Postman

AGREE

"You cannot use smoke to do philosophy. Its form excludes the content." (Postman 7.) Postman's statement supports the two-way communication model. When decoding messages, part of the message is the form in which it is sent. Smoke does not work as a
effective means of communication for philosophy as it is not easily conducive for communicating details.

DISAGREE

"People like ourselves may see nothing wondrous in writing, but our anthropologists know how strange and magical it (writing) appears to a purely oral people, (Postman 13). Postman then states on the same page, that this book is about "our own tribe undergoing a a vast and trembling shift from the magic of writing to the magic of electronics". When we are capable of understanding when we are repeating ourselves by removing ourselves from the situation, the comparison of these statements seem contradictory because sometimes we can learn from the past if we study it and consciously realize the similarity of these situations. However, history tends to repeat itself when we do not remove ourselves from the situations around us, and compare present day to times of the past. A problem with comparing the situations of going from spoken traditions to print and from print to electronic archives is that people have not experienced both. So they must rely on documentation of others experiences of this transition.

An interesting question to pose to this argument is whether or not print is viewed as the most trustworthy of all media. Then the situations could be considered differently as a shift towards print and a shift away from print.