The Seven Postmen
Contents
Watch the lecture
Neil Postman was a brilliant and enlightening writer, teacher, and speaker. He’s well known for his 1985 book, titled Amusing Ourselves to Death. As great as it is, I like his 1993 book even more, which is titled Technopoly. The subtitle of that book is also the title of a lecture he gave in 1997. Here’s the video recording of that lecture, uploaded by the College of DuPage in Chicago.
Enduring questions
Postman offers seven questions for the sceptical mind to evaluate new technology. His prefatory remarks are brilliant, as are all of his justifications for putting forth these particular questions. For the sake of convenience, I’ll paraphrase them below before going any further.
- What is the problem being solved?
- Whose problem is it?
- What new problems might be created by solving it?
- Which people and what institutions might be harmed?
- What changes are being promoted in language?
- Which people and what institutions acquire new powers?
- What alternative media might be made?
He makes the point wisely that the answers will certainly vary based on who is answering, but the questions will endure. It’s not hard to see why these are lasting questions. They nudge you along a logical and succinct thought process, which also makes them an excellent checklist. Regardless of what your answers end up being, by addressing these questions when evaluating new technology you gain a deeper understanding than reverting to in-built biases. The horizon in your mental landscape gets pushed back a little bit, revealing dense forests that you never knew had existed all along.
More than 20 years after Postman’s lecture, these questions are more relevant than ever before. Evidently, social media never underwent any such questioning by the billions of mindless users. It seems likely that self-driving cars will be adopted en masse without much enquiry as to what exactly is the problem that is being solved? To be fair, not all new technologies get adopted unquestioned. I think cryptocurrency has been scrutinised carefully, and its best feature now seems ripe for widespread adoption (i.e., the blockchain).
Some epistemology
On a broader note, Postman’s lecture made me ponder the unusual effectiveness of asking questions as a means to gaining knowledge. It does link back to the school of sceptics, I suppose. Nothing all that new. But I dug around a bit and came across an excellent essay by Postman in the journal ETC, titled Language Education In A Knowledge Context. You can read a grainy PDF copy here. “I would expect”, Postman says, “very little resistance to the claim that in the development of intelligence nothing can be more ‘basic’ than learning how to ask productive questions”. He goes on to further explain:
Thus I find it necessary to repeat two obvious facts about question-asking. The first is that all our knowledge results from questions, which is another way of saying that question-asking is our most important intellectual tool. I would go so far as to say that the answers we carry about in our heads are largely meaningless unless we know the questions that produced them. The second fact is that questions are language. To put it simply, a question is a sentence. Badly formed, it produces no knowledge and no understanding. Aptly formed, it leads to new facts, new perspectives, new ideas.
I strongly recommend reading that entire essay. Like the lecture, it’s time well spent on both entertainment and enlightenment simultaneously. Postman makes a number of arguments that I agree with wholeheartedly. His writing is always lucid and lively. Hence I am incapable of paraphrasing them. Just read the original text, as any sceptic would do.
Remembering to ask
I’ve internalised the seven questions in the form of an image: the seven postmen. It helps me to remember that I need to ask these questions and straighten out my garbled thought process, as if I’m assembling the fragments delivered by various postmen into a complete message.