Postman Part 1

Part 1

1. Describe three specific characteristics of the "Typographic Mind."

2. Postman suggests that the twin inventions of 19th century Telegraphy and Photography challenged Typography's monopoly on public discourse. How, specifically did each of these two new media/communications inventions do this?

3. What does Postman mean by "The Peek-A-Boo World," and can you give an example of this world from your own media experiences?

1.The three specific characteristics of typographic mind starts with the attention span of the person receiving it. Back when Douglas and Lincoln did their speeches people would site around for hours on end to hear them speech on the subject. This wasn’t just for this event people would travel far and wide to see their favorite author at their local lecture hall. Since this was all before the time of any other kind of entertainment this was the big thing to do, so people would want to get the most out of it.
The thing that also set this apart from any thing that has come after it was that their speeches were very well thought out. Lincoln and Douglas had their whole speeches planned out and even their rebuttals. This allowed them to be as full with information and still sound good instead of them stumbling around. Another part of this was the fact that the speaker could expect the audience to know a lot about the topic so he could use sophisticated words and get in depth with the topic and know that they would not get lost. This kind of speech does not exist today.
Then lastly Typographic mind was more thought provoking. This was because you don’t have a blogger who could post something in 2 seconds with out thinking about it. In those days their was only books and news papers which took some time to get produced so the writers would make sure that they were as good as they could be and offer the most to the reader. It also was the man form of entertainment and education so everyone was doing so you had to out due the person next to you.

In the Time of Typographic it took a very long time for things to get out and if any thing most of it was local news and things that really were important/ effected the reader. Then when the Telegraph came out you would be able to find out news from across the country and people were wicked excited to see what was going on around them. So it started to slowly filter in to the news and everything around them. This change was not really a good thing because people would start learning/ be more interested in a fire out west than the one that was right down the street. This news from afar was taking over the news that people really need to know. The way I feel it was the start of the dumb down of the news to things we do not need to know. Then Photographs came in to lay and they added to this problem. Soon people would be able to see pictures of distant lands that they never seen or could image seeing. This was a great step forward for the world but I feel like the telegraph it took away more from know the things that were really important.

3. A Peek-a-Boo world means the gathering of information that was not important to people and their community. When reading the book it seemed like he was talking about how people would get a news clip about some kind of event out west and it would be there one min and then it would get replaced by something new that had maybe even lesser importance. This seemed to get started with the telegraph because you would be able to contact people from Maine to Texas and since they didn’t have any thing to tell them to improve their lives they would talk about small talk. Like is stated before I feel like it was the start of what our media is today because it was used in the wrong way. In modern day media I feel like Peel-a-Boo would have to be every news story about some local person in North Dakota who had lost their car or something bad happened to them but is only covered that one time and then the news moves on to something else more important.