(Originally posted at Greater Democracy.)

The words of Neil Postman provides a peculiar juxtaposition to the committee reports of the monthly Woodbridge, CT Democratic Town Committee.

Next month, I will be speaking, in Second Life, to a communications class about the relationship between Second Life and other forms of media, blogs, online Second Life News, online traditional news, and so on. The class will be reading essays on Media Ecology at that point in their class and I hope they will have some good questions.

However, I’m not a communications scholar, and certainly not an expert on Media Ecology. So, I thought I’d try to get up to speed a little bit in preparation. The local library doesn’t have much on Media Ecology. The closest I got was two books by Neil Postman. Neither seems to be specifically about Media Ecology, but they are both interesting books that I’ve long been thinking about reading.

One book is The End of Education : Redefining the Value of School. Some of my friends in Woodbridge are encouraging me to run for Board of Education next year. I have lots of thoughts about education, and this book, together with his Teaching as a Subversive Activity are probably good books for me to read, even though I suspect they may not come up in any school board debates.

Setting that book aside, I thought I would start off with Building a Bridge to the Eighteenth Century. Postman sets the tone for the book with a quote by Randall Jarrell on the dedication page, “Soon we shall know everything the 18th century didn’t know, and nothing it did, and it will be hard to live with us.”

In the first chapter, Postman references everything from Yeats, T.S. Eliot, Vachel Lindsay and Edna St. Vincent Millay to Jean Baudrilliard. He talks about the “absence of narrative to give organization and meaning to our world”, claiming, “we require a story to explain to ourselves why we are here…”

I mulled these words over as I pondered the latest election news. Palin claiming that Sen. Obama is palling around with terrorists by sitting on a board funded by Republicans addressing education in Chicago and the confusion that some people in the media and beyond have between improperly filled out voter registration cards and voter fraud. I wondered what Five Thirty Eight, a great site number crunching the latest polls tells us about why we are here.

With this providing a backdrop to my thinking, I listened to people from local State Legislative races talking about their campaigns. One person commented about how it is sad that most people don’t know who their state legislators are, and yet these legislators may have a greater immediate effect on people’s lives than that of people further on up the ticket.

Ed Sheehan, Woodbridge’s First Selectman, spoke about dealing with flooding around the Pond Lily Nature Preserve as well as efforts to address traffic problems around Route 15. Plans for restoring the old firehouse and installing a cell phone tower near the high school were discussed. Other folks mentioned efforts to create a quarter of a mile loop at the elementary school and efforts to have ice skating rink in Woodbridge again.

Concerns for those struggling to get by were discussed. The public library will be having Food for Fines next week. If you have a fine outstanding for an overdue library book, bring the book in, along with food for a food pantry and get your fine forgiven. Even if you don’t have a fine outstanding, bring in some non-perishable food for the food panty. Likewise, there were discussions of various groups

Somehow, these concerns seem a little bit closer to the narrative that helps explain why we are here. Yet my mind wanders back to Postman and his concern about Eliot’s “hollow men occupying a wasteland” or Lindsay’s “leaden-eyed people who have no gods to serve”. To that list, I add Thoreau’s mass of men that lead lives of quiet desperation.

I imagine a Thoreau of our day, sitting beside the Pond Lily Nature Preserve reading McLuhan, Postman, Baudrillard, Yeats, Elliot, Lindsay, Millay and others as he tries to relate it back to our digital lives and at the same time talk with students from Beecher Road School.

Perhaps we can learn both what wasn’t known in the eighteenth century, without losing what it did know. Perhaps we can take this beyond the walls of academia and into our nature preserves, schools, town committees, and even blogs.