“What ideas are convenient to express inevitably becomes the important content of a culture.”

—  Neil Postman

Ch 1: Medium is the Metaphor, p. 7
Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (1985)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "What ideas are convenient to express inevitably becomes the important content of a culture." by Neil Postman?
Neil Postman photo
Neil Postman 106
American writer and academic 1931–2003

Related quotes

Harriet Beecher Stowe photo
Charles Sanders Peirce photo

“The tendency to regard continuity, in the sense in which I shall define it, as an idea of prime importance in philosophy conveniently may be be termed synechism.”

Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) American philosopher, logician, mathematician, and scientist

The Law of Mind (1892)
Context: The tendency to regard continuity, in the sense in which I shall define it, as an idea of prime importance in philosophy conveniently may be be termed synechism. The present paper is intended chiefly to show what synechism is, and what it leads to.

Joss Whedon photo

“The idea of changing culture is important to me, and it can only be done in a popular medium.”

Joss Whedon (1964) American director, writer, and producer for television and film

"We Don’t Say Indian" in Slay Age (2005); also quoted in Ink-stained Amazons and Cinematic Warriors: Superwomen in Modern Mythology (2010) by Jennifer K. Stuller
Context: If I made a series of lectures on PBS on why there should be feminism, no one would be coming to the party, and it would be boring. The idea of changing culture is important to me, and it can only be done in a popular medium.

Nicholas Carr photo

“If we lose those quiet spaces, or fill them up with 'content,' we will sacrifice something important not only in our selves but in our culture.”

Nicholas Carr (1959) American writer

Is Google Making us Stupid in The Atlantic, July 2008.
Context: The kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not just for the knowledge we acquire from the author's words but for the intellectual vibrations those words set off within our own minds. In the quiet spaces opened up by the sustained, undistracted reading of a book, or by any other act of contemplation, for that matter, we make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, foster our own ideas…. If we lose those quiet spaces, or fill them up with 'content,' we will sacrifice something important not only in our selves but in our culture.

Kyūichi Tokuda photo
Terence McKenna photo

“Television is by nature the dominator drug par excellence. Control of content, uniformity of content, repeatability of content make it inevitably a tool of coersion, brainwashing, and manipulation.”

Terence McKenna (1946–2000) American ethnobotanist

Variant: Television is by nature the dominator drug par excellence. Control of content, uniformity of content, repeatability of content make it inevitably a tool of coersion, brainwashing, and manipulation.
Source: Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge

Ernest Gellner photo
Donovan photo

“The most important of my achievements, if you want to call them that, was that I successfully introduced mystical ideas into pop culture”

Donovan (1946) Scottish singer, songwriter and guitarist

Grip interview (1997)
Context: The most important of my achievements, if you want to call them that, was that I successfully introduced mystical ideas into pop culture, which was my obsession and my compulsion when I was 16 years old. So, behind all of this fame and fortune, there was a seeker, on a spiritual path — a young man who wanted to discover and share with others an alternative way of looking at the world. I wanted to save our culture from the stupidity and the bigotry and the ignorance that threatened it. And there was the Buddhist way, and the Celtic way.

Marshall McLuhan photo

“The content or time-clothing of any medium or culture is the preceding medium or culture.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

Source: 1970s, Culture Is Our Business (1970), p. 168

Related topics