Members of the Class of 2026.
Neil Postman was a visionary. During his forty years on the faculty of NYU’s Steinhardt School, he created its programs in media ecology and culture and communication. He formed a new vision of what education could be, set up an experimental school to test that vision, and then revised his vision based on what he learned.
In 1985, Postman published a book called Amusing Ourselves to Death. You should get a copy of Amusing Ourselves to Death, and you should read it all the way through, from the first word to the last.
The book is about how new technologies change our culture, change how we relate to each other, and even change how we think. It is about how some of those changes can be good for us, and some of them can be bad for us. It has important implications for how we should use new technologies and how we should not use them.
The first technology Postman discusses is the written alphabet. Before the ancient Greeks had a written alphabet, they shared ideas by reciting epic poems. They composed them with a special meter called dactylic hexameter, so they were easy to memorize and recite.
When the Greeks acquired the technology of the written alphabet about 2800 years ago, they no longer needed to do everything in dactylic hexameter. They could write out and recite prose arguments that presented abstract ideas for analysis.
Next, Postman discusses the printing press. It enabled people to push their ideas out to very large audiences without giving speeches. The audience used their eyes instead of their ears. And because your eye can read and re-read a series of paragraphs, printing enabled writers to deliver long, structured arguments grounded in reason rather than emotion.
The printing press launched the Age of Enlightenment, when religion and science, politics and law were transformed by books, pamphlets, and newspapers. The Age of Enlightenment, with its culture of typography, lasted hundreds of years. But then, in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a series of new technologies arrived and began to degrade that culture.
Postman describes how the telegraph allowed ideas to move across huge distances, separated from the context in which they arose. And how photography led people to think they were encountering reality through visual images, without having to embed that feeling in the logical structure of language.
But for Postman the most important technological change was television. It combined the speed of the telegraph with the visual emphasis of photography. It created a powerful way to reach another person emotionally rather than rationally. It turned public discussion, even of serious topics, into entertainment. Things like beauty and charisma mattered more than thoughtfulness. As a result, Postman argued, we are amusing ourselves to death.
Since Postman wrote his book, transformative technologies have kept arriving at an accelerating pace. The merger of social media with smartphones weakened our attention spans and our social skills. Now AI has weakened our confidence in what is real.
Members of the Class of 2026, by spending the past four years at NYU Shanghai, you have equipped yourselves with the skills you need to surf the waves of Postman’s technological change. Ever since GPS, you have been locked into a culture of rational discussion. A culture of respectful disagreement. A culture of logical exploration of the world around us.
Because you studied here, you are well prepared for the world of 15-second streaming videos, clicks, and likes. In order to flourish there, however, I ask you to keep three messages in mind:
First, do not refrain from participating in the culture of amusement. It is good for you to have fun. It is good for you to take advantage of modern technologies of entertainment. By all means watch silly videos, absorbing TV series, and exciting movies.
Second, at the same time, do not confuse amusement and emotion for logic and reason. The fact that someone looks and sounds serious on YouTube does not turn what they say into rigorous argument. If they say something persuasive, don’t assume it is right. Go find the same argument in written form somewhere else, so that you can subject it to critical analysis.
And third, make sure you protect space in your life to keep using the technology of typography. Read books. Read things that you cannot finish in one sitting. Read things that will take you a week or more. That is the way to preserve and protect your intellects, your ability to think carefully and rationally. That is the way to maintain your super-powers, the powers that will enable you to have an impact on the world around you.
Members of the NYU Shanghai Class of 2026, as you embark on lives of worth and purpose, lives of service to a world that desperately needs you, let me conclude by sharing a few hopes that we, your teachers, hold for you:
May you enjoy the special pleasures of craft — the private satisfaction of doing a task as well as it can be done.
May you enjoy the special pleasures of profession — the added satisfaction of knowing that your efforts promote a larger public good.
May you be blessed with good luck, and also with the wisdom to appreciate when you have been lucky rather than skillful.
May you find ways to help others under circumstances where they cannot possibly know that you have done so.
May you be patient, and gentle, and tolerant, without becoming smug, self-satisfied, or arrogant.
May you always be able to confess ignorance, doubt, vulnerability, and uncertainty.
May you continue to inhabit an Age of Enlightenment, a culture of typography, a culture of rational exploration of the world around us through engagement with long, serious, written texts.
May you know enough bad weather that you never take sunshine for granted, and enough good weather that your faith in the coming of spring is never shaken.
May you be able to travel frequently beyond the places that are comfortable and familiar, so that your appreciation for the miraculous diversity of life grows ever stronger.
And may your steps lead you often back to Shanghai. Back to Pudong. Back to the New Bund. For you will always be members of the NYU Shanghai family. And we will always be happy to welcome you home.
Congratulations.