The evening seemed charmed--even the rain couldn't stay away from Neil Postman on his last night in Vancouver. Speaking on "Where Do We Go From Here?" the distinguished NYU Professor of Culture and Communication, and sometimes media scold, proved an irresistible Friday date, if not somewhat preordained given the particular trappings involved. Building on the momentum of a three-day speaking gig heroically entitled "The Quest for Narratives in a Technological Society," Postman's lectures had been tricked out with the requisite fawning throngs and cavernous venues only the most popular of non-celebrity speakers warrant. And while the rain had no problem delivering (however unable to deter an eager audience), it was Postman's response to the so-called technomania of contemporary culture that faltered, leaving the night's promising air feeling downright inclement itself.

Call him old-fashioned, and you risk making Postman blush. He rightly eschews the cult of technophobic pride--you know the types, who wear their incompetence like a badge of homely, righteous pragmatism (read Andy Rooney). The author of classic treatises like Amusing Ourselves to Death and The Disappearance of Childhood, and, more recently, Technopoly, now reveals his comfort with as weighty a mantle: full blown, self-professed anachronism. His newly released collection of complementary essays on the forgotten virtues of the Enlightenment, the somehow un-ironically titled Building a Bridge to the Eighteenth Century, advertises itself as a riposte to our current information-glutted turn of the century. This collection summarises much of his anti-media, anti-technology themes (literally, according to reviewers who've noticed his penchant for self-plagiarism). Packed with an inordinate amount of aphoristic quotations--again, unintentionally ludicrous--the study poses itself as a needed consolation to his other cultural criticism. But the rapprochement of contemporary ills with useful but disregarded past fights becoming the hackneyed rhetorical manoeuvre that it is for readers inured to generations of cultural critics who've played the same card. Hagiography and romanticism come easily to such perspectives, and particularly to scholars already much absorbed in figures and histories that only seem more exemplary in retrospect.

Still, even knowing how I already felt about his newest book, I wasn't the least dogged by the downpour and late buses: the idea of Postman, wielding his newly articulated Enlightenment bombast and considerable academic reputation, augured at least a spirited talk. His prior speeches practically designated that the third would be the most compelling, as he went through the motions of his technology critique at the University of British Columbia's Chan Centre, and then the importance of human narratives to understand and orient this crisis at the First Baptist Church. This closing night at the War Memorial Stadium was, to excuse the sporting analogy, the put-up or shut-up event of his speaking engagement for the first annual Laing Lecture series, arranged by Regent College of UBC. It wasn't until Postman was gushingly introduced to the vast audience teeming with visible anticipation, and addressed as a "modern day prophet," that I realized just how beset this intellectual had unwittingly become by his own deliverance shtick.

Armed with throwback idée fixes like the human condition and a generally unassailable, impressive veneration for Enlightenment thinkers, just listening to Postman felt nostalgia inducing. Regardless, his gravel voice made a well-measured pace through a clear thesis about the need for pragmatism in the face of technological change. We require a public discourse and an artistic imagination, reinforcing fundamental ideas that instruct a culture besotted with hurtling technological and social change. Contemporary western culture lacks any ideology outside "mythinformation," Postman elaborated, borrowing from fellow academic Langdon Winner's memorable neologism-the illusory assumption that social progress is barred by limitations on what we know, our ready access to more and more information. "This devotion to information is utter nonsense," Postman opined. Crime, abuse, or the ills of public education or Western democracy? All this "has nothing to do with insufficient information."

There is a bit of sophistry to this, of course. Postman makes distinctions between wisdom, knowledge, and mere information. "Knowledge," he writes in Building a Bridge, "is only organized information." Similarly, wisdom is the application of gathered knowledge to certain principles, the cui bono or "so what?" which is supposed to be every journalist's strong suit. Information, the only one of these three which we have in abundance in this information society, is also the least useful-carrying instead a deleterious effect in the amounts which Postman feels besiege and befuddle us in our everyday lives. Wisdom, the synthesis of these lower-order forms of detritus, is not so much the utopian answer to our problems, but it does entail the "asking [of] the right questions." Postman does not see this happening anywhere in media or elsewhere in public discourse; he suggests newspapers adopt wisdom pages in the way they do sections for editorial and opinion. Learning to transform accumulated knowledge into wisdom is the dominant narrative of our struggle with technology, Postman claimed to the assembled stadium crowd.

But it is exactly Postman's naive reading of what he calls the "technological onslaught" that fails to appreciate the more salient features of the present culture of information abundance. He fails to acknowledge much dynamism to culture, seeing everything instead through the monocle of critical disdain. The unprecedented global reach of information technologies like the Internet cannot be simplified as a menace, aiding and abetting only our appetite for gossip, image, and the related ephemera of pop culture. No, Britney Spears, the WWF, and Pokemon are not fine measures of cultural wattage; nor are they indications that the wired generation is slouching, much less surfing, toward Bethlehem. This is true no matter how laughable a proposal it may appear in some quarters, particularly on the West Coast, where dot com boisterism and Valley venture capital laughably outpaces actual questions of the usefulness of new media outside commerce.

No one can fail to notice that this is clearly a transitional, historical and cultural moment, for the media and journalist professional no less than the rest of us: everyone is in the process of adapting to the emergent information environment. That does, however, make for an invitingly fat and slow-moving target to Postman's rhetoric. Still as traditional media finds its place in information-dissemination usurped by the fleeter distribution of the Internet, society will place an increasing demand on such traditional bastions of public trust like the daily newspaper to provide higher-level knowledge and wisdom to understand the changes in effect. It already does, I would suggest. Indeed, the paper seems to have little choice for survival but to assume the mantle of "truth medium," as Postman implores. Our political and social situation increasingly privileges a more sophisticated assessment of the information made available to us, and it is this specialized labour which new media's growth demands.

Its earnest appeal and general merit aside, Postman's jeremiad basically laments a lack of apparent consensus to these times--he updates the Enlightenment epithet of pedantry for the info-junkie in each of us--but therein lays his glaring misstep. To mistake consensus for progressiveness is the logic of an ideologue, not a critic. And no apparatchik of the Enlightenment can rightly evade the inadequacies of that age's institutions and established beliefs while vilifying our own. That point was not lost even on doting audience members, who asked him to reconcile his fondness for dead white Europeans with a conspicuous distaste and distance from a radically more pluralist present.

Which leaves us to realize that despite his new enthusiasm for the eighteenth century, Neil Postman is never more relevant to an audience than in the delivery of his punditry. As a popular scourge of the here and now, Postman's words are far more edible. In fact, he scored the night's biggest laugh on the follies of such "advancements" as call waiting. Perhaps wit has less appeal to a critic in his autumn, but it was hard for Postman to escape the attendant ironies of his final talk, which was something of a production itself: banks of huge speakers, snaked cables, and microphoned aisles, not to mention the Neil Postman bookselling stall busily transacting away on his cultural capital.

His castigation--itself an attribute of his prized Enlightenment philosophies--is certainly welcome, even if not the entire answer or final word. As Postman caught himself wryly confessing in mid-sentence, while advising the audience to seek out a particular eighteenth century essay, "You can probably find it on the Internet."

[Author's note: Beginning next issue I will contribute an ongoing column for *spark-online on media and culture, "Surfing Toward Bethlehem," which will cull from a broad range of sources the latest dispatches which reflect the debates and themes of our so-called information age.]

Copyright © 2000 Jeffrey MacIntyre All Rights Reserved

Jeffrey MacIntyre is a Vancouver writer whose recent work has appeared in The Ubyssey, the loop, and On Hoops.