Neil Postman was born March 8, 1931, and died October 5, 2003. He earned a master's degree in 1955 and a doctorate in education in 1958, both from Teachers College, Columbia University. He began teaching at New York University in 1959. In 1971 he founded a media ecology program at New York University's Steinhardt School of Education, and in 1993 he was named a university professor and served as chair of the Department of Culture and Communication until to 2002. .Postman has written 18 books and more than 200 magazine and newspaper articles. Postman's best-known book is Amusing Ourselves to Death, published in 1985. It explores the decline of the medium of communication as television images replaced the written word. Postman argues that television confuses serious issues with entertainment, demeaning and undermining political discourse by making it less about ideas and more about image. He also argues that television is not an effective way of delivering education, as it only provides the passive transfer of information, rather than the interaction he believes is necessary to maximize learning. He draws on the ideas of media theorist Marshall McLuhan to argue that different media are appropriate for different types of knowledge and describes how oral, literary, and television cultures value and transfer information in different ways. In his novel, Amusing Ourselves to Death, Postino describes to the reader, in detail, the immediate and future dangers of television. The argument begins logically, first explaining the differences between today's media society and yesterday's "typographic America." Postman goes on to discuss in the second half of his book the effects of today's media, politics on television, religion on television, and finally educational television programs. He explains that the media is made up of “snippets of news” (Postman, 1985, p.97), and politics is simply a fashion show. While Postman's arguments about the shortness of America's attention span and the importance of mass media today are logical, I disagree with his opinion about television's inability to educate. I agree with Neil Postman when he says that television is having an overall negative impact. effect on our society; promotes short attention spans. For this argument, Postman uses the example of the seven famous debates between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas. Postman explains that audiences “happily satisfied themselves with seven hours of oratory” (Postman, 1985, p. 44). I don't think this concept is entirely true in today's society.