CONSCIENTIOUS OBJECTIONS Stirring Up Trouble About Language, Technology and Education<i> by Neil Postman (Alfred A. Knopf: $17.95) </i>

No contemporary essayist writing about American pop culture is more fun to read and more on target than Neil Postman, a professor of a field he calls “media ecology” at New York University. While our brightest cultural critics gravitate toward the more glamorous political arena, Postman rakes muck about education and the mass media, institutions that arguably play a more decisive role in focusing thought, instilling values and shaping the national agenda. One is rightly suspicious of the education and mass media books that come out in droves each year, for so many are predictable--aficionados of high culture bemoaning TV shows they believe are burlesque, education theorists sounding ominous warnings followed by rallying cries. Postman might address familiar subjects, but the conclusions he reaches usually diverge dramatically from the mundane.

“The least dangerous things on television,” he writes, for instance, “are its junk.” Of more concern is TV news, which has taken over “our culture’s most serious business” by serving as the public’s main source for social and political decision-making. Rather than involving viewers in the decision-making process, Postman writes, TV news dulls our interest and diminishes our awareness, turning potentially inquisitive citizens into passive spectators. Postman sometimes slips into the type of criticism we often hear about TV news, lambasting politicians such as Jesse Jackson for his brief appearance on an entertainment show (the real danger is that we expect Jackson and other leaders to act like TV characters even when they aren’t on dramatic shows). But unlike more conservative critics, Postman doesn’t go so far as to insist that news always be deadpan and dead serious. He is more concerned about the way news producers (usually unconsciously) titillate our interest by portraying the world as out of control, leaving us with a desire to tune in for a rundown of tomorrow’s surprising events--but also with a sense of powerlessness.

In his essays on education, Postman launches out against his own discipline: social science. Psychologists, anthropologists, and presumably, “media ecologists” don’t do science, he writes, contending that these trades are closer to “moral theology.” Postman effectively captures the absurdity of supposedly “scientific” research. In one project cited here, researchers conducted 2,500 studies about TV’s role in fostering childhood aggression, only to conclude that “TV may be a contributing factor in making some children act aggressively, but it is not entirely clear what constitutes aggressive behavior.” Postman overgeneralizes from anecdotes like these, however, contending that one can study cause-and-effect in the natural sciences, but not in the social world. The latter, he writes, is “not defined by immutable laws,” when in fact, disciplines such as criminology have presented convincing evidence that human behavior is not entirely unpredictable.

Even when Postman’s arguments become a bit imprecise, though, his essays remain a pleasure to read, for they are gifted with a rare quality in substantive nonfiction books: a sense of humor. Postman kids around, for example, when comparing the differences between dissidents in the East and dissidents in the West: “In Russia, writers with serious grievances are arrested, while in America they are merely featured on television talk shows where all that is arrested is their development.”