Two Cultures

There have been many debates over the years that address the age old question; does TV really make man stupid? It’s hard to state whether or not the electronic culture has really helped in lowering the IQ of many Americans of today but it is safe to say that TV has become a powerful tool in controlling how many people think, act, behave, and the way we develop the inner ‘I’.
TV, movies, music and the internet have drastically changed the world we live in by helping up exchange and develop millions of new ideas. Yet, somehow it has seem to dominate our millions of years old written culture which has allowed for written government, religion, and life to flourish through out the planet.

These two important points were taken with keen interest by Neil Postman and Camille Paglia who were both addressed the importance of it to each other over dinner as well recorded.
Postman took up the side of the print culture claiming in his points that the very gift of the print culture has so many advantages to it. Such as it’s importance over the image culture created by technology. Postman also comments on law being able to be traveled in space and time due to the written word which is very true and one of the very intelligent points that he makes.
As stated above, without the written culture people would not be able to have a fully working preserved culture that can transcend time. Even if we find articles of cultures, if they were without a written culture its very hard to understand fully who these people truly are, but with the written word we can discover who and how they performed daily duties. This is how cultures and societies like the Greeks, Romans and Egyptians have been preserved for thousands of years.

While Postman talks about the need for written culture Paglia looks at how important image culture is to humans. She argues that humans are visual based creatures.
Paglia also goes as far as to point out that the image culture is: "Nature--violent, chaotic, unpredictable, uncontrollable--predates and stands in opposition to the ordered, structured world created by the word, by the law, by the book centered world of Judeo-Christianity" (234)
With this she means that print culture is what keeps us in line yet image culture helps us break free of the bonds that print culture has created to hold us down and in line by creating this ‘Judeo-Christianity’ culture that rules even our government.
It is interesting to see the points both use in their arguments over which is more important. That which stimulates us visually or what stimulates us mentally?

Yet, the best example used by Postman really gives a grasp on how much the image culture controls us while the print culture frees us. Postman comments that using the Print cultures of Propaganda art, Nazis were able to control the population of Germany by abusing these images and resources. Which as recorded is very true, with the use of German Propaganda art, Hitler was able to paint images of a superior race lying in wait to bring German back to its former glory. It’s easy to understand why Hitler used these forms of mediums to control the population, because people are so stimulated by images that using them to find a scapegoat of a hurt nation was easy for the budding dictator.

People respond to these and use the image culture for terrible means because the image culture is easy to be manipulated and constructed by others with little notice from bigger sources. The image culture can be formed and distributed to millions without anyone knowing because messages can be retorted to small catchy sayings and hidden truths slipped in without a nations knowledge. While with the print culture many books and articles are checked then re-checked and questioned before they are published before a large nation.

Yet, the print culture is not without fault either since many print cultures have used printed materials to control other people and to justify their practices even when they are inhumane. Such example would be cultures in Sudan who use their religious text to justify female castrations at birth or in the girls youth. Or using their religious text to justify the genocide of another culture or religion. Many leaders read these text and take them out of context and go on crusades because of the stimulation they received through life by print text.

With Postman and Paglia make both good points it’s easy to see that both of these “Two Cultures” are at fault for what both judge each other for. Both cultures stimulate and form the way people see the world around them and other people that populate it with them. So we can say one is more at fault than the other but we can not place blame on one and not the other. It seems that the debate will range on between the written word and the world of the TV in which medium is superior to the other as both mediums evolve into new forms.