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Foreword from |
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by Neil Postman |
We were keeping our eye on 1984. When the year came and the prophecy didn't, thoughtful Americans sang softly in praise of themselves. The roots of liberal democracy had held. Wherever else the terror had happened, we, at least, had not been visited by Orwellian nightmares.
But we had forgotten that alongside Orwell's dark vision, there was another - slightly older, slightly less well known, equally chilling: Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley's vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.
What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny "failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions". In 1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.
This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right.
Most scholars who write about television to warn of its dangers are wont to discuss the fictional, distorted world that they allege television portrays. They write about the misrepresentation of minorities on television or the proliferation of violent programmes. In short, they talk about the tangible effect of the resonance of television and anchor their theories in evidence. Postman’s book, Amusing Ourselves To Death, however, does not offer an indictment of ‘junk T.V.’ Instead, it is a diatribe that rails against television as a medium, whose pernicious content, he claims, is a result of its form. Television, for Postman is inextricably linked with entertainment and is dangerous when it attempts to be serious. He argues that television has such resonance that our ability to take the world seriously has diminished. Postman believes a new ‘worldview’; a new ethos or approach to life has been brought about by the assimilation of television into the culture of the masses. But the effect he describes is not quantifiable, so his theories are not supported by evidence. Any correlation between television and this unsubstantiated theory is also clearly impossible. It is important to note before embarking on the essay that Postman delivers his attack on American television while my response to his book can only relate to British television. Although the medium remains the same in both countries, this discrepancy is worth bearing in mind.
Postman’s concern is that modern culture reduces everything, which prior to the Age of television was held sacred and important, to the realm of entertainment. In particular he cites, politics, religion, news, athletics (queerly) education and commerce and suggests that all of these have somehow been the victims of television and that we are in the process of ‘amusing ourselves to death.’ ‘The dissolution of public discourse in America and its conversion into the art of show business’ are much lamented. For Postman, television provides the explanation for a world obsessed with image to the detriment of content. He argues that television conveys its dialogue in images, not words. ‘Its form works against the content.’ In the same way that a Cherokee Indian cannot philosophise with smoke signals, television as a form demands a certain lack of content. Postman attaches such importance to the medium that; ‘typography and television cannot accommodate the same ideas.’ He connects his work with Marshall McLuhan’s famous aphorism, ‘the medium is the message.’
Postman tries to demonstrate how the content of the printing press in America was once, ‘coherent serious and rational’ and how, under the governance of television that tries to be ‘serious’ it has become ‘shrivelled and absurd’. These are the grand claims he makes from the outset.
The suggestion is then, that definitions of meaning are to be found in the mode of communication. He nudges Marshall McLuhan’s dictum and his own argument a little further by suggesting that every medium of communication has ‘resonance.’ He describes resonance as the power of an idea, book or phrase, or even a country, to develop itself until it becomes emblematic for a variety of experiences. For example, Hamlet has become synonymous with ‘brooding indecisiveness,’ ascribing Shakespeare’s play with great resonance. A medium says Postman:
‘Has the power to fly far beyond (its original) context into new and unexpected ones…It imposes itself on our consciousness and social institutions in myriad forms. It sometimes has the power to become implicated in our concepts of piety, or goodness, or beauty. And it is always implicated in the ways we define and regulate our ideas about truth.’ (Postman, 1985)
He gives examples of concepts of truth being linked to biases of forms of expression. At his trial, Socrates was considered untruthful for refusing to use rhetoric and oratorical skills in his own defence. Socrates preferred what he considered the undecorated, naked truth, but in doing so contravened the cultural bias that endorsed oratory as the only tool available to unravel a truthful argument.
In Postman’s opinion, intelligence within a culture is also derived from the character of its important forms of communication. This is because truth is dependant upon the techniques of communication that people have invented. Postman describes some of the criteria of intelligence in aural cultures before the days of print as the power to memorise, or invent sayings; in print culture, however, memorising a poem is merely considered quaint. Print culture demands high concentration, and the need to pay attention to the shapes of the letters. Television however:
‘Changes the structure of discourse; it encourages certain uses of the intellect, by favouring certain definitions of intelligence and wisdom and by demanding a certain kind of content in a phrase, by creating new forms of truth telling.’ (Postman 1985)
As the argument continues, Postman betrays a certain reverence for the period in history from the seventeenth century to the late nineteenth century, when America was dominated by the printed word, ‘and an oratory based on the printed word as any society we know of.’ The press existed as a monopoly. It was ‘the model the metaphor and the measure of all discourse.’ The resonance of the printed word could be felt everywhere and Postman’s crucial point is that conversational style of this period came to mirror the writing style found in the press. The press created a serious and rational public discourse.
Postman’s assertion is that people in their multitudes, under the irresistible influence of the resonance of the press were always ready and willing to listen to public speakers performing oratory for hours on end in the name of the furtherance of political education. A tradition developed, especially in the Western states where a speaker would find a stump or an equivalent open space, gather an audience and ‘take the stump’ for about three hours. A requirement among the audience, of course, was high powers of concentration and a good capacity to understand lengthy and complex sentences. In order to understand some of the speeches, good historical knowledge was also invaluable. The idea is that people of the time were habituated to a kind of literary oratory where the language used was modelled on the style of written word. That the people attended these sessions is remarkable only to the ‘people whose culture no longer resonates powerfully with the printed word.’
In order to make sense of an author, Postman suggests that a reader must follow a line of thought, engage in a process of classification, make inferences and use her powers of reason. She must establish what the author is doing in terms of stylistics and work out how this works in tandem with the narrative. She must weigh ideas and compare and contrast assertions. Thus a prerequisite of success in a world dominated by print is the ability to follow logical and coherent ideas.
Postman saw the advent of the telegraph as the turning point in what was later to become, in his eyes, a spiralling effect. With the telegraph came the notion that information no longer ‘derived its importance from the possibilities of action.’ The telegraph conquered space, and news thenceforth was of a national variety, having no bearing on local communities and neither therefore, on individuals. Hand in hand with the telegraph came the ‘assault of’ photography, which made a bid to replace the written word. Postman believes the former to be markedly inferior; it records the world rather than comments on it, for which language is needed, language that has categorised a world of flux and infinite variety in a way that is not possible in a photograph. This cemented the nefarious effect of telegraphic news by giving faces to the names of the people in what had become ‘irrelevant’, national news. Both the telegraph and the photograph were moments frozen in time without real context or content, throw away information that heralds Postman’s ‘peek- boo-world’ where we are entertained by an event that vanishes as soon as it arrived.
So television for Postman is completely devoted to emotional gratification and entertainment. It depends on changing images, and the viewing eye never rests. The problem is not that it is entertaining, ‘but that entertainment is the format through which all experiences are mediated.’ The ‘smiling face of television is unalterable.’ Postman is particularly against coverage of the news and newsreaders who close the programme with the words, ‘join us tomorrow’, which often fails to reflect the gravity of the content of the news. We should be traumatised by what we have seen urges Postman. We should not want to ‘join the programme tomorrow’ and the message is that we should not take the news, which is merely fun, too seriously. The segmented nature of television accentuates this problem. An earthquake for example may be reported on the news, but the next moment we are transported to a fresh and new programme. Music also sets the scene for entertainment; as does the brevity with which an average story is covered and the fact that commercial breaks defuse the seriousness of the coverage. Pictures add to the effect by ‘short-circuiting introspection.’ A further contributing factor is that newsreaders often fail to adopt a suitable gravity of tone. Instead they maintain an ‘ingratiating enthusiasm.’
Postman’s critique of television is in fact very compelling. However, he proves neither that society has plummeted to the levels of intellectual depravation that he describes, nor that television has enough ‘resonance’ to alter the truth of our reality; that we now find truth in television, the new form of expression, in the same way that the Ancient Athenians found truth in the virtues of oratory. While the medium is certainly important to the meaning within the message, there is no proven correlation between a medium whose form allegedly promotes only images and a society that allegedly prioritises entertainment above, among other things, serious discourse, politics and education.
If Postman is right to lament a lost attitude towards learning, and the presence of ‘sacred’ values, there are surely other, less visible factors at work. For example, as conservative ideology loses its way, increasingly prevalent liberal attitudes have been nudging society away from prescriptive, draconian moralising. Perhaps this makes it easier for individuals from all classes to ‘opt out’ of an interest in ‘good literature’ and ‘high culture.’ Further, as right wing economists stave off their competition, room for a radical communist agenda has diminished. Indeed, there is little room for radical politics of any hue and political parties become more similar, replacing diversity with games of ‘one-up-man-ship and allowing image to take precedence over content. Though, of course, these theories embrace only the realm of speculation, I hope only to show that before Postman can rule out alternative explanations such as these, he needs to find a direct correlation between the particular cause he has projected, namely the advent of television, and the effect he outlines.
Postman is also merely speculating when he argues that television has damaged our intelligence, our ability to think, ‘seriously, rationally and coherently.’ While more people are reading the printed press than ever before, there is no reason to assume that the single greatest influence on our thought processes is the television. Certainly the prescriptive approach to learning revolves around the printed word and society has a print bias and a print onus, which is why literature is more readily accepted as art than television. But regardless of the validity of this, comfortable interchanging between the two media is surely not only possible, but a common experience. I have just read some books and am now writing an essay. Immediately prior to this I watched television.
Postman conveys the impression that in the ‘Golden Age’ he describes, before the infiltration of the telegraph and television, everyone participated ‘taking the stump’ and that topics were relevant to everyone. But national news is generally more ‘serious’ than its local counterpart and presumably reaches a far larger audience than the old printed press and the debating activities combined. Postman bemoans the fact that we no longer take the full gravity of worldwide events on board, but in a changing world that brings new tragedies to light with alarming regularity, this would, in practise, be an impossible task. To be thinking about all issues at all times is simply not a tenable objective. Were people in Lincoln’s time never relaxed, their minds constantly buzzing with the contemplation of seven or eight serious issues for debate, each with ramifications for their daily life? Typography and the much lauded written argument cannot have been a feature of everyone’s life. In fact, while the news on television captures a wide audience today, it is commonly known that literary standards have never been so high, nor have existed on such a broad basis.
Further, television news brings into children’s homes a wealth of information about the world every day. Much of this information will concern people, places and events they have never seen and may be never likely to meet or experience first hand. (Gunter and McAleer 1986)
One early American study (Gunter and McAleer 1990) revealed that over half a sample of children said they received most of their information about the president and vice-president from television; 30 per cent listed television as the most important source of information about Congress and 21 per cent about the Supreme Court. The research involved children aged 5 to 10 years old over a one-year period. The researchers administered questionnaires to the children on two occasions, one year apart and asked the children whether they discussed news events with parents or friends, whether they were interested in the news and whether they had tried to find out about news after seeing it on television, which indicates, if verified, that children, supposedly indoctrinated by television, are taking news seriously. It was found that news viewing contributed to political knowledge, interest and information seeking. Crucially children go after television information; they do take it seriously. It seems that television and news in particular serve an important function as an imparter of information; and such knowledge is a necessary condition of the kind of serious outlook that Postman wants to promote. It is a safe assumption that if most of these 5-10 year old children were not watching the news on television, they would also not be reading about it in the papers.
I do not share Postman’s concern that news is not treated seriously enough on television. News programmes, including shows such as Newsnight and Question Time present a serious and challenging discourse. That viewers should tune into these programmes in order to receive visual stimulation and a spectacle of gratifying images is an absurd notion. Visual footage is an integral part of a good news service. It tells the viewer as much as the newsreader can with language alone and despite Postman’s claim that photographs record the world without commenting upon it, contextualised pictures tell us a great deal. ‘The smiling face of television is unalterable’ says Postman. But people simply do not watch the news with fun or entertainment in mind, and with these claims Postman undermines the importance of national and international news, which is a vital component of democracy. Certainly, there was not much laughter when television news covered the recent floods in Mozambique or the situation in Kosovo. National news is perhaps the greatest tool available that can, among other things, raise the requisite indignation, awe, horror and pity of the public that can prompt action from national governments. Despite this, perhaps people are still too apathetic regarding world events, but providing people with information about a subject cannot be the cause of apathy surrounding it.
Postman dwells on the fact that a newsreader must have the right face, a valid indictment of society. But the right voice is also needed on the radio, the right formal style of writing in Postman’s beloved typography. The face that reads the news does not affect its content, even if it does indicate an unfortunate preoccupation with image.
In short, Postman must produce evidence that serious discourse and the art of exposition is at an all time low, and even if it is, that television is the culprit. I am not convinced that television has such resonance that it alters our framework of reality and undermines our whole value system. Postman suggests that the medium of television, as a consequence of its inherent form, cannot be used intelligently. There is a whole tradition of writers however, such as John Fiske, who argue that television has a certain grammar, the decoding of which can also be described as ‘reading.’ Postman has no gripe with ‘junk television’ because he feels that ‘serious television’ is an oxymoron. As his claim that television as a medium is dangerous and pernicious is not substantiated, perhaps a more relevant concern is whether or not we are using this relatively new medium properly, especially when innovative intelligent writers such as Dennis Potter can ‘alienate’ their audience:
‘Potter’s sculpted cinema of ideas-in itself a discomforting aesthetic for a television audience craving nothing more radical than Neighbours or The Darling Buds Of May-was too much like something they’d try to avoid at the National Film Theatre.’ (Fuller 1993).
If television involves a reading process, some programmes will be easier to read than others. My concern then, is not with ‘serious’ television, rather that we should begin to use the medium more seriously in order to bring its reputation in line with film and the printed word.
Bibliography
Quotes from Neil Postman’s: Amusing Ourselves to Death
Thus, it takes some digging to get at them, to grasp, for example, that a clock recreates time as an independent, mathematically precise sequence; that writing recreates the mind as a tablet on which experience is written; that the telegraph recreates news as a commodity. And yet, such digging becomes easier if we start from the assumption that in every tool we create, an idea is embedded that goes beyond the function of the thing itself. It has been pointed out, for example, that the invention of eyeglasses in the twelfth century not only made it possible to improve defective vision but suggested the idea that human beings need not accept as final either the endowments of nature or the ravages of time. Eyeglasses refuted the belief that anatomy is destiny by putting forward the idea that our bodies as well as our minds are improvable. I do not think it goes too far to say that there is a link between the invention of eyeglasses in the twelfth century and gene-splitting research in the twentieth (14)
And yet, such digging becomes easier if we start from the assumption that in every tool we create, an idea is embedded that goes beyond the function of the thing itself (14).
It is my intention in this book to show that a great media-metaphor shift has taken place in America, with the result that the content of much of our public discourse has become dangerous nonsense (16).
But to avoid the possibility that my analysis will be interpreted as standard-brand academic whimpering, a kind of elitist complaint against the junk on television, I must first explain that my focus is on epistemology, not on aesthetics or literary criticism (16).
In particular, I want to show that the definitions of truth are derived, at least in part, from the character of the media of communication through which information is conveyed (17).
Objects may have resonance, and so may countries: ‘The smallest details of the geography of two tiny chopped-up countries, Greece and Israel, have imposed themselves on our consciousness until they have become part of the map of our imaginative world, whether we have ever seen these countries or not (17).’
Many of our psychologist, sociologists, economists, and other latter-day cabalists will have numbers to tell them the truth or they will have nothing (23).
Indeed, I hope to persuade you that the decline of a print-based epistemology and the accompanying rise of a television-based epistemology has had grave consequences for public life, that we are getting sillier by the minute (24).
Truth, like time itself, is a product of a conversation man has with himself about and through the techniques of communication he has invented (24).
I will say once again that I am no relativist in this matter, and that I believe the epistemology created by television not only is inferior to a print-based epistemology but is dangerous and absurdist (27).
I will try to demonstrate that as typography moves to the periphery of our culture and television takes its place at the center, the seriousness, clarity, and, above all, value of public discourse dangerously declines (29).
People of a television culture need ‘plain language’ both aurally and visually, and will even go as far as to require it in some circumstances by law. The Gettysburg Address would probably have been largely incomprehensible to a 1985 audience (46).
It is also true that by 1858, the photograph and telegraph had been invented, the advance guard of a new epistemology that would put an end to the Empire of Reason (48).
One must begin, I think, by pointing to the obvious fact that the written word, and as oratory based on it, has content: a semantic, paraphrasable, prepositional content (49).
The name I give to that period of time during which the American mind submitted itself to the sovereignty of the printing press is the Age of Exposition. Exposition is a mode of thought, a method of learning, and a means of expression. Almost all of the characteristics we associate with mature discourse were amplified by typography, which has the strongest possible bias toward exposition: a sophisticated ability to think conceptually, deductively, and sequentially; a high valuation of reason and order; an abhorrence of contradiction; a large capacity for detachment and objectivity; and a tolerance for delayed response. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, for reasons I am most anxious to explain, the Age of Exposition began to pass, and the early signs of its replacement could be discerned. Its replacement was to be the Age of Show Business. (63)
Among the few who understood this consequence was Henry David Thoreau, who remarked in Walden that ‘We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate…. We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the old world some weeks nearer to the new; but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad flapping American ear will be that Princess Adelaide had the whooping cough’ (65).
The telegraph made a three-pronged attack on typography’s definition of discourse, introducing on a large scale irrelevance, impotence, and incoherence. (65)
The telegraph made information into a commodity, a ‘thing’ that could be bought and sold irrespective of its uses or meaning (65).
The penny newspaper, emerging slightly before telegraphy, in the 1830s, had already begun the process of elevating irrelevance to the status of news (66).
Since we live today in just such a neighborhood (now sometimes called a global village), you may get a sense of what is meant by context-free information by asking yourself the following question: How often does it occur that information provided you on morning radio or television, or in the morning newspaper, causes you to alter your plans for the day, or to take some action you would not otherwise have taken, or provides insight into some problem you are required to solve? (68)
The fact is the principal legacy of the telegraph: By generating an abundance of irrelevant information, it dramatically altered what may be called the ‘information-action ratio (68).
We may say then that the contribution of the telegraph to public discourse was to dignify irrelevance and amplify impotence. But this was not all: Telegraphy also made public discourse essentially incoherent. It brought into being a world of broken time and broken attention, to use Lewis Mumford’s phrase. The principal strength of the telegraph was its capacity to move information, not collect it, explain it, or analyze it. In this respect, telegraphy was the exact opposite of typography. Books, for example, are an excellent container for the accumulation, quiet scrutiny and organized analysis of information and ideas. It takes time to write a book, and to read one; time to discuss its contents and to make judgments about their merit, including the form of their presentation (69)
Facts push other facts into and then out of consciousness at speeds that neither permit nor require evaluation. (70)
To the telegraph, intelligence meant knowing of lots of things, not knowing about them. (70)
As it happened, at almost exactly the same time Morse was reconceiving the meaning of information, Louis Daguerre was reconceiving the meaning of nature; one might even say, of reality itself. (71)
The name ‘photography’ was given to this process by the famous astronomer Sir John F. W. Herschel. It is an odd name since it literally means ‘writing with light.’ Perhaps Herschel meant the name to be taken ironically, since it must have been clear from the beginning that photography and writing (in fact, language in any form) do not inhabit the same universe of discourse. (71)
What Boorstin implies about the graphic revolution, I wish to make explicit here: The new focus on the image undermined traditional definitions of information, of news, and, to a large extent, of reality itself. First in billboards, posters, and advertisements, and later in such ‘new’ magazines and papers as Life, Look, the New York Daily Mirror and Daily News, the picture forced exposition into the background, and in some instances obliterated it altogether. By the end of the nineteenth century, advertisers and newspapermen had discovered that a picture was not only worth a thousand words, but, where sales were concerned, was better. For countless Americans, seeing, not reading, became the basis for believing. (74)
This coincidence suggests that the new technologies had turned the age-old problem of information on its head: Where people once sought information might be put to some apparent use. The crossword puzzle is one such pseudo-context; the cocktail party is another; the radio quiz shows of the 1930s and 1940s and the modern television game show arte still others; and the ultimate, perhaps, is the wildly successful ‘Trivial Pursuit. In one form or another, the answer is that same: Why not use them for diversion? For entertainment? To amuse yourself, in a game? (76)
Our culture’s adjustment to the epistemology of television is by now all but complete; we have so thoroughly accepted its definitions of truth, knowledge, and reality that irrelevance seems to us to be filled with import, and incoherence seems eminently sane. (80)
Television does not extend or amplify literate culture. It attacks it. (84)
These are the questions to be addressed in the rest of this book, and to approach them with a minimum of confusion, I must begin by making a distinction between a technology and a medium. We might say that a technology is to a medium as the brain is to the mind. Like the brain, a technology is a physical apparatus. Like the mind, a medium is a use to which a physical apparatus is put. (84)
The average length of a shot on network television is only 3.5 seconds, so that the eye never rests, always has something new to see. Moreover, television offers viewers a variety of subject matter, requires minimal skills to comprehend it, and is largely aimed at emotional gratification. Even commercials, which some regard as an annoyance, are exquisitely crafted, always pleasing to the eye, and accompanied by exciting music. There is no question but that the best photography in the world is presently seen on television commercials. (86)
The problem is not that television presents us with entertaining subject matter but that all subject matter is presented as entertaining, which is another issue altogether. (87)
The men were less concerned with giving arguments than with ‘giving off’ impressions, which is what television does best. Post-debate commentary largely avoided any evaluation of the candidates’ ideas, since there were none to evaluate. (Postman 97)
Viewers would be quite disconcerted by any show of concern or terror on the part of newscasters. Viewers, after all, are partners with the newscasters in the ‘Now…this’ culture, and they expect the newscaster to play out his or her role as a character who is marginally serious but who stays will clear of authentic understanding. (104)
The viewers also know that no matter how grave any fragment of news may appear (for example, on the day I write a Marine Corps general has declared that nuclear war between the United States and Russia is inevitable), it will shortly be followed by a series of commercials that will, in an instant, defuse the import of the news, in fact render it largely banal. (104)
I should go as far as to say that embedded in the surrealistic frame of a television news show is a theory of anti-communication, featuring a type of discourse that abandons logic, reason, sequence and rules of contradiction. In aesthetics, I believe the name given to this theory is Dadaism; in philosophy, nihilism; in psychiatry, schizophrenia. In the parlance of the theater, it is known as vaudeville. (105)
The result of all this is that Americans are the best entertained and quite likely the least well-informed people in the Western world. (106)
It has not yet been demonstrated whether a culture can survive if it takes the measure of the world in twenty-two minutes. Or if the value of its news is determined by the number of laughs it provides. (113)
I know of one rabbi who seriously proposed to his congregation that Luciano Pavarotti be engaged to sing Kol Nidre at the Yom Kippur service. He believes that the event would fill the synagogue as never before. Who can doubt it? But as Hannah Arendt would say, that is the problem, not a solution to one. (124)
It is well understood at the National Council that the danger is not that religion has become the content of television shows but that television shows may become the content of religion. (124)
In America, the fundamental metaphor for political discourse is the television commercial. (126)
By bringing together in compact from all the arts of show business- music, drama, imagery, humor, celebrity- the television commercial has mounted the most serious assault on the capitalist ideology since the publication of the Das Kapital. (126)
Among those lessons are that short and simple messages are preferable to long and complex ones; that drama is to be preferred over exposition; that being sold solutions is better than being confronted with questions about problems. (131)
By the 1970’s, the public had become accustomed to the notion that political figures were to be taken as a part of the world of show business. (132)
How delighted would be all the kings, czars, and fuhrers of the past (and commissars of the present) to know that censorship is not a necessity when all political discourse takes the from of a jest. (141)
We now know that ‘Sesame Street’ encourages children to love school only if school is like ‘Sesame Street’. (143)
’Sesame Street’ dos not encourage children to love school or anything about school. It encourages them to love television. (144)
Perhaps the greatest of all pedagogical fallacies is the notion that a person learns only what he is studying at the time. Collateral learning in the way of formation of enduring attitudes… may be and often is more important that the spelling lesson or lesson in geography or history… For these attitudes are fundamentally what count in the future. (144)
America is, in fact, the leading case in point of what may be thought of as the third great crisis in Western education. The first occurred in the fifth century B.C., when Athens underwent a change from an oral culture to an alphabet-writing culture. To understand what this meant, we must read Plato. The second occurred in the sixteenth century, when Europe underwent a radical transformation as a result of the printing press. To understand what this meant, we must read John Locke. The third is happening now, in America, as a result of the electronic revolution, particularly in the invention of television. To understand what this means, we must read Marshall McLuhan. (145)
This is why I think it accurate to call television a curriculum. As I understand the word, a curriculum is a specially constructed information system whose purpose is to influence, train, teach or cultivate the mind and character of youth. (146)
I refer, first, to the fact that television’s principal contribution to educational philosophy is the idea that teaching and entertainment are inseparable. (146)
The name we properly give to an education without prerequisites, perplexity, and exposition is entertainment. (148)
George Comstock and his associates have reviewed 2,800 studies in the general topic of television’s influence on behavior, including cognitive processing, and are unable to point to persuasive evidence that ‘learning increases when information is presented in a dramatic setting’. Indeed, in studies conducted by Cohen and Salomon; Meringoff; Jacoby; Hoyer and Sheluga; Stauffer, Frost, and Ryboly; Stern; Wilson; Nueman; Katz; Adoni and Parness; and Gunter, quite the opposite conclusion is justified. (151)
Since our students will have watched approximately sixteen thousand hours of television by high school’s end, questions should have arisen, even in the minds of officials at the Department of Education, about who will teach our students how to look at television, and when not to, and with what critical equipment when they do. (Postman 153)
They will, to be sure, have learned something about whales, perhaps about navigation and map reading, most of which they could have learned just as well by other means. Mainly, they will have learned that learning is a form of entertainment or, more precisely, that anything worth learning can take the form of an entertainment, and ought to. (154)
And they will not rebel if their English teacher asks them to learn the eight parts of speech through the medium of rock music. Or if their social studies teacher sings to them the facts about the War of 1812. Or if their physics comes to them on cookies and T-shirts. Indeed, they will expect it and thus will be well-prepared to receive their politics, their religion, their news, and their commerce in the same delightful way. (154)
What Huxley teaches is that in the age of advanced technology, spiritual devastation is more likely to come from an enemy with a smiling face than from one whose countenance exudes suspicion and hate. (155)
By ushering the age of television, America has given the world the clearest available glimpse of the Huxleyan future. (156)
An Orwellian world is much easier to recognize, and to oppose, then a Huxleyan. (156)
To whom we complain, and when, and in what tone of voice, when serious discourse dissolved into giggles? What is the antidote to a culture’s being drained by laughter? (156)
Public consciousness has not yet assimilated the point that technology is ideology. (157)
Television, as I have implied earlier, served us most usefully when presenting junk-entertainment; it serves us most ill when it co-opts serious modes of discourse- new, politics, science, education, commerce, religion- and turns them into entertainment packages. (159)
The problem, in any case, does not reside in what people watch. The problem is in that we watch. (160)
The desperate answer is to rely on the only mass medium of communication that, in theory, is capable of addressing the problem: Our schools. (162)
I have just been reading Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death. Postman observes that the age of typography has been replaced by the age of television. Typography forced the creator and reader each to organize their thoughts and proceed in an orderly way, the one to the creation, the other to the comprehension of the material. Telegraphy, the fore-runner of television, overwhelmed us with a myriad bits of irrelevant information, and diminished our ability to construct coherent opinions based on fact when we could no longer find just the facts we needed and avoid the ones that did not matter. Along came television, the domain of the ever- shorter sound bite, and turned all information into entertainment, striking the final blow to our ability to select facts and formulate opinions.
Though the book was written eleven years ago, it already contains a foretaste of Postman's opinion of the personal computer as an educational device: a solitary activity when children need socialization and no substitute for a human teacher. In an interview in the July Netguide Magazine, he confirms that he sees the computer as essentially being a solitary device, eroding any sense of real community and drowning us in irrelevant information.
Postman's prejudices have blinded him to the significance of the Internet. If Postman logged on and did a bit of surfing, he would discover that the Net, in particular the World Wide Web, is the rebirth of typography. Publishing Web pages (note the particular significance of the word "publishing") is a form of typesetting and indeed forces you to organize your thoughts. Some of us organize our thoughts monthly, in an old fashioned newletter-like format, like I do; and some of us add new links, and the documents behind them, daily, complete with little graphics saying "New!" In either event, as the word "Web" suggests, a link represents both an idea and a relationship between the linked idea and the one to which it is linked. A Web page is a constellation of such links--organized thoughts--and the Web itself is a constellation of pages. Like a library, the Web is as chaotic or as organized as you are. You could get lost in a library just as you sometimes do on the Web, if you always went and looked up the book listed in the first footnote, and then the book listed in that book's first footnote. On the Web, you can get lost faster than in a library, but, if you are organized, you can also find more faster; thus the "hyper" in "hypertext".
A footnote that produces the footnoted source in reponse to a click is a beautiful idea in typography. The Web does not so much represent a new paradigm as it represents a return to an old one, but in a new form with many of the old restrictions removed.
I am writing a book about censorship and the Internet for Henry Holt, to be published in February, and I have been able to do almost all my research on the Internet. This includes not just the part you wuld expect--Web pages on the CDA or analyses from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, but also the Congressional Record and the text of legislation, , Supreme Court decisions, and most of the people--journalists, academics, even regular people--that I needed to find. What about non-Internet topics? In recent months, I have researched religion, game theory, the Holocaust--there is useful information there on every topic.
The comment has been made that if you restrict yourself to the Internet, you do bad research, because sometimes the sources there are not complete or even not accurate. This is true. The Web is in its infancy but you can safely start almost every search on the Web. The pages you find will point you off of the Web, tell you which books to read, name people from whom you can learn more.
The Web is typography plus telecommunications plus transportation, rolled into one, like a book that really takes you to the place that it describes.
Christopher A. Shumway
Foundations of Media Theory
Professor Hank McGuckin
Fall 2000
An Essay on Postman’s Arguments against Television
Neil Postman is deeply worried about what technology can do to a culture or, more importantly, what technology can undo in a culture. In the case of television, Postman believes that, by happily surrendering ourselves to it, Americans are losing the ability to conduct and participate in meaningful, rational public discourse and public affairs. Or, to put it another way, TV is undoing public discourse and, as the title of his book Amusing Ourselves to Death suggests, we are willing accomplices.
Postman bases his argument on the belief that public discourse in America, when governed by the epistemology of the printing press, was “generally coherent, serious, and rational” (16) because the reader was required to ingest, understand, and think about the logic of the author’s arguments before coming to a verdict. In effect, intelligence in a print-based world “implies that one can dwell comfortably without pictures, in a field of concepts and generalizations” (26). However, with the emergence of television and its rapid ascendancy in our culture, Postman argues that discourse has become “shriveled and absurd” (16). TV, he says, assaults us with fleeting images and disconnected bits of information with no context except for the “pseudo-context” which is manufactured “to give fragmented and irrelevant information a seeming use” (76). In effect, TV demands a certain kind of content—the “medium is the message” in the words of Marshall McLuhan—that Postman believes is suitable to the world of show business and hostile to the print-based world of logical thinking (80). This is not to say that TV ignores important subjects such as current affairs, politics, religion, science, and education in favor of entertainment shows. The situation, Postman argues, is quite the opposite; TV often embraces these subjects but, because it is tilted toward amusement and emotional gratification rather than coherent, logical thinking, it turns them into entertainment. Postman says that, as a result, “all public understanding of these subjects is shaped by the biases of television” (78) and that in the absence of rational discourse, cultural decay is sure to follow.
In an effort to expose the epistemology of television, which Postman believes has not been effectively addressed, he examines the effects of TV on several important American cultural institutions: news, religion, politics and education. All four institutions, Postman argues, have realized that they have to go on television in order to be noticed which, in turn, requires them to learn the language of TV if they are to reach the people. Therefore, they have joined the national conversation not on their own terms, but on TV’s terms. Postman contends that this transformation of our major institutions has trivialized what is most important about them and turned our culture into “one vast arena for show business” (80). In the case of broadcast news, we see visually stimulating, disconnected stories about murder and mayhem along with a healthy dose of infotainment delivered by friendly and likeable anchors that remind us to “tune in tomorrow”. In the case of politics, we have discourse through distorted paid TV commercials and “debates” in which the appearance of having said something important is more important than actually saying—or doing—something important.
When we consider the recent—make that current—American presidential election and the television news coverage of it, Postman’s arguments hold up very well. First, political discourse, as Postman contends, is conducted almost totally via the television commercial (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting reports that television stations made $600-million in political advertising revenue this election year. And the Center for Public Integrity reports that in the last two weeks of the New Jersey Senate race, citizens watching top Philadelphia and New York TV stations were 10 times more likely to see a campaign ad than a campaign news story). The other vehicles for discourse are staged political party conventions and the aforementioned "debates" in which only the candidates with the most campaign money appear. All three vehicles speak the language of television; they rely on images to make an emotional, rather than rational, appeal to the voters. In effect, a candidate must appear to be better than his opponent at soothing our fears; the focus here is on the emotional needs of the voter (consumer) not the presentation of ideas (by the candidate) to be critically examined. Second, the TV networks, in their mad rush to keep audiences entertained on election night, adopt the technique of "projecting" the winner before the votes are counted. In this year’s close election, the network’s assurances of accuracy fell to pieces and they are paying dearly for it. Or are they? Looking back, the long night of projections and retractions kept audiences fixed on the "drama" and, more importantly, watching their TVs. Sure, the networks might have a public relations crisis on their hands—that no doubt will inspire "soul-searching" and public repentance—, but so long as they keep entertaining us with superficial "on the scene" reports from Florida and the two presidential camps, all’s well in the world of show business. It should also be noted that TV coverage of the recount issue has focused not on whether hand recounts are more accurate than machine recounts, but on what the two campaigns are saying about recounts—better to keep broadcasting the verbal volleys than to invite the audience to stop and think about an important subject. And as long as we keep coming back for more, we’re likely to miss the big picture as Postman sees it; that, no matter how the content is shaped, the epistemology of television prohibits coherent exposition and rational discourse and, therefore, TV is dangerous to a society that relies on it as the primary source for information and public discourse.
Our way out of this mess, Postman believes, is through awareness and education: First, we must acknowledge that technology is not neutral; that it is a sort of sub-conscious ideology in the sense that it “imposes a way of life, a set of relations among people and ideas, about which there has been no consensus, no discussion and no opposition” (p. 157); and, secondly, we should set our educational system to the task of helping students understand not only the content of a medium but also its form and how the former dictates the latter. In short, all new technologies, or media, have agendas and unless we can decode and understand them we will never be able to shape the technology; it will, instead, continue to shape us.
As well as I believe Postman’s argument holds up, I’d like to offer another angle for consideration, one that looks critically at the institutions that control television and other major media. I would argue that, in addition to TV’s form, private, corporate control of the public television airwaves dictates its content. As the television airwaves—like the radio airwaves before them—were handed over to major networks they became vehicles for advertising and entertainment. Right from the start TV was programmed to amuse us; we never really had a chance to see what would happen if it was used any other way. Therefore, it’s necessary to pay close attention to the private interests that steered—and continue to keep—TV in the direction of entertainment in the first place. Postman does acknowledge this connection briefly when discussing the constitutional protections against government tyranny and censorship. He writes: "the Founding Fathers did not foresee that tyranny by government might be superseded by another sort of problem altogether, namely, the corporate state, which through television now controls the flow of public discourse in American" (139). This is an important statement, however, Postman keeps his focus on the comparison between print-based and television-based epistemology rather that digging a little deeper into the origins of corporate control of the airwaves—or of other media, like newspapers and book publishing, for that matter. Fortunately, other scholars, such as Robert W. McChesney, have tacked this subject and offer illuminating studies (See McChesney’s Rich Media, Poor Democracy: Communications Politics in Dubious Times and Telecommunications, Mass Media and Democracy: The Battle for Control of U.S. Broadcasting 1928-1935).
Another weakness, in my view, is Postman’s over-romanticized portrait of America under the print-based epistemology. His analysis begs several questions, among them: Was public discourse any better when socialists, feminists, abolitionists, atheists, and other people from outside the propertied classes had little or no access to major print media; was it better in the days when the slaughter of Native Americans was rationalized as a necessary means toward American expansion; when slavery was justified because blacks were considered less human than whites; when women were denied the right to vote; or when workers and union organizers were being beaten by corporate enforcers and police?
Even with these weaknesses, Postman makes a significant contribution to enlarging our understanding of television and the epistemology it establishes. He may be too fond of typographic America, but he has some very important things to say about how television works, and we should be paying attentio
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