The Cost of Technology

"Am I using this technology, or is it using me?" Charlene Hunter Gault interviews media theorist and cultural critic Neil Postman on PBS' The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour in 1995. Postman discusses new media and the "Faustian bargain" of technological change in the context of the "Information Superhighway" and the Internet.





Now when you watch this video it almost makes you remember that education and the humanities for that matter weren't always about: "Nice horsey, horsey pretty" with HD graphics and surround sound. Almost. Problem is Jimmy wants his horsey,
he wants to call it "pretty" and get his A. The customer is always right and that's that. No matter that in the highest academic spheres we keep knowing more and more about less and less.
Also mass culture keeps degrading to the lowest common denominator while the specialist is increasingly an "idiot" in the classical sense of an individual divorced from society.
So if today's undergraduate education is yesterday's high-school and graduate work is the equivalent of the old undergraduate education what's today's middle-school?

Conclusion:

Me like school, teacher give me red balloon.

Translation:

Just give me my whores.