25.Future Shlock

 In Neil Postman's essay, he describes the aftermath of the "future shock," the "future shlock."  He says such phenomenon is a "the rapid erosion of collective intelligence." This  kind of human intelligence creates a society categorized with ignorance and distortion because of how fragile and easily corrupted it is. Postman sets Germany as an example. Germany once was a country of knowledge but it was broken down when so much knowledge suppressed each other and the nation itself. However the author changes his focus to America, a nation that was once known as an Empire of Reasoning, and now turned to be an Empire of shlock. A major alternation was the new development that once bombarded the media and the culture. For this idea the movie The Gods Must Be Crazy and The Producers are introduced. Both movies depict a society where technology and new findings have corrupted the original culture of each society. However these incidents are also discovered in the American society, especially in the entertainment industry, where knowledge and stupidity are misplaced. In politics, news, commercials,  and religion, the important matter of each subject is distorted as public culture has changed them so that it will be more suitable for the audience. The role in which public culture plays in society is distorted, which can destroy itself as becoming a prison or burlesque, an artistic composition. 


Postman displays a persuasive and well supported argument.  He sets various examples related to his argument that the culture has on people. However his essay consists of many fallacies. First of all =, his idea about the Bible is very immature. Either is it well developed nor comprehensible. It was somewhat offensive to me as an audience who likes the Bible. Postman also places trivial but big mistake in the essay. He refers to some of the preacher he writes a list of names of preacher from history. Among them is Johnathan Edwards and Charles Finney and George Whiteside, who is a chemistry  professor at Harvard. This is a mistake that the author makes. He refers to some other person by misspelling the actual preacher's name that is George Whitefield.  I was disappointed with the mistake the author made of not considering the small mistakes in his essay, but rather so concentrated in expressing his critical views about the world. It is a well written essay but the author should have been more meticulous about his work.