It is not necessary to conceal anything from a public insensible to contradiction and narcotized by technological diversions.
Interpretation
The quote suggests that when a society is distracted by technology, there's no need to hide truths from them as they are indifferent to contradictions.
Neil Postman points out a significant concern about modern society's relationship with technology. He argues that when individuals become numb to reality due to the overwhelming distractions of technology, they stop questioning or recognizing contradictions in information and opinions. Consequently, the need to conceal truths diminishes because the audience is not engaged enough to challenge or think critically about the presented information.
In practice
In a seminar discussing the impact of technology on society, this quote can highlight concerns about critical thinking.
Television is a non graded curriculum and excludes no viewer for any reason, at any time. In other words, in doing away wtih the idea of sequenece and continuity in education, television undermines the idea that sequence and continuity have anything to do with thought itself.
Television is altering the meaning of 'being informed' by creating a species of information that might properly be called disinformation. Disinformation does not mean false information. It means misleading information - misplaced, irrelevant, fragmented or superficial information - information that creates the illusion of knowing something, but which in fact leads one away from knowing.
Children enter school as question marks and leave as periods.
When two human beings get together, they're co-present, there is built into it a certain responsibility we have for each other, and when people are co-present in family relationships and other relationships, that responsibility is there. You can't just turn off a person. On the Internet, you can.
A book is an attempt to make through permanent and to contribute to the great conversation conducted by authors of the past. [β¦] The telegraph is suited only to the flashing of messages, each to be quickly replaced by a more up-to-date message. Facts push other facts into and then out of consciousness at speeds that neither permit nor require evaluation. (70)
Everything in our background has prepared us to know and resist a prison when the gates begin to close around us . . . But what if there are no cries of anguish to be heard? Who is prepared to take arms against a sea of amusements? To whom do we complain, and when, and in what tone of voice, when serious discourse dissolves into giggles? What is the antidote to a culture's being drained by laughter?
Regardless of what the naysayers believe about human interaction and social media, the data show us that the abundance of technology is actually increasing the abundance of happiness all over the world.
Somehow in the last 100 years, every time there is a problem of getting more spectrum, there is a technology that comes along that solves that problem.
If a major source of the nation's news is personalizing user experiences, people with different points of view will end up in echo chambers of their own design. Facebook didn't create that problem, but it shouldn't aggravate it.
Machines are admirable and tyrannize only with the user's consent. Where, then, is the enemy? Not where the machine gives relief from drudgery but where human judgment abdicates. The smoothest machine-made product of the age is the organization man, for even the best organizing principle tends to corrupt, and the mechanical principle corrupts absolutely.
Skin has become inadequate in interfacing with reality. Technology has become the body's new membrane of existence.
In those days [batch processing] programmers never even documented their programs, because it was assumed that nobody else would ever use them. Now, however, time-sharing had made exchanging software trivial: you just stored one copy in the public repository and therby effectively gave it to the world. Immediately people began to document their programs and to think of them as being usable by others. They started to build on each other's work.
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