Amusing Ourselves to Death and You Just Dont Understand Essay

Amusing Ourselves to Death and You Just Dont Understand - Essay casefulPart one deals with how the American media developed through the ages, with an emphasis on the printed word at first, and whence the arrival of the telegraph and radio. These topics ar discussed first, in a chronological order, to create a context and action in the background. Part two looks at modern media, with an emphasis on show business, film and particularly television. The structure offers two main arguments how things have developed first of all, and then what this means for the modern world. Deborah Tannens You Just Dont Understand is not ar purged chronologically, but rather takes a range of varied topics on the subject of mens language and womens language and deals with them one by one. It starts very generally, with a description of how women and men are socialized in separate spaces, and develop different techniques. The key phrase Asymmetry is introduced (chapter 2) and defined as the gap betwe en the sexes. In the middle chapters more than specific topics such as interruptions, and gossip are discussed, and then last chapter (chapter 10) revisits the idea of asymmetry and the informant describes what to do about this mis-match, namely to open up lines of communication that both men and women can understand. An afterword compose ten years after the first publication reports how successful the book was, and answers some questions which readers and critics have raised. The thematic structure suggests that the subject is being treated as a collection of observations rather than a individual line of argument. It allows the author to range freely over many details. Question 2 Postman relies on the earlier ideas of media and culture scholar Marshall McLuhan and notes that the clearest way to see through a culture is to understand to its tools for conversation. (Postman 1985, p. 8) From this basic observation he moves to a close examination of American discourse, looking at heathen phenomena like Las Vegas, with its focus on high risk and existentism, and the medium of television which offers unintelligent and repetitive material to keep citizens quietly consuming its hidden messages. A key issue for Postman is that dictatorship film not be obvious and violent, like a fascist regime which dominates peoples lives with visible deprivation and misery. A dictatorship can be subtle and deceptive, and television is just such a force. It is not just the message that the media offer, nor even just the medium of presentation that is important, but also the distant reaching implications of both of these things together as they impact upon passive viewers. The argument is very convincing because it sums up the commercialization and dumbing down of television in the 1980s and 1990s and points out a number of dangers which nearly people have not been aware of. Deborah Tannens book makes many statements about the different ways that men and women use language , and explains that this is often at the root of difficulties which couples have in their relationship. Her argument is based on the discipline of linguistics, and she uses linguistic terminology in quite a technical way, explaining how these features work, and what they imply about male person and female gender behaviors. A big feature of the book is its insistence that male and female styles are both equally valid Throughout this book, and throughout my work, I take a no-fault approach (Tannen, 2001, p. 301) This is a laudable aim, but unfortunately the book does not always stick to it, and there is more than a touch of pro-feminist argumentation, for example in chapter on dominance and control, which refers to other research but without clear singularity of sources. There is a lot