Book: 20230610 to 20230821, "Amusing Ourselves to Death" by Neil Postman

20230610 - Introduction

24 hour electronic prohibition? I like this idea.

20230705 - The medium is the metaphor

Metaphor? I prefer to call it "projection".

This book is more about psychology and philosophy.

Photo and video give us more objective details, but making us distracted by those details.

Text is with much less details, and it is easy to be distorted, but it let us to observe the subject from higher level.

So, colour inversion on screen make sense: it let us skip the unnecessary details and focus on important content.

Without media(projection), we cannot perceive the reality. So media is part of content. Some content, if there is no much details, then it's very hard to express it through photo or video.

20230722 - Media as epistemology

The wise Solomon, we are told in First Kings, knew three thousand proverbs. p25

People believed that Solomon was wise 3000 years ago because he could remember so many proverbs.

Today, if someone has very good memory, or can understand complicated things easily, or can speak multiple languages at early stage, etc. people believe they are very smart, or even wise. Is that correct?

Compound effect(habit) is important. Cross-domain association is important. Self-discipline is important. Media type is important.

Why audio and video is bad? They don't give audience time to think and review, and with too much useless, distracting details.

20230723 - Typographic America

Here provides another reason of the arise of USA. Almost everyone in USA spent a lot of time reading 200 years ago.

Reading is something that our subconscious cannot disturb much, unless it triggered our irrelated imagination, but that's normally by fiction books.

Many topics are so complicated that it takes hundreds of pages to explain the idea. Because our brain is big data analyzer, it got a lot of training material during reading. That helps us to forge our mastering of the idea.

But when we watch video clips or listen to podcasts, the useful information is hidden in a lot of irrelated information, such as music and colors. Our subconscious jump up and take the "thinking" over from time to time. The consequence is, we cannot memorize much after watching video clips or after listening podcasts.

20230802 - The typographic mind

It's hard to imagie the life in U.S. before 1890.

Even harder to image the life before printing were populated.

The populance of books make everyone have the chance to touch the knowledge human accumulated. Is that the same feeling when we get chance to touch Internet and even AI such as ChatGPT?

No wonder the aged books are always full of long sentences. The people at that time were used to long sentences. They were smarter than us to some extent, and have much better memory. They can control their body for longer time through their consciousness. Internet, Youtube, Tiktok, computer games, etc. is more like reversed meditation.

Our brain is big data analyzer. We can meditate through read.

20230803 - The peek-a-boo world

If some information is not related to our lives, is it still worth knowing it?

Why image is so powerful? It only needs us to recognize it, which can be done by our subconscious. For primitive man, image is much more important than reasoning in most of the time.

Infinite unrelevant information(images, videos, etc.) make us feel safe and powerful. It creates the illusion to make us happy. That's why it's so entertaining.

Internet is like infinite number of intelligent TV channels. It helps a lot with our work, and also wastes a lot of our time. It gives us the feeling that we are in charge. But we are not: all information are for entertainment purpose and not related to our lives. We are addicted to it.

However, science and technology are progressing faster and faster. The wealth gap and intelligence gap among people are getting wider and wider. There must be a small percentage of people realized the problem of photography, and then stick with typography.

This books is good. 10 out of 10.

20230810 - The age of show business

Latest laptop and mobile phone now have two chips: CPU and AI chip

Is CPU for typographic mind, and AI chip for subconscious?

"The Game"(by Neil Strauss), "Focusing"(by Eugene T. Gendlin), "Thinking, Fast and Slow"(by Daniel Kahneman) and this book.......are they all talking about the same problem?

To save energy, our gene always prefer to let subconscious take control. That's how the show business replaced typography so easily.

Read is painful. But I don't have to watch screen to relax. Our brain is like muscle: anything except reading helps our brain to relax.

20230811 - "Now ... this"

When information lose the context, it's defragged information. Useless and irrelevant. We cannot really get anything useful from it.

Is Youtube better than TV show? Kind of. But it gives us the illusion that we are in charge. But we are not. Our subconscious will be in charge, not our conscious.

Maybe this is the result of Information Explosion. We lose the capability of thinking.

20230812 - Shuffle off to Bethlehem

Without context and depth, TV program cannot trigger thoughts from audience. Youtube video and blog posts have similar issue.

We need to figure out a way to raise more questions, instead of getting answers of the questions other people raised.

So far, books are the best solution.

20230820 - Reach out and elect someone

TV and Internet let people focus on the events of past 24 hours. People pay full attention to those information on the surface, and ignore the meaning behind them. People believe they know everything, but actually know nothing useful.

For example, we don't care much about the political candidates's thoughts, but more about their image.

This is a perfect trap for our gene.

If most of people fall into this trap, what would happen to our society?

20230820 - Teaching as an amusing activity

How much did I learn from documentaries and movies and Youtube? Not much. Neil Postman is right, it's not efficient way to learn through screen.

But I did learn a lot from "The Big Short" and "The.Wolf.of.Wall.Street", after watching them many times. I can learn most of the stuff through books, but not all of them. There are a lot of stuff we should learn through video clips. For example, we can understand "brain in a vat" through reading, but the movie "Matrix" gives deeper understanding about it.

I guess that 99% of study should come through books, and only 1% from images and videos.

20230821 - The Huxleyan warning

2500 years ago, alphabet was invented. Then civilization got the first explosion.(Ancient Greece, Plato)

500 years ago, typography appeared, we got the second civilization explosion.

Now, with the help of computer and Internet, we got the third one.

What is education? We need to memorize and understand the basic knowledge, but mastering more knowledge didn't give us better education.

I believe it's about "thinking". Well educated people think more and think deeper. They are good at detecting problems and opportunities. They are the one push civilization forward.

It's not just about science. It includes more domains, such as politics, arts, religion, etc.

So, after Year 9 (15 years old), the more important task of school and parents is how to push children thinking more.

Books are much better than screens at doing that. Actually, screens discourage thinking.