Welcome to CyberEssays Website

The Information Age: A Blessing Or A Curse

Feature Article
The Information Age
A Blessing or a Curse?
Neil Postman

New York University Professor Neil Postman passed away October 5, 2003, at the age of seventy-two. A faculty member at NYU for forty-four years, Postman founded the
School of Education’s program in media ecology in 1971 and was chair of the Department
of Culture and Communication until 2002.He was the author of more than two hundred articles and twenty books, including Teaching as a Subversive Activity, The Disappearance of Childhood, Amusing Ourselves to Death, and Technology. The following is an abbreviated transcript of Neil Postman’s Brown Bag Luncheon talk given at the Shorenstein Center on February 7, 1995.Postman was the Shorenstein Center’s Visiting Lombard Professor in the spring of 1991.

The title of this session is “The Information Age: A Blessing or a Curse?” Or maybe it says a curse or a blessing, I don’t know. But, when we get to talking about it, many of you, I would guess, will want to talk about the blessings of the information age. So let me begin with the curse. And the curse was spoken of in a prophetic poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay and this poem is from her book
Huntsman What Quarry. Wonderful book. This is a fragment of this poem in which
Miss Millay describes precisely the problem that bothers me so much. This is the fragment: “Upon this gifted age, in its dark hour, rains from the sky a meteoric shower of facts. They lie unquestioned, uncombined. Wisdom enough to leech us of our ill is daily spun. But there exists no loom to weave it into fabric.”
I like that—no loom. Now what the poet speaks of here is a great paradox.

Beginning in the 19th century humanity creatively addressed the problem of
How to eliminate information scarcity, how to overcome the limitations of space, time, and form. And we did this in spectacular fashion, especially in the 19th century. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the 19th century, here are some of the inventions...