Entertaining ourselves
Neil Postman’s book, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, is shockingly relevant today. He strips away the facade of mainstream media revealing its dark side and four decades later it’s all very recognizable as applicable today. Not only is it prescient, but making his points about the quaint legacy of now old school media makes everything very easy to follow, as well as demonstrating that today these same effects have kicked in orders of magnitude more so. Here are a few highlights but there is so much more in there.
The following line from the book made me think about modern social media, supposedly built with noble intentions of bringing the world together in peaceful harmony, and when it doesn’t work out the executives shrug and say, “Who could have known?”. This book did: “To be unaware that a technology comes equipped with a program for social change, to maintain that technology is neutral, to make the assumption that technology is always a friend to culture is, at this late hour, stupidity plain and simple.”
In the Media as Epistemology chapter a central thesis of the book is distinguished from the usual “television is ruining the minds of youth” objections. “… at no point do I care to claim that changes in media bring about changes in the structure of people’s minds or changes in their cognitive capacities.” … “My argument is limited to saying that a major new medium changes the structure of discourse; it does so by encouraging certain uses of the intellect, by favoring certain definitions of intelligence and wisdom, and by demanding a certain kind of content—in a phrase, by creating new forms of truth-telling.” … “I believe the epistemology created by television not only is inferior to a print-based epistemology but is dangerous and absurdist.” [page 27] Substitute television with the internet and it’s far more dangerous and absurd.
Epistemology has evolved from asking elders to soothsayers, academic institutions, written works, the scientific method — and ironically from here we get into trouble with the rise of mass media. Until the mid-20th century creating media content required infrastructure and resources beyond most people so we had gatekeepings (for better or worse). From there (mimeograph, Polaroids, Super 8, audio tape) barriers to content creation fell quickly and with the internet and computers in every home the dam burst when anyone could publish to the world (at first bulletin boards, then geocities, and beyond).
To make this absolutely clear let me spell out how I apply this point somewhat obscured by jargon. Epistemology amounts to how we find out things, including how to know what’s true or not. As we collectively get our information from media, not only do we normalize it as an information source and also as a format. By virtue of spending time consuming this media we implicitly invest attention as well as invest it with authority, for why else would we bother if we think it’s balderdash? Yet the format aspect is more invidious: if we get our news from Tik Tok then we reinforce thinking that we learn about the latest in world events from short vertically shot video clips of attractive or entertaining people telling us their opinion of things.
In my lifetime we’ve gone from visiting the library to learn things, to television, to web search, and at this point “someone on the internet”. Combined with free for unlimited use (all paid for by ads in exchange for getting our attention) digital ecosystem competing for eyeballs and our many easily exploited human frailties, I doubt that Postman could have scarcely imagined and would have refused to believe possible if he’d read such a thing.
One chapter centers on two words that I grew up with watching television but never gave a second thought to until now. ““Now . . . this” is commonly used on radio and television newscasts to indicate that what one has just heard or seen has no relevance to what one is about to hear or see, or possibly to anything one is ever likely to hear or see.” [page 99] We’ve long since blown past this excuse for a complete lack of narrative or even relevance with no such connectives required: just swipe to the next irrelevant attempt to grab your interest.
Dozens of lines from the book spoke eloquently to me about the present day where everyone has more information instantly available to them than we could all collectively consume in our lifetimes. The crucial points about intermediation stand out with more clarity looking back compared to now when we are so very deep into the funhouse.
In closing he considers solutions to get out of this seemingly irreversible slide into silliness. “As I write, a story appears in The New York Times (September 27, 1984) about the plans of the Farmington, Connecticut, Library Council to sponsor a “TV Turnoff.” It appears that such an effort was made the previous year, the idea being to get people to stop watching television for one month. The Times reports that the turnoff the previous January was widely noted by the media. Ms. Ellen Babcock, whose family participated, is quoted as saying, “It will be interesting to see if the impact is the same this year as last year, when we had terrific media coverage.” In other words, Ms. Babcock hopes that by watching television, people will learn that they ought to stop watching television. It is hard to imagine that Ms. Babcock does not see the irony in this position. It is an irony that I have confronted many times in being told that I must appear on television to promote a book that warns people against television. Such are the contradictions of a television-based culture.” [page 158]
When it takes collective action to turn around manipulation by digital media in a society that affords no other way of getting the word out it can feel like game over.
“The problem, in any case, does not reside in what people watch. The problem is in that we watch.” [page 160]