Can Reading More Books Save Democracy?

In an age of endless scrolling and bite-sized content, does reading still matter? This episode explores Neil Postman’s argument that different forms of media shape the way we think—and why reading is unique in making us better thinkers, speakers, and decision-makers. We’ll break down how books train the mind for deeper reasoning, challenge our biases, and help us engage with the world in a way that tweets and TikToks never could. If you want to sharpen your mind, expand your perspective, and reclaim your attention, this episode is for you.

why reading matters, Neil Postman media theory, books vs. social media, critical thinking and reading, deep reading benefits, philosophy of media, how reading shapes the mind, attention and literacy, intellectual development, philosophy podcast.

Transcript

Imagine having a conversation with a clerk at a store about an important package you need to send across the country. You start trying to talk, but the clerk speaks in nothing but three words or less. A phrase here, a word there, always struggling to get a complete thought across. You have difficulty understanding the questions and instructions they are trying to give you. You become increasingly frustrated. Why won't they just speak normally, you say? But they reply, "I can't. My only way. Now, think about how much of our day-to-day information arrives to us just like this. It's Tiny fragments, a headline here, soundbite there. How much depth of thought can you really expect to be getting from this mode of communicating? Could you really get a comprehensive idea of how the coach's choices might have affected the outcome of the big game? Or whether a new drug might be an effective treatment for what ails you? Probably not. But you might get just enough information to make you think you did. So if our decision-making is shaped by the way we come to get our information, the way we interact with others, then the media goes a long way in shaping how we think. If you get your information mostly from TikTok videos or social media posts, you quite literally think in sound bites. And that would inhibit your ability to discover truth and solve your problems, get what you want out of life. Have you ever wondered if how we get our information, then is just as important as the information we're getting? Welcome back for another episode of American Socrates. I'm your host, Charles M. Rupert. In this episode, we're diving into the question, why we read. We're not just talking about reading for fun, but why reading, especially the slow and focused kind, is vital for the way we think, speak, and even understand the world. Mostly, we'll be looking at Neil Postman's influential ideas about how media shapes our thoughts. He argued that what we read, watch, and listen to affects not just what we think, but how we think. And if our minds are constantly fed and bite-sized pieces, it might be limiting our ability to concentrate, to think of deeply, critically, and clearly, and even to tolerate other people's ideas. Making anything more complicated than the baby food version sounds like some sort of fraud or swindle. So today, we're going to explore how reading might be one of the best tools we have for building sharper, more engaged minds, and more tall tolerant people. The first thing I want to discuss is one of Neil Postman's ideas, where our technology affects us in ways we're not always able to predict or understand. He calls this idea Frankenstein Syndrome, which is his term for how we create technologies or forms of media for specific purposes, but then we struggle to contain them to that purpose. Just like the monster in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, the scientist has built something that he can't quite govern. Postman says our technological creations soon take on lives beyond the limited design that we intended for them. He writes, but once the machine is built, we discover sometimes to our horror, usually to our discomfort, always to our surprise, that it has ideas of its own. Postman sees technology as the main driver of cultural innovation. He says, in every tool we create, an idea is embedded that goes beyond the function of the thing itself. Our stuff means things to us in ways that are more than just functional. And it's in this realm that Frankenstein's syndrome has its most profound influence. Let's take eyeglasses as an example. Wearing a shaped bit of carved glass in front of your eyes to see better was an innovation that first came about in Northern Italy, sometime around 1290. But the invention of eyeglasses didn't just come with the idea of improving vision. It came with the idea of improving the human condition. You see, medicine up until this point had largely been in the business of restoring humans to their natural condition. So if you broke an arm or you got sick, medicine was there to help return you to how you were before that malady. But eyeglasses allowed us to improve on God's design. We could literally take something that was natural, like the natural decay of our vision, and fix it. We could improve on how we are. This idea led the medieval Christian monarchists to wonder just what else they could improve on, including things like government, religion, and knowledge of the natural world. And all that wondering is ultimately what kicked off the European Renaissance. Now, none of the people inventing eyewear in the early 14th century thought that they would be leading to some sort of Renaissance or cultural revolution within a couple of hundred years, but that's just the point. Eyeglasses had other ideas for humanity than just helping us see a little better after 40. Frankenstein's syndrome affects all technology, but it is especially significant for communications technology. The Think about how fast-paced media, like social media or news flashes, encourage us to focus on the newest, most shocking thing. This can leave less room for deep reflection and understanding.. The dominant media of a society then goes a long way in determining the character of that society. So we could even say that one generation is the radio generation, and another generation, the television generation, and a third one, the internet generation, and so on. Media here simply means the ways and the methods for the transmission of thoughts and ideas throughout a society. Generally, we mean technology that spreads information to a mass of people, like all at once, the mass media. A medium, then, is simply whatever it is that exists between two people and then allows them to communicate. Since the way we create and share information can shape how our society thinks and operates, media can then shape us in ways that we can't predict and don't necessarily want. Our own inventions start controlling our attention and even our values. It's like we've created a system that rewards us for constant passive consumption rather than thinking deeply. Postman's Frankenstein syndrome, then, should be read as a cautionary tale. If you're not intentional about the media you're using to consume information, you might find yourself adapting to its demands rather than it serving your needs. For postmen, these media are double-edged swords. They can be useful, and they can also be destructive. Sometimes the Frankenstein syndrome leads us to positive outcomes, but they can just as easily topple our civilization. So some media are better suited to processing complex information than others. Print, especially the slow, thoughtful kind of writing, is one way to program your mind, to be able to read and to focus and concentrate longer and deeper. When we read carefully, we're not just skimming the surface, but we are plumbing the depths of the human mind. OK, so this is all going by pretty quickly. Let's slow down and take stock of where we are. Media, or in the singular, a medium, is just a piece of technology. It's facilitates communications between people or groups of people. Postman argues that each medium of communication isn't just some neutral vessel for the transmission of information. Instead, each form, whether it be print, television, a podcast, a smartphone app, whatever it is, it's shapes what it communicates and how we come to understand the information that it contains. Marshall McCluan said, this effect makes it so that the medium is the message. But Postman wants to tweak that a little, saying instead that the medium is the metaphor. In other words, each different medium highlights different aspects of human communication. An inside so doing, it shapes what information it provides through its own filters, limitations, and strengths. To understand what I mean, consider smoke signals as a medium of communication. With this technology, I could transmit any message that will transmit via puffs of smoke. But some messages would obviously work more easily in this medium than others, meaning that some messages would be easy to signal with smoke while others would be tedious and difficult. Relaying a simple message like, "The buffalo are here", would go easily. But imagine trying to have a philosophical conversation on, say, the nature of reality, using nothing but smoke signals. And you would get some idea of avoiding what Postman and I are talking about. Most likely, we would quickly abandon such a conversation because of the difficulty in communicating it. And so if smoke signals were a dominant form of communication communications technology, our culture would simply lack philosophy, and so it would lack science and all of the prosperity that those bring with them. This is what I mean when I said that our dominant media technology thus goes a long way in determining the content of our culture. If it doesn't communicate easily through our dominant media, it just doesn't get talked about. TV, the dominant technology when Postman was writing his famous work of his, Amusing Ourselves to Death in 1984, is a visually driven, quick, and often emotional kind of communication. It's great at delivering entertainment, but it tends to prioritize immediacy and simplicity often often at the expense of accuracy and relevance. A televised debate, right, a political debate, for example, may focus more on a candidate's charisma than their demeanor, their appearance, rather than the details of their complex policies, which is inarguably what really matters when we're choosing a person for government. So with TV, the medium itself tends to favor what is visually and emotionally appealing, not what's necessarily the most informative or the most thought-provoking. TV appeals not to reason then, but to our emotions and disables us from making rational choices instead of ones based on taste. Postman says that the electronic media, starting with the telegraph, have emphasized speed, quantity, novelty, and distance, often at the expense of right relevance and coherence. Consider this quote from Henry David Thoreau: "We are in a great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas. But Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate. We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the old world some weeks nearer to the new, but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad, flapping American ear will be that Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough. Together, the electronic media present us with a dramatized and attention-grabbing world that is not only seemingly chaotic and out of control, it's unrealistic. This fictional world ultimately replaces the real world because it is better for show business. That is, it's more entertaining. And so it earns more money for the owners of the media. Capitalism then drives us away from reason and towards some sort of artificial reality, not because that's what's best for us or that's what we want, but because it's more addictive. And since it's more addictive, it's more lucrative. TV, Postman says, carries all of this chaos into our living rooms. Were we alive today, he would no doubt say things have gotten much worse. The artificial reality that the media creates to entertain us follows us around in our pockets. It buzzes at us to take it out and to watch it. It promotes misinformation and disinformation over the truth because in our shock, in our uncertainty, we tend to pay more attention to it. And the more attention we pay to it, the more advertisers can buy our attention. But let's compare the electronic media with the print medium. We've all heard how important reading and writing is to education. Hardly a year seems to go by without some chorus of educators singing a lament in minor chords to the reading habits of the youth. Still, more complaints come ironically from parents who probably can't be bothered to pick up a book themselves, but no one really explains to us why reading and writing matter. Or if they do, they tend to couch it in abstract terms that very few of us can really relate to. They say things like written words require focus. They invite a complex argument. They can explore nuanced ideas or reading develops analytical skills; all of these are very true and entirely unrelatable to anyone who doesn't have a bachelor's degree in education. So let's try to make this more concrete. When you engage in a conversation with someone standing right in front of you, you can tell whether or not they're getting what you're saying, simply by the look on their face. If they stare at you blankly, you know you're going to have to repeat what you're saying. Perhaps in a different way or in different words, try it again and again, until you see their eyes ultimately light up with understanding. Thus, in dialogue, you have multiple chances to convey what you mean. You can try out different phrases until they pick up what you're ultimately putting down. Okay, but in writing, you get one chance to get it right. So you need to express your thoughts in the clearest and most accessible way for your target audience. And they'll either get it or they won't. So written language tends to be clearer, more straightforward, better reasoned out, more explanatory, and more consistent than spoken language, precisely because it has to be. Reading it, then, might make you think in all of those ways. The more you read, the more you think, like a book is written, until it long lasts, that becomes your head habit of thought. People who read all the time tend to sound the way a book reads. They are clear, rational, tolerant, and quick thinking, as a result of nothing more than reading people's ideas expressed in the best way possible. Any reading will do it first, but then you really need to read harder and denser, and more complex books if you want to get the full effect here. It's a bit like going to the gym and lifting weights to get strong. I often tell my students that if you're going to try learning and you don't read, it's like going to the gym and then standing around by the water fountain for an hour and then going home. You didn't really get much out of it, did you? Of course, if you try to dumb things down to get the information by consuming it through, say, a different medium, right, you watch a YouTube video instead of reading the book or take the Cliff Notes version instead of trying to read it. Well, that's a bit like going to the gym, only lifting the lightest weights they have. So, yeah, you do develop a little bit, but it's not really building much muscle. And the worst thing is going in trying to learn through the internet or through AI, right? You let AI do the research for you. Well, that's like getting somebody else or in this case, a robot, to lift your own weights for you. You're really defeating the whole purpose of going to the gym in the first place. Remember, the easier it is, the less improvement you're going to get from this process. It's meant to be hard. So in Postman's view, print culture is unique and its power to shape thoughtful, reflective minds across an entire population. Unlike TV or digital media, reading requires sustained attention and the ability to follow complex arguments. Print culture encourages analytical thinking, logical structure, and the kind of mental rigor that Postman feels is crucial for it informs society to maintain something complex at like a national democracy. When we read books, essays, and long-form articles, we're more likely to encounter these complex, philosophical debates and perspectives that challenge us to think deeply. And it's this deep thought that allows us to maintain this civilization without reliance on some kind of dictator or king. To postman, print culture represents an era when people value depth and discourse more than entertainment and distraction. A print-based medium emphasizes several ways of thinking, importantly, including objectivity, exposition, reflection, sequential development, and logical coherence. Print technology organizes our thinking in order to write it, and so in order to read it. All right, so all too quickly, let me go through those.. Let's look at each of these in turn here. Writing is more objective because in order to reach a mass audience in a single shot, an author must attempt to put himself or herself in the point of view of many different people so that their ideals will be understood from different perspectives. Exposition means the need to slow down and explain ideas rather than just assume people have it or give them an oversimplified version of it. Print allows us to take the time to do this, whereas other media have to be fast-paced, and so they just move from bullet point to bullet point to bullet point. Reflection here means the time it takes to write from an objective point of view, which gives the author the time to reflect then on their own view, and to see if, you know, if they're genuinely interested here in the truth, they can adjust that view as is required. It gives the author the time to consider what whether what they're saying is really true or only true from certain points of view. Sequential development is the process of laying out one's ideas in simply the most logical and coherent manner you can imagine. This takes a lot of time to organize, but it pays off in that your reader is more likely to be able to follow what it is you're saying and get it correct. And finally, logical coherence simply means that the author has taken the time to iron out the inconsistencies of contradictions in the expression of their ideas, right? They have gone through it, they have looked at the different statements that they've made, and they've made sure that none of those are in conflict with other statements that they have made. Postman argued that the more societies values print, the more likely they are to develop citizens who can critically evaluate information and build a healthy public discourse. It's about a culture that nurtures and informs individuals rather than passive consumers of ideas, you know, the kind that turn into factious ideologues that ultimately tear themselves apart. Reading helps us to develop not just knowledge, then, but the tools to question, interpret, and apply what it is we know. For postmen, as we move farther and farther away from print culture, we risk losing a society that values deep thought, and we become more susceptible to superficial, emotionally driven media that does not give us a full picture of reality if it gives us any picture of reality at all. Okay, so I like to end these episodes with something of a call to action, like a What can you do using this information? And this one, I'm going to give you kind of a homework assignment, if you will. Postman has warned us, right, that the media we consume programs our mind, whether we realize it or not. So here's my challenge for you. Try an E-Fast. This means unplugging from all electronic devices for, I don't know, let's say a week at least. If you can't do a week, maybe, you know, try just a day, just 24 hours without any electronic devices. You can still use anything mechanical. Like you can drive your car, but you can't turn on the radio. So there would be no digital media at all here. You know, maybe you should warn your family before doing all of this so that don't think you are like dead in a ditch somewhere. But you're just going to unplug and take your time for the full day or the full week. You know, and I don't mean you have to go somewhere. You don't have to like go live in the woods or anything like that. You can stay at home, you can go to work, you can do all of that without your phone, without your computer, without any of it. Now, before you end up coming back online, you should try to notice how you feel. What did you really miss? What didn't you miss? Were you able to get to things that you had never seemed to have the time for? How might your mind feel cleared? How might you see things a bit differently now? But this is a really simple thing you can try and do, because eventually you're going to reintroduce this technology back into your life. And now you'll kind of have some idea of what is good for you and what wasn't. What is really useful and what could you do without? This makes you in control of your electronic technology, particularly in control of your media consumption. Maybe you were less angry. Maybe you were less paranoid. Maybe you were less anxious because you stopped listening to certain news or certain media. Those are real effects. They're no different than like you feeling better because you stopped taking a drug or something like that. So in the end, you can use this EFAS as a way to change your relationship with technology and the media and to make room for personal growth and some of that deep, reflective thinking that Postman believed we all need more of. So in this episode, we dove into Neil Postman's thought-provoking ideas about how media shapes our thinking and our culture. Postman argued that each media, from the prints to television to other digital sources, structures our thoughts and our thought processes in unique ways, influencing not just what we think, but how and why we think that way. We explored his concept of Frankenstein Syndrome, where our technology has developed beyond their limited original purposes. And then we moved on to the idea that the medium is the metaphor, shaping our understanding by channeling the messages we are likely to encounter. Before finally taking a look at the value of print culture and fostering deep, reflective thinking. Thanks for tuning in to American Socrates. If today's exploration of philosophy got you thinking in new ways, don't forget to subscribe, so you'll never miss an episode. Leave us a review and helps others discover the show and share it with a friend who you think might need a dose of practical wisdom in their life. Join us next week as we explore schooling and education by examining the question, why do we teach the humanities?