He said a lot of things, thus those seventeen books. But here are some
Big Ideas that have stuck out to me:
1. The medium is the message. Borrowing from McLuhan, he
explained that every medium — TV, radio, typography, oral
transmission — changes and biases the message itself. The written
word, for example, tends to bias the message towards linear
thinking, logic, exposition, and delayed response. Video tends to
bias towards the “peek-a-book world”: trivial content that vanishes
in seconds, constantly flickering images, yet the viewer has a hard
time turning away no matter the subject… because the medium is just
so darn entertaining and engrossing. These biases mean that news
from a newspaper and a television, even with the same subject, have
two different messages.
2. Education ≠ entertainment. Shows like Sesame Street
undermine schooling — “it encourages children to love school only if
school is like Sesame Street.” School is about asking questions; TV
is about passive consumption. School is about the development of
language; TV demands attention to images. TV is always fun and
entertaining; serious education is not. Postman lamented that by
equating education with entertainment children would never learn the
rigorous of serious schooling. “Sesame Street doesn't teach children
to love school or anything about school,” he said. “It teaches them
to love television.”
3. Subjects should be taught as history. “Every teacher,”
Postman said, “must be a history teacher.” Every subject has a
fascinating history. Facts and dates are memorization, not
understanding. To teach a subject without the history of how it
happened “is to reduce knowledge to a mere consumer product,” he
said. “It is to deprive students of a sense of the meaning of what
we know, and of how we know. To teach about the atom without
Democritus, to teach about electricity without Faraday, to teach
about political science without Aristotle or Machiavelli, to teach
about music without Haydn, is to refuse our students access to The
Great Conversation. It is to deny them knowledge of their roots,
about which no other social institution is at present concerned.”
4. Fear Huxley's future, not Orwell's. Everyone is worried
about Big Brother… but we should really fear ourselves. We live in a
society where we can spend hours on devices entertaining ourselves.
We have access to TV and videos in any location. We can amuse
ourselves to death.
5. To ask is to break the spell. Blind belief and passive
consumption can be broken through the simple act of asking
questions. “No medium is excessively dangerous if its users
understand what its dangers are,” he said. Healthy skepticism is
encouraged. Kids are wired to ask questions, but we often squash
those tendencies.
6. How we talk is how we think. “Any significant change in
our ways of talking can lead to a change in point of view.” This is
why there's a battle over labels — abortionist or pro-choice or
pro-life? Sodomite or homosexual or gay? Patriot or terrorist? The
words we use convey meaning and if you can convince others to use
your words, perspectives can shift.
7. Technology is a doubled-edged sword. Technology giveth and
taketh away. The printing press allowed us to codify and pass down
knowledge reliability but in exchange we gave up our memories.
Mobile phones gave us constant communication but now we're always
distracted and never alone. There is no such thing as a free lunch.
If you want to see how these ideas show up in today’s world of
TikTok-style feeds, autoplaying videos, algorithmic timelines, Zoom
classrooms, and AI-generated content, take a look at
Neil Postman’s Influence on Modern Media Theory (2025
Perspective). It tries to answer the question: what does “amusing ourselves to
death” look like when the screen is always in our hand?
