).

Then came the invention of the photograph.  The name photography means “writing with light” (71). Photography made it easier to record experiences and share them with someone who was not there in person.  According to Postman, the photograph complemented the telegraphic news that came from nowhere which gave readers facts from unknown places about strangers with unknown faces (75).  I found it very interesting that the crossword puzzle came about at this same time because now people had to invent ways to use all of the useless information.

Each new type of media built upon the telegraph and the photograph to keep us from having to think and really communicate. The invention of the television and the fact that it was brought into the home, made this new false reality a way of life.  Postman finds it disturbing that the world as given to us by television now seems natural.  He says we have created a neighborhood of strangers and a world of fragments (70).