English 1010-025 Fall 2009 Formal Essay Assignment 2:

The Postman Rings Again

Objective: Successful completion of this essay assignment will result in 5-7 typed, double-spaced, well-thought-out pages of text that meet the requirements listed below. Do keep in mind that this paper will be graded, not marked pass/fail, which means that you may earn some, none, or all of the 20% of your grade that this is worth.

General Requirements: The paper must have a unique and appropriate title, one that fits the paper’s particular content and begins to point the reader in the direction the paper will go. An essay introduction that lacks some indication of the paper’s purpose, scope, and structure (see Swales) will significantly impact the grade the paper receives. An essay without suitable and substantial and carefully analyzed quotations from the text(s) you discuss will surely fail. Transitions between paragraphs should exist in some form as well. The conclusion should not repeat the intro, but point out what has been accomplished and perhaps what has not—and if you can think of any, suggestions for future research make for a nice closing point. Lastly, please be sure to number your pages.

Crafting the Essay: A few prompts are provided here to get you thinking about the paper. Please be sure to specify which option you select in the heading for your paper. Optionally, if you have an idea of your own for a paper, feel free to propose it to me. In addition, while not mandatory, a good paper will probably draw on more than one of Postman’s essays, since no single essay really captures the extent of his thinking on any given subject.

Option 1, Postman Meets teh Internets: Take a major news website or social networking tool and analyze it from a Postmanian perspective—that is, citing some of Postman’s analyses of the “structure” of television (and, if you like, other media), see how those critiques do or do not apply to a particular website/tool. Be specific in citing Postman’s critiques and be sure you understand why he makes them as you apply them to your target. This is an easy one to do, in some ways, but also an easy one to screw up, if you don’t have a clear understanding of the specifics of Postman’s critiques of television as a medium. Be sure to print out & include with your paper at least some screenshots of the site you are looking at and refer to these as much as possible when your paper needs to provide specific examples. And again, remember, for Postman what matters is not the content per se (yes, that’s how it’s spelled), but how the content is communicated, how the medium shapes the message. In essence, you should see your paper as extending Postman’s thinking to a new medium. You have a shot at being brilliant as well as a shot at, well, being not brilliant. Tread carefully.

Option 2, Education, Postman’s (False?) Hope: One the one hand, Postman, as we have discussed, believes that education, done properly, can radically change the way that people process information; specifically, it can improve our ability to intelligently evaluate information communicated to us through language. On the other hand, Postman spends an awful lot of time arguing that television undermines our ability to process information at all. Assuming that Postman is right in both cases, how optimistic can we be about our future? In other words, based on Postman’s essays, how much hope do we have that education (if improved as Postman desires) can undo or otherwise protect us from the effects of commercial television? A different way of looking at the question might be: if Postman’s project to reform education actually worked, what would be the consequences for commercial television, if any? Your essay should articulate both Postman’s hopes for education as well as his fears of television in the process of assessing how the former might relate to the latter. Note that your paper doesn’t have to take up an extreme position, but might well talk about some benefits being realized and some problems remaining unaddressed.

Option 3, Television vs. Democracy: Postman argues that television (commercial television, particularly) is a threat to democracy in several different ways. Identify at least two different ways in which Postman says television, as a medium, threatens the United States’ ability to function as a democracy and assess, as best you can, using Postman’s own arguments, which of these seems to be the most serious threat, with the assumption, for the purposes of this paper, that his arguments (his stories, more accurately) are correct. In a sense, you are pitting Postman against Postman to determine what he appears to believe the greatest problem is—which effect he tells the most convincing stories about.