Entertaining Ourselves to Death

Postman’s speech and his book relate to each other in many ways.  One of these ways is shown towards the end of Postman’s speech when he reveals that “we will talk more with machines than we will with humans.”  This relates to what he had to say in chapter 1 on page 6.  On this page Postman states that, conversation refers to techniques and technologies metaphorically to exchange messages.  This means that our conversations will not be by being with the person, but we will converse with them by using technology.  Another way that Postman’s speech parallels to his book in chapter one is when he states what Henry David Thoreau had to say.  Thoreau stated, “All our inventions are but improved means to an unimproved end.”  When Postman quoted this, I think that he meant that even though we are constantly creating more things, it’s a never ending cycle because we will always want to create more.  We want to entertain ourselves to death by creating more machines to do this.  This is just like when Postman talks about Los Vegas as a symbol of entertainment (Pg. 3,4) and how lots of people go there for the entertainment.  We as people, have a habit of constantly entertaining ourselves.