In the End

In the end of Neil Postman's book he makes a separation between thinking and laughter. He says that people no longer know exactly why they are laughing anymore. And he also states that people have stopped thinking, but they do not know why. This is the danger in the growth of television. This idea pretty much sums up the whole point of Amusing Ourselves to Death. It is the basic reason for the lower rates in typography. Postman's premise of the book lies within this topic. We will all be sucked into the entertaining world of meaningless T.V and laugh along with the world for no good reason. We will all lose our ability to think for ourselves and make insightful decisions.

Thank God for Speech

Last Friday was a rough day to get through. Using only illustration and charades to get my point across would never be my first choice. It was hard enough for me to keep my big mouth shut let alone have to be an artists and an actor too. At the end of the day I was trying to explain my idea for the yearbook and it was incredibly difficult to get my my teacher to understand what was on my mind using only charades and a whiteboard. This relates to the point that Postman makes when he says how we are dependant on the way we do things. We get so used to one thing that when we try and change it, we cant do it. Like when we went a whole day wihtout facebook, we are all so used to checing it so often so most of us struggled to keep away. While making funny gestures and drwaing terrible picutes, she never unserstood what I was trying to get across, though she did have asome interesting guesses. I had to wait till 2:30 and explain to her my plan with words. I thank God we all have speech to make our lives 100% easier and more clear.

Web Pages Take Over the Yellow pages

In Postmans discussion he talks about how humans become used to or adapt to the changes in technology. We seem not to realize we are taking to machines instead of real people. This agrees with his message in his book "Amusing Ourselves To Death." This is completely true. We find ourselves talking to anything as long as we get an instant response. Weather its a computer screen, an answering machine, a key board, or a cell phone, we don't care. Humans of our time was everything new. Faster, better, cooler, new. We always want the next best thing without realizing what we already have. This creates a problem for our human interaction skills. Soon people won't know how to carry on a conversation face to face, weather they want to or not.

Postman also brings up the topic of human appearance in both his book and his interview. In the interview he talks about how Human cloning is in our near future and can be used for anything from a person to talk to or an extra lung. In his book Postman talks about how looks makes a huge difference in all of our opinions. Now, when people watch a presidential candidate on the T.V they judge him on his looks along with his plans for the country. With the new clones people can use them to change anything about themselves they don't think is "Perfect". This shows people are caring more about the outside then inside. New technology and the new way we think is self centered and judgemental.

Word Choice and Civility

In her first 6 words Chavez is stating her assertion. She wants everybody to know that civility is incredibly important because people do get offensive and certain words should not be used in public. Chavez wants to be sure she wont be misunderstood, but still gets her point across.
Bellicose means favoring or inclined to start wars. She uses this word to explain how politics have been know for starting disputes. She then goes on to explain how the very word of campaign comes from a back round of war. It is a good word to describe how politics have always been about arguing and who is right and who is wrong.
Chavez is attempting to persuade the reader into believing that civility in word choice does need to be used but it shouldn't have to take away from the content of the literature. The vocabulary authors use should not be affected by civility. "it should not be used as an excuse to stifle legitimate debate or denude our language of color, passion, or good metaphor." in that quote Chavez is talking about civility getting in the way of a good piece of literature. Her point that we have changed so much in my opinion is the best example, "We've already virtually eliminated certain words from our public vocabulary -- or revised the meaning of others to conform to political correctness." this goes to show how much people are afraid to use words that would be better to describe or imitate what they mean.
I agree with Chavez completely. I think civility does need to used when speaking publicly, and you shouldn't just be throwing harsh words around. I also agree with her when she says that some of those words that some see as offensive can be used in a good way as a metaphor and in a descriptive matter. When she talks about the "n" word being changes to slave in the story "Huckleberry fin" I thought it was completely unnecessary. Things like that just take away from the true meaning, and feel of the story. When the words are used in that context it is not meant to offend or hurt anybody. It is simply to tell what life was like during this time period. Obviously people wouldn't write that all over in a book written in today's time period. Things change over time and language is one of them. So overall I agree with Linda Chavez and hope other people get the point as well.