Postman and Author/ity

Nealon’s chapter on Author/ity aligns better with Postman’s views than Paglia’s because it emphasizes the importance of the written word in education. There is strong evidence to support this claim, such as the parallel between Nealon’s belief that the majority of our knowledge comes from what books teach us and Postman’s belief that a literate education is a safeguard against the imagery we are fed by popular culture. The warrant is evident, because of the close relationship between Nealon’s and Postman’s beliefs that text is an important part of our culture, it can be inferred that they would agree that text is an integral aspect of education. The qualification for this argument is that Paglia would not agree with Nealon because Paglia believed that one should learn from logic, not just text.

CHARITIES ARE FOR SUCKERS

In his scathing editorial, Ted Rall strongly contradicts the opinion of the previous post on this blog. Rall's objective in writing the article was to advance the argument that private charities are a way for the government to avoid their responsibility in helping citizens.

Rall supports his argument with an endless amount of mathematical evidence. Currently, the damage total from Katrina has risen to $125 billion. He compares this amount to the $50 million that it would have cost to fix the levees, but the government was unwilling to fund this project. He also brings in the war in Iraq and the government's continued tax cuts for the upper class. He states that by 2010, we will have invested $600 billion in Iraq, which is equivalent to 4 or 5 Katrinas. He also notes that over the last decade, tax cuts for the rich have amounted to $4 trillion, which would cover 32 disasters on the scale of Katrina.

The warrant of his argument is that the government pawned off their responsibility in the 80's when Reagan said that the poor and sick should not depend on big government anymore, but should instead live and die at the whim of charities.

Rall does qualify his argument by admitting that trying to make a case against giving money to charities compares to lobbying against puppies, because the impulse to donate is rooted in us all. However, if we don't hold the government accountable, Rall feels that another disaster that could have been avoided will strike.

Although at first Rall may seem like a heartless radical, after analyzing his argument, it becomes evident that he doesn't have a vendetta against charities, he just feels that disaster relief is too important and expensive to be put upon private charities alone.

"My Name is George, and I Won't Take Responsibility for Anything."

I recently read an editorial on Yahoo News by Ari Emanuel about President Bush. The claim of this editorial is that President Bush has failed to take responsibility for his own mistakes during the course of his presidency. The main evidence Emanuel uses to back up his claim is Bush's repeated "now is not the time to play the blame game," which he has been reiterating over the past two weeks. Emanuel's warrant is the key to what makes his article interesting. He starts off the article by telling a short anecdote about his friend who has completed AA, and he uses the twelve step program as the model for his article. He states that there needs to be a responsibility intervention for President Bush. Although Emanuel is critical of Bush, he qualifies his argument by stating that on Tuesday, Bush did acknowledge that, "To the extent the federal government didn't fully do its job right, I take responsibility." However, he views this as a half-hearted, too late attempt at gaining some support back from Americans.

So Much Space, So Little Time

We live in a world dominated by space-binding media. It is evident in everything that we do, whether it's watching television or looking at the Drudge report online. In most instances, time-binding media has been absorbed. Think about how many more speeches we watch on television versus how many we see in person. Although the speech is originally time-biased, the way we take it in is space-biased. One of the most convincing examples of the dominance of space-binding media is the classroom. Walk into any classroom, from middle school to college, and observe the actions of the teacher and the students. As the teacher attempts to communicate orally to the students, the majority are engaged in a rapidly growing space-biased form of communication: text messaging. Text messaging is connecting society by putting the direct link that the Internet and AOL Instant Messenger provides into the consumers pockets. Last month alone, over 5 billion text messages were sent. As our culture moves towards more and more forms of space-binding media, it's important to remember that the space-bias has its pros and cons.

Gilligan and Rehnquist

I was reading through the posts this morning and I stumbled across the depressing news that Bob Denver had died at age 70 on Friday. I agree with the original poster that although the hurricane is a national tragedy, there is still other news that is worthy of being shown. When I went home this weekend, I watched TV for the first time since college had started. In the roughly two hours that I watched CNN, I saw only one thirty second announcement that Rehnquist had died. It's just depressing that the deaths of these two men only received a glimmer of attention. Rehnquist was a very important political figure, and will probably be mentioned in many history textbooks. Although Bob Denver was not part of the political spectrum, Gilligan's Island is a show that has spanned generational gaps, due to the innocence and purity of the characters, especially Gilligan. The news media needs to remember that diversity is a much better approach than putting all their resources into one story.

The tragedy of the news media

The last post lead me to think about one question: In today's society, how necessary is the current news media? Do we really need ten different television stations repeating the same news and showing us the same images day after day? The last post asked whether there are other things happening in the world, and the answer is yes. Open any newspaper or read through the news on the Internet, and you will see that New Orleans is not the only place impacted by the hurricane. For example, Biloxi is in dire need of supplies and help, but because they are being civilized human beings and not killing and raping each other, they are being overlooked by the networks because they lack "sensationalism." As a society driven by television, it's important for us all to stop and really look at whether we can call ourselves "well-informed" just because we watch CNN for an hour and a half everyday...

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