What feels almost quaint now is not Postman’s alarm, but his target. Television was merely the prototype for the power that cellphones and tablets have over the population. The danger was never the screen itself, but what happens when a society allows its dominant media to define how truth is presented, how politics is understood, and how meaning is measured. Postman was not arguing against technology; he was warning that every medium carries a philosophy, and that some philosophies are incompatible with serious thought.
“Orwell feared those who would ban books,” Postman wrote. “Huxley feared that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one.” George Orwell, the author of 1984, imagined a tyrannical government suppressing the flow of truth and free speech through pain.
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This is how we arrived at what Postman called “peek-a-boo” news — information without continuity or consequence. Stories surface briefly, disappear, and are replaced before they can demand action or reflection. A war, a scandal, a meme, and a sponsored post flash before your eyes quicker than meaningful comprehension. “We are flooded with information,” Postman warned, “but starved for knowledge.” The algorithm does not ask whether something is true or important, only whether it’s clickable.
Clicks equal revenue for advertisers and the big tech companies, so in a sense, we are operating both under the imagined societies of Huxley and Orwell. Follow the money, the public-private partnerships, and you will find yourself entwined in a web of commercial interests that likely don’t bend to your benefit. But that doesn’t matter, because you’re more concerned with being a participant in the modern world than untangling something you don’t understand.
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Consider that America’s obsession with politics is a symptom of societal sickness. A healthy society does not experience politics as a 24-hour performance that flings in your face like fragments of debris from a relentless storm. Postman warned that when politics becomes entertainment, it ceases to function as a serious mechanism for self-government. Average citizens do not deliberate; we root for our team instead of trying to persuade others of our perspective.
Gen Z is often blamed for this lack of seriousness, but that accusation misses the point. Young people are not the authors of this condition; they are its most complete expression. They grow up in an environment where everything is content, and everyone is a brand. The self becomes something to curate, not something to cultivate.
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Media and technology are now embedded into education. It is omnipresent, largely unexamined, and composed of substances few fully understand. Teachers tell children that screens, digital platforms, gamified lessons, and algorithmic feedback are “simply how the world works.” But as Postman warned, “Technological change is not additive; it is ecological.” America did not add media to learning — it transformed learning itself.
The gamification of serious subjects has consequences. When everything is designed to be engaging, nothing is allowed to be different. When learning must always entertain, boredom becomes an emergency rather than a teacher or an opportunity to think. America produces students fluent in interfaces but impatient with complexity. Students are comfortable with expression but unfamiliar with thought, only to grow up into adults who vote based on the media’s emotional current rather than opinions rooted in reason and a sense of self.
The solution is not to abolish technology, but to separate it from immersion. Technology and media should be taught as subjects, not atmospheres — like history or science. Students would study how digital algorithms shape perception, how data is harvested and sold, how platforms incentivize behavior, and how media forms privilege to certain kinds of truth while excluding others.
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But schools cannot teach what families refuse to practice. A child cannot learn to “look away” from technology if every idle moment is filled for them. Parental discomfort with bored or emotionally needy children often drives the very dependency educators are called to undo. For parents, screens satiate their desire for a moment of peace from the never-ending attention demanded by their kids. They enter adolescence burdened with academic pressure, social anxiety, and bodies changing faster than their sense of self can keep up. These are not conditions children are equipped to manage alone.
Today, many children live in dual-income households; both mom and dad are often at work. Other parents are divorced, but the outcome is the same: a discomforted, confused, and overwhelmingly stressed-out child left to their own devices. So, the screen offers something irresistibly appealing: escape without consequence. Online, identity is malleable. Pain can be muted, attention can be curated, and the self can be endlessly reinvented across usernames, platforms, and digital avatars.
For many young people, the digital world becomes a retreat from a reality that feels demanding, judgmental, or uncontrollable. It is a space where they can experiment with identity, language, and community in ways that feel safer than the physical world because the rules are different. But what begins as exploration does not always remain contained. Behaviors, identities, and emotional patterns reinforced online inevitably spill into real life — into classrooms, families, and institutions unprepared to distinguish between development, distress, and durable belief.
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Institutions and Big Tech deserve criticism, but they cannot undo what families have fallen away from doing themselves. You cannot outsource formation and then demand repair. Postman warned that we would amuse ourselves into decline, but the deeper failure is that we stopped believing it was our responsibility to raise the next generation at all. This is not achieved by laughing at news stories about how bizarre Gen Z or Gen Alpha is behaving. It should be a matter of reflection, understanding how the generations that preceded made decisions that enabled the behavior of America’s future constituents.
If we want to be a country capable of attention, judgment, and self-command, the work does not begin with schools, platforms, or policy. It begins at home with parents willing to be present, to be uncomfortable, and to raise their own children.
* Original Article:
https://thefederalist.com/2026/01/16/parents-must-actively-opt-out-of-turning-their-kids-into-digital-age-zombies/?utm_source=rss