Miguel Torres

Ms. Probst
English 1101
28 October 2015
Judgment of Thamus: Rhetorical Analysis
Neil Postman is an American author and an educator with a masters in education.
Automatically without reading his paper, Postman already creates ethos. However, he is also
known as a culture critic and social media theorist, although this doesnt take away from the fact
that he has a masters in education, it does however indicate that he will most likely take a
passionate stance throughout the article. With that being said his big claim in this article is that
we will piggy back on technology, so much so that we will destroy what we have created. He
claims that our reliance on technology will be the death of us.

Postmans audience for this article, in particular, is a group of angry parents that claim
their children are lazy. Postman, passage, after passage, makes it abundantly clear that he
believes that students will become stupid not because they are, but because the war between
social media giants (printed word, television, etc.) will pin us, students, on the wrong side of
things. Technology will change the way children learn, thus they become stupid because this
change in learning isolates and disengages the student. While his thought process is clear and
makes sense at first, his arguments and examples become purely anecdotal. For example, New
things require new words. But new things also modify old words, words that have deep-rooted
meanings. Postman has taken this example and used it all throughout his paper by simply

saying that new technology changes the old, so therefore we are becoming dumber because we
lose skill and knowledge of the technology before its predecessor.
Postman is constantly making hast generalizations. For example, On the other hand and
in the long run, television may bring a gradual end to the careers of schoolteachers, since school
was an invention of the printing press and must stand or fall on the issue of how much
importance the printed word has. In this passage Postman is talking about how Television
might do well by starting careers for television personnel, but bad for educators because
television will eventually monopolize the knowledge industry, just as the teacher did with the
printed word. Knowing this was written in the early 90s is great because living in 2015 we can
see that his prediction was false indeed, as we know there are millions of people across the globe
who are taught what they know by a teacher.

As afore mentioned, Postman has a background in education and the study of culture.
His focus on education gives him great credibility, because as a student we trust what a teacher
tells us to be true. However, he has also been described as a culture critic and a social media
theorist. Having gone over this article more than once, his tone seems clear. It is without a
doubt that Postman is a pessimist of technology. His only evidence to support his claim is the
excerpt itself. Aside from that there are no statistics presented to support any of his claims. As
far as the use of quoting or siting experts go, he is only using his own examples. This by and
large only makes him less credible. With that being said, he did counter some arguments to shed
light on possible arguments made by the opposition, however this was only done to a couple of
his examples, and made his bias clear.

Throughout the article it was clear that he was making an attempt to come off as
objective as possible, however his tone seemed almost unwavering as he continuously gave
technology a bad reputation. That being said, as far using vocabulary to provoke emotion, he
kept his language fairly objective. Towards the end of the article he did make some poor choices
in vocabulary, for example he makes the claim of social media making war on students because
they all fight for the students attention. While this is clear and understood, he makes it seem as
there is an ongoing 3rd world war going on right in front of students faces. Nonetheless Postman
is able to make his argument with fairly objective tone and language.

Overall postman makes a good argument; however, he lacks credibility due to the fact
that the only evidence he uses to support his evidence is the excerpt he starts off the article with.
In terms of Logos his logic is clear and understood, but his examples put into real world concept
simply dont make sense. As he has no evidence in terms of statistics, all of his arguments are
anecdotal, which turn makes him less credible. Connecting this article to our overall theme for
the semester, these go hand in hand as Postman makes valid points as to how technology can
isolate an individual. Society isnt quite yet seeing the impact that it makes among the younger
generations that have a direct influence from technology as they are growing up.