Summary Of Early American Culture By Neil Postman

In today’s television based society, image is valued much more than thought, leisure more than work, and reading has lost its appreciation. However, in the early years of America, things were drastically different. Before television, the printed word had a monopoly over all public communication. In these chapters of his book, Neil Postman illuminates eighteenth and nineteenth century America, a society where print ruled over culture, conversation, and people.

Early America was a culture totally immersed in print based epistemology. Postman claims that the colonial Americans were as committed to the written word as any group of people who has ever lived. This commitment produced a culture of highly literate people. There were several reasons for this near obsession with reading, most prominent being religion and education. Most early settlers were Christians and their faith demanded knowledge of the Bible, which required the

Postman uses the Lincoln versus Douglas debates of 1858 to convey the general mindset of Americans in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. These debates were extremely long, sometimes lasting up to seven hours, with content consisting of nearly uninterrupted talk. Their conversation was controlled, almost entirely, by print. Postman describes the type of language they used as “prose lifted whole from the printed page” (49). Though events such as these debates may seem boring and mundane, many people came willingly, considering this event, among others, to be essential to their political education as well as a social affair. These audiences had the ability to comprehend lengthy and complex sentences through hearing, demonstrating a drastic difference between those of a print based society and those of a television based