The disappearance of childhood

What Hacker News says

1. ocschwarDec 2024
   If you want to know the answer, read "The Disappearance of Childhood" by Neal Postman.
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2. brnaftr361May 2023
   I believe he discussed it at some point in, it must have been How to Watch the TV News or one of his talks. I screened my copy of Technopoly, Entertaining Ourselves to Death, and The Disappearance of Childhood.

   If I recall correctly he expected it would follow a similar trajectory to TV. And by far and large I would tend to agree, in fact I recall agreeing with whatever assessment he had made and being in awe with his prescience — this was in 2021. As far as ChatGPT, perhaps this excerpt of the introduction to Amusing Ourselves to Death* written by his son may pique your interest;

   "Amusing Ourselves to Death is a call to action. It is, in my father’s words, “an inquiry ... and a lamentation,” yes, but it aspires to greater things. It is an exhortation to do something. It’s a counterpunch to what my father thought daily TV news was: “inert, consisting of information that gives us something to talk about but cannot lead to any meaningful action.” Dad was a lover of history, a champion for collective memory and what we now quaintly refer to as “civilizing influences,” but he did not live in the past. His book urges us to claim a way to be more alert and engaged. His ideas are still here, he isn’t, and it’s time for the reins to be grabbed by those of a new generation, natives of this brave new world who understand it better."

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3. BraggadociousDec 2019
   The brutality of the dark ages has been debunked. The timeline I just gave you about illiteracy, the printing press, the enlightenment, and our 400 year old education system remains in tact. Neil postman's a good source for the history of education (see "The Disappearance of Childhood") or you can simply wikipedia it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Ages_(historiography) There's some graphs that show how the enlightenment coincides an exponential growth in mass publication.

   As far as protestantism and the printing press being invented prior to the enlightenment, yeah. Without widespread use of both you don't get the enlightenment for reasons I mentioned previously. And neither were really new ideas, either. Ancient greece had the printing press, high rates of literacy and a belief in interpreting texts for yourself, but these ideas were lost during the dark ages.

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