Response To Neil Postman's 'Now … This'

340 Words2 Pages
In “Now… This,” Neil Postman claims that the title of this chapter has become a metaphor for discontinuities in the American culture. The phrase is used to transition from one subject to the other with the subjects having no relevance to each other. Each fragment of news reported is about 45 seconds long and should only be given that much thought before moving onto the next set of news. According to Postman, “The phrase is a means of acknowledging the fact that the world as mapped by the speeded-up electronic media has no order or meaning and is not to be taken seriously” (99). There is no story that is the most grievant or the most disastrous that our attention cannot be shifted to a different subject by using these words (99). Television