Structures of Amusing Ourselves to Death and You Just Dont Understand - Literature review Example

A Comparison between Amusing Ourselves to Death and You Just Don’t Understand Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death and Deborah Tannen’s You JustDon’t Understand were the two books discussed during the semester. Both books explore the issue of communication from different perspectives. While Amusing Ourselves to Death focuses on television communication, You Just Don’t Understand deals with gender communication. I personally prefer Tannen’s book, since such situations occur in our everyday life and she explains why there is a lot of miscommunication between the genders. Nevertheless, Postman traces the issue back to the birth of communication in the region of New England, which makes the book a little bit hard to understand since we haven’t lived those times. Neil Postman, structures his book in an orderly fashion, in the foreword he states that he thinks both Orwell and Huxley’s theories can be true, yet both opposes each other. Postman explains both George Orwell’s and Aldous Huxley’s theories. While Orwell believes that everything we hate will destroy, Huxley believes the opposite, that everything we love will destroy us. Postman structures his book by dividing it into two parts. The first part of the book explores America in the beginning and the second part concentrates on America today. At the introduction of the book, Postman asserts that entertainment is the supreme goal for America. In the subsequent chapters, he draws conclusions on what entertainment has done to America. Tannen begins her book by referring to her past book That is Not What I Meant, but You Just Don’t Understand shows a deeper understanding of why such things happen in most of the relationships. Tannen doesn’t structure her book in a way that Postman does. She analyzes how each gender reacts to the different aspects of life. These aspects include world, life, goal and conversation. Tannen structures her book by beginning with the details of the differences on how men and women view the world, and then she moves into other studies of interactions between men and women. Aldous Huxley believes that everything we love will destroy us, which Postman also strongly agrees. The development of technology that leads to the development of entertainment is what made America today, and Postman believes that it is what going to destroy America as well. Postman also argues that it is already happening, due to the creation of television. He states that “I must, first, demonstrate how, under the governance of the printing press, discourse in America was different from what it is now – generally coherent, serious and rational; and then how, under the governance of television, it has become shriveled and absurd” (16). America used to have a high literacy rate and now people are getting less efficient. “Television served us most usefully when presenting junk entertainment. News, politics, education religion – turns them into entertainment packages” (159). Television made people less productive, now because of it, people can just stay in their homes and get political updates, children learn through television shows and listen to the preachers on television . Tannen believes that men and women view the world differently. For her, men and women live in different worlds, thus they think and speak differently, which is the major reason of miscommunication between men and women. Men view the world “ as an individual in a hierarchical social order in which he was either one up or one down” (24) whereas, women view this world “as an individual in a network of connections’ (24). She points out that men have a tendency to achieve and maintain the upper hand in a conversation, while women seek and give confirmation and support. Tannen also argues that it leads to the different behaviors between the genders in different situations and aspects of life. Postman argues his point clearly as it can be understood from the way he structures his book. He divides his book into two parts very clearly as America before and America today. Postman gives evidence for all of his points, it makes his arguments specially convincing. Neil Postman uses a lot of comparisons and contrasts especially in the two parts of his books. He formulates an argument for all of his chapters from the book. Postman also convinces the reader since he takes a long period of time into his account, from the birth of communication in the New England region, till the creation of television, and he also sees an increasing trend in these areas. Postman is better in convincing his readers, but Tannen also convinces her readers. She convinces her readers by giving examples from the daily life. Her examples help us to see ourselves in such situations as we react more or less the same. The structure of her book is also convincing. At the beginning chapters, she discusses how men view the world; how they see life, their goal and the way they converse. Then she compares men’s view with women’s view on how they view the world, see life, goal and conversation. After discussing their differences, she gives examples from everyday life, from asking for information till gossiping; hence, we understand why misinterpretation happens. Postman uses a wide variety of evidence, to support his argument. He utilizes evidence from Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography (30), Abraham Lincoln’s debate (44) to modern television shows such as Sesame Street (142). Postman’s evidence ranges from historic moments to present moments, he also compares and contrasts statistics to convince his audience. Most of Postman’s evidence is credible, especially the ones in the chapter 4. He argues that, while debating, people used to have four better qualities than we have now, and he provides evidence for all of his arguments. The evidence he provided in the chapter four is the list for establishment of the elite universities (55). He claims that people lived in Lincoln’s era had better knowledge than people have now, and proves it by listing the year of establishment of such universities. Postman’s evidence is better than Tannen’s. Tannen’s evidence is sometimes unreliable; she uses her own personal experiences and her friends’ conversations as her sources. In the chapter 4, Tannen gives an example of a passage from a novel as evidence for her argument (96). Using a fictional work and a fictional character as evidence for a scientific argument is far from being credible. Novels are not supposed be informational, and even if their form is realistic, they do not reflect reality. A writer creates a fictional society and fictional characters in a novel, thus a novel cannot be read as a factual report on society and gender roles. However, she also uses credible evidence like the small survey of The Chronicle of Higher Education (41). Though, as she herself indicates, the survey is very small, covers only six people, which is far from representing the whole populations of women and men. The way Postman structure his book is one of his greatest strengths. He structures his book so clearly that he can compare and contrast the different eras to further prove his argument. Furthermore, Postman studies four different centuries to strengthen his arguments; he examines the issue from the 17th century to the modern America, the 20th century. One of the strengths of Tannen’s book is that it is fun to read. She divides her chapters into many subtopics, and in each subtopic, there is an example of everyday life situation or a conversation between a man and a woman. She also uses daily-life situations as an example like fixing things and asking for information. Moreover, she enhances her book with the examples of conversations between men and women, which enable her to sustain her arguments. Finally, Tannen makes references to many other researchers such as the Maltz and Borker, the anthropologists, to prove her arguments (142). Postman’s greatest weakness is the last argument in his book. He gives five solutions to the problem; nevertheless, his solution creates another set of problems. The paradoxical solution that he offers is to make a TV show on how television shows work (161); however, the problem is, the show needs to be entertaining so that many people would watch the show. In the end, Postman doesn’t give any definite solution to fix this problem. Tannen’s sources are sometime credible and sometimes aren’t. The conversations of her friends are somewhat not credible evidence and also the contexts are not given, thus sometimes we don’t know why such things happen besides the males’ and females’ different worlds views. Furthermore, in addition to having an extract from a novel as evidence, Tannen also shows a weakness in interpreting the novel. The novel does not reflect the negativity of gossip; it is quite the opposite. Repetition is often found in the most real life examples of her book, while the males are one-up. She also goes off the topic in chapter 7. High involvement and highly considerate speakers do not reflect genders, but it is based on their cultures and religions (201). I do not agree with Neil Postman’s arguments in Amusing Ourselves to Death. I don’t think that people have become lazier and more unproductive in these days due to the development of technology and entertainment. Therefore, I won’t recommend Postman’s book to a friend. However, You Just Don’t Understand by Deborah Tannen is quite interesting to read. I would recommend this book to a friend, so that s/he can understand why males and females act in a certain ways, which sometimes lead to miscommunications. Read More