“The point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it.”
— Bertrand Russell

Hillsong is a business and not a church (simple and seemingly not worth stating). I couldn’t think of anything to say that would actually be hard to blieve abuot Hillsong. I ahve failed the Bertrand Russell test of Philosophy -

Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (1985), is a controversial book by Neil Postman in which he argues that mediums of communication inherently influence the conversations carried out over them. Postman posits that television is the primary means of communication for our culture and it has the property of converting conversations into entertainment so much so that public discourse on important issues has disappeared. Since the treatment of serious issues as entertainment inherently prevents them from being treated as serious issues and indeed since serious issues have been treated as entertainment for so many decades now, the public is no longer aware of these issues in their original sense, but only as entertainment. (”Conversations” in the sense here of a culture communicating with itself).

The book originated with Postman’s delivering a talk to the Frankfurt Booksellers Convention in 1984. He was participating in a panel on Orwell’s 1984 and the contemporary world.

It has been translated into eight languages and sold some 200,000 copies worldwide.

[edit] Medium is The Metaphor
Postman argues that communication media inherently shape the conversations that can be carried out. To take an extreme example, it is not possible to conduct a discussion of philosophy using smoke signals; the conversation is too complex and long to be conducted over such a low bandwidth medium. Postman in particular describes two forms of mass media, print and television, and the ways in which they influence the content carried across them.

[edit] Print
Printed material inherently makes assertions. It is almost impossible to write a meaningful sentence which does not make an assertion; and as such, when reading, the reader is being presented with assertions which they are required to agree with, to suspend judgement upon, or to refute. A book is essentially a very long set of assertions which build an argument. The reader has to keep track of the assertions, build up an overall picture, and come to a conclusion of his own, which may or may not match the view of the author.

Postman asserts print as a medium encourages thought and judgement upon arguments and so that when print is the primary means of communication (as it was in the USA, for example, up to the late 1800s) then culture as a whole has a strong, effective public discourse on important issues. People are not only well informed, but have a strong understanding of the issues of the day.

[edit] Television
Television as a medium is inherently assertionless; a video of an event makes no assertions whatsoever. It merely displays something that occurred. For example, an advertisement for McDonald’s says nothing about the burgers, their nutritional value, their cost or position in the market compared to the competition; instead, it shows happy, smiling children eating McDonald’s burgers, followed by a happy clown.

A viewer can like or dislike a McDonald’s advertisement, but he cannot accept or refute it, because there is nothing to accept or refute.

[edit] Summary
Postman distinguishes the Orwellian vision of the future, in which totalitarian governments seize individual rights, from the vision offered by Aldous Huxley in Brave New World, where people medicate themselves into bliss and voluntarily sacrifice their rights. Postman sees television’s entertainment value as a “soma” for the contemporary world, and he sees contemporary mankind surrendering its rights in exchange for entertainment. (Note that there is no contradiction between an intentional “Orwellian” conspiracy using “Huxleyan” means, which is an argument advanced in the later book The Unreality Industry: the deliberate manufacturing of falsehood and what it is doing to our lives by Ian Mitroff and Warren Bennis (New York: Carol Pub. Group, 1989). Postman evidently did not disagree, since he provided a blurb for this book.)

The essential premise of the book, which Postman extends to the rest of his argument(s), is that “form excludes the content,” that is, a particular medium can only sustain a particular level of ideas. Rational argument, an integral component of print typography, cannot be conveyed through the medium of television because “its form excludes the content.” Because of this shortcoming, politics and religion get diluted, and “news of the day” is turned into a commodity. The presentation most often de-emphasizes quality; all data becomes burdened to the far-reaching need for entertainment.

Postman objects to the presentation of television news as it is conveyed in the form of entertainment programming. He cites the inclusion of theme music, the interruption of commercials, and “talking hairdos” as the basis for his argument that televised news is presented so that it cannot readily be taken seriously. Postman further examines the differences between written speech, which he argues reached its prime in the early to mid-nineteenth century, and the forms of televisual communication, which rely mostly on visual images to “sell” lifestyles. He argues that politics has ceased to be about whatever ideas or solutions a particular candidate may possess, but instead whether or not they come across in a favourable way on television. Television, he notes, has introduced the phrase “now this”, which indicates a complete absence of any connection between one topic and the next. Larry Gonick used this phrase to conclude his Cartoon Guide to (Non)Communication, instead of the traditional “the end”.

Postman also examines the relationship between learning and television. He acknowledges that school curricula are integrating television and computers into their classrooms with increasing frequency. He argues that these uses of media do not equip the student with the ability to question the nature of media; they merely provide the student with study guides that are amusing and entertaining–something that Postman argues is fundamentally against the process of learning. Postman draws from the ideas of the media scholar Marshall McLuhan— slightly altering McLuhan’s “The Medium is the Message” into “the medium is the metaphor”—to describe how oral, literate, and televisual cultures radically differ in how information is processed and prioritized. He also argues that different media are appropriate for different kinds of knowledge. The faculties necessary to sustain rational inquiry simply are not normally encouraged by televised viewing. Reading, a prime example cited by Postman, is a subject of intense intellectual involvement, at once interactive and dialectical, unlike television which limits involvement to passivity. Moreover, as television is programmed for maximum ratings, its content is determined by commercial feasibility, not critical acumen. Television in its present state, he says, cannot sustain any of the conditions needed for honest intellectual involvement and rational argument.

Given this analysis, Postman regards television as a useful entertainment medium, but questions the efficacy of its use in such intellectually demanding areas as political argument, education and the news. He also repeatedly states that the eighteenth century was the pinnacle for rational argument, truly being the Age of Reason. Only in the printed word, he states, could complicated truths be rationally conveyed. A striking example Postman gives: that the first fifteen U.S. presidents could probably have walked down the street without being recognized by the average citizen, yet all these men would have been quickly known by their written words. However, the reverse is true today. The names of presidents or even famous preachers, lawyers, and scientists call up visual images, typically television images, but few, if any, words come to mind. The few that do almost exclusively consist of carefully-chosen soundbites.

but while our neighbour is starving to death in africa i think the question has been answered for the time being

Emma

i am sure you would love Neil Postman.. non Christian critic of the wests acceptance of ‘technology as saviour’

Marchall McCluan (sp?) was the coiner of the phrase ‘the medium is the message’ but Postman gave it legs….

his titles
amusing ourselves to death and technopoly are must reads

The difficulty is defining “basic needs” in a world where comparative living standards are progressively rising.

I live in a three bedroom, two bathroom house. The house I demolished to build this one had two bedrooms and one bathroom.

People who lived in this very same suburb lived in sea shacks 100 years ago.

The aboreiginals camped here and lived in basic temporary shelters.

What standard of housing should I live that would just cater formy basic needs.

The aborigines

the medium is definitely the message

do you read any neil postman?

so money, that is the metal itself, is neither holy or corrupt, although, having said that, what they are used for obviously can be either holy or orrupt

this is true but our very natures are corrupt so we will use it (i would say almost inevitably) for corrupt purposes given any more money than needed to cover our basic needs..

Many pro-HSers and AOG-ers often come back at comments like mine with words like “it’s not all bad” “they do heaps of good” etc etc. I’m sure they do. I know people who have found Jesus through HS and the AOG, because God uses all of us in pour crappiness. But if the medium is the message, then I think what HS advertises is the wrong message. I think it is a shame to offer people such a watery version of Christianity.

http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2007/august/18.35.html

“Blessed are those who hunger? Hunger and thirst signal need. They are symptoms of emptiness and unfulfilled desire. How can they be a source of blessing?
The fact that Jesus says he is talking about hunger and thirst for righteousness clarifies little. He seems to have put the emphasis in the wrong place. Why not, “Blessed are the righteous?” Hunger implies a lack of righteousness. Jesus’ proposal is so radical, it turns our notions of God and righteousness and blessing on their heads. He blesses what most of us would curse.”

“The language of filling in Christ’s beatitude underscores another important aspect of the blessing. Righteousness works from the inside out. We usually go about it the other way around; we try to work on it from the outside in, as if it were a matter of externals. If we worship in the right building, perform the right rituals, wear the right clothes, and are seen with the right people, we are righteous. If we read our Bibles and pray in the morning, give a tithe of our earnings on Sunday, control our tempers and restrain our passions the rest of the week, we are righteous.”

bearing in mind that, though the Kingdom of God is essentially heavenly,

and in the context I wasn’t completely sure what you were saying in regards to the kingdom. As to the other statement, it seems you are saying the same thing as me, just refusing to use the word redeem. The word redeem is used in the bible to talk about animals, and crops. It says that you must redeem the first born. The idea of the word redeem is that we take something and in the way we use it, or substitute something for it, we remove it or change it. Like when I redeem bottles in the old days, it meant that I take the bottles to the store and “change” them for money. So when you take money, which as far as I have seen always is image bearing, and is always promoting the nation state, it does have inherant meaning. Just like you wouldn’t have a pentagram on your wall, as it has meaning. Therefore, the way we redeem (change) this false concept of wealth that bears the image of the nation state (and to a Jew would by its image bearing be an idol all by itself) by using it in a way that co-ops the state. In other words we use it against the powers. We can not do that by consumerism, as we prop up the nation state by our consumption. Therefore, by taking the money and using it to bless others, to care for those that cannot care for themselves, we change the essential nature of that money in our lives. Now this money still bears the image of the nation state, and still weaves its magic of corrupting, but it has been redeemed in our lives, and we have used this idol to subvert all idolatry.

rev