The Longest Day

Some were completely adrift.

"There was a moment in my day when I felt homeless," one student said. "I couldn't go home because I knew that would be too tempting. I couldn't be with my friends because that would be too tempting. I had just eaten, so I couldn't just sit in a restaurant all day. I was walking down the street literally with nowhere to go, and I just didn't know what I was going to do."

Several students realized their circle of daily friends included many who were nowhere near them geographically. "I found it hard because a lot of the people I talk to aren't in my immediate area, so they didn't relate to it," said one student.

Others realized the Internet helps them negotiate relationships.

"I started thinking about the idea that we've given up responsibility by relying on technology because it's a lot easier to send a text message to say I'm sorry," said one student.

A student's cellphone interrupted the class, evoking laughter. Then I asked them all to turn their cellphones on, and they eagerly complied.

POSTMAN, THE AUTHOR OF OUR ASSIGNED BOOK, became alarmed by the growing influence of media in 1985. It was during the second term of the first Hollywood actor to become president, as the first television generation came of age, and as live news, MTV, cable TV and videocassette recorders were soon to become ubiquitous. The world had passed by one year the benchmark of George Orwell's 1984, the futuristic novel published in 1949 that foretold of Big Brother, the thought police and totalitarianism. But Postman believed that Aldous Huxley's 1932 scenario in Brave New World was more compelling -- one in which society is destroyed by its worship of mass consumption and escapism. Postman believed television, in particular, was constraining higher thought and "transforming our culture into one vast arena for show business" without our realizing it. He thought that, because we are engineered to avoid our own imprisonment, we just needed to be aware of what our growing addiction to media was doing to us.

But were an intellectual's 20-year-old musings about the future of our media world still relevant?

In their papers, a surprising number of students said Postman had convinced them of his argument or at least made them feel guilty about their e-media indulgences. "A day without electronic media showed me how dependent society and I were upon it," one student wrote. "Without that distraction, I can discover new things in the real world, or at least be more productive. Neil Postman was right when he said that American society has become obsessed with the trivial and the minute."

One student related the lessons of the book to her own upbringing.

"The fact that the media trivialize information and turn public discourse into pure entertainment are both things my father tried to explain to me as a young child that I'm only now starting to understand," she wrote.

But some of my students jumped to defend their media habits.