I've been reading Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death coincidentally with Martin Heidegger's essays "Letter on Humanism" & "The Question Concerning Technology", and realized just how easy it is, once you break through his jargon, to get at the practical consequences of Heidegger's methodology when applied to a different medium. Enframing, in a certain restricted way (i.e. without specific regard to man's special reflective relationship to Being from perspective of Thrown-ness. Ek-sistence not withstanding, as it were) is precisely what Neil Postman's book seems to concern itself with.
For all intents and purposes, Postman spends around 180-ish pages lamenting the fall of The Age of Exposition (the age in which culture and thinking is funneled through the lens of typography and print media, which organizes thinking and discourse in discreet, rational, and highly contextualized forms) as it is replaced by the Age of Showbusiness wherein the culture is dictated by the context-free, absurdist, and ultimately superficial colander of television. Postman's characterization of the Age of Exposition is suspiciously close to Heidegger's lament in the "Question Concerning Techology" concerning man's Enframing by Techne and being Ordered Into Parts for the purposes of Consumption. While anytime one is considering Heidegger, he or she is primarily supposed to be concerned with what such an imposition means in terms of the relationship of beings to Being, it seems like Postman's criticism of the oncoming (as of 1986-ish) epoch, while couched in terms of culture, addresses a sort of practical parallel similar in process, if not in function, to Heidegger.
Heidegger was concerned that, in an epoch in which beings are Set Upon by Techne, they are Ordered as Objects -- massed for the purposes of future consumption -- in such a way that alters their relationship to Being itself. They are no objectified and alienated from Being. They are de-contextualized, and removed from their special relationship to Being. Man's Thrown-ness from Being is ignored as he and Being both become objectified and Ordered.
Postman is concerned that, in a cultural epoch in which Television is the specified norm of discourse and information, people, news, and events are de-contextualized into floating bits of pointless matter. Huxley was right, and information is trivialized, making man's relationship to the whole is ignored and practical news and information is largely irrelevant.
Heidegger would almost certainly not lament a removal from the homogenization of the print culture which Postman champions so dearly, but I find that the comparison of de-contextualization of some sort of ethereal special relationship, which Heidegger DOES lament, appears to be a shared theme. Postman's analysis looks like a practical application of Heidegger's more obscurantist method (although couched in non-poetic, concrete terms that Heidegger would absolutely hate.)
It's fun to see that they are at cross points, and that Postman apparently decries the fall of a sort of aspect of the specific paradigm which Heidegger is specifically trying to remove.
