Language as our Media and Still Living in the Age of Television

Postman’s concluding claim is that Our conversations about anything are conducted in whatever "languages" we find it possible and convenient to use. We do not see anything as what it is, but what our languages are. Our languages are our media. I agree that without language we cannot have much media. However his statement about the 10 Commandments contradicts that idea that languages are our media.                           

We may hazard a guess that a people who are being asked to embrace an abstract, universal deity would be rendered unfit to do so by the habit of drawing pictures or making statues or depicting their ideas in any concrete, iconographic forms. The God of the Jews was to exist in the Word and through the Word, an unprecedented conception requiring the highest order of abstract thinking. Iconography thus became blasphemy so that a new kind of God could enter a culture (Postman 9).

Postman states that since God can only exist though text, which was an unprecedented conception at the time, requires an abstract way of thinking. Because of this iconography became blasphemy so that this new God could enter the culture. If even God is too afraid of the media of depicting statues and pictures, when His way of conveying with the people is word. God must have felt that Word can be an inferior to iconography when expressing abstract ideas. “To say it, then, as plainly as I can, this book is an inquiry into and a lamentation about the most significant American cultural fact of the second half of the twentieth century: the decline of the Age of Typography and the ascendancy of the Age of Television”(8). Television is still the most primary media influence. The use of mobile devises is catching up to television. However the television companies still are the ones running the media on the mobile devises. People may not spend as much time watching cable or local television as was watched in 1984, but hours are spent on Netflix and ESPN 3 stations. These mediums are not directly from the local antenna or the cable provider, but they are still television. While we still get a lot of information off of our mobile devises, mostly we just get bits and pieces of information off these websites. Like our “news of the day” example mobile devises just give us bits and pieces of whatever seems to interest us. Television is still our primary source of media still in the year 2015.

Are the words on the tablets or the huge golden calf easier to conceptualize?