Leah Johnson

Amazing Ourselves to Death chpt 1-9 These first chapters challenged me to think how do you escape from the entertainment of new media and different technologies that are constantly at our fingertips. The impersonal aspects of writing have become too addictive in our culture. I personally find my expression of oral speech to be most personal and I am able to communicate effectively how I need to. Can we separate the entertainment from time to be serious? As a culture we do not realize the differences in the way we communicate because of our consumption in technology. Postman likes to focus on these differences and how it affects us today. As Strate mentions in these first chapters its about finding a balance between all these many forms of communication, which our society lacks. What’s real and whats not real? To me it seems like that is a major issue within the world of media and technology. Because of our consumption in it, we end up believing everything we read and hear in the media, instead of trying to dig deeper into what the media says. We even have become obsessed with becoming trying to become the media, where our content and video uploads become gospel. We rather indulge in the media rather than worry about the realities we have to face in our own lives. In the chapter “Breaking News,” I was not surprised to see the different intersections of bias within this field as it exist everywhere in daily activities. From the appearances of the news casters to the way they talk all these things matter within broadcast news, rather than the actual news. This stems from the medias portrayal of societal norms and expectations, so our world becomes all about appearances and materialistic things. Most often we forget about the true issues at hand.