Twenty six years ago, Neil Postman wrote Amusing Ourselves to Death, a book that looks at the influence of television on modern public discourse. He sets out to prove the idea that we live in a society similar to that discussed in A Brave New World as opposed to the world of 1984. The following contrast of these two dystopian realities is presented at the end of the Foreword (ironically illustrated for your amusement):
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 wrote 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 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.
Continue on to a convincing explanation for the marked drop in the quality of our public discourse.
The Basic Premise
The book begins by discussing how the nature of media guides the type of conversation that takes place. The basic idea is that very different conversations are possible depending on what medium for conversation is used. Oral speech is different from writing is different from television. The book goes deep into the idea of media as epistemology, the name of the second chapter, where epistemology refers to what type of dialogue can take place, and thus what information can be conveyed and known. He sets out to show that different mediums, with a focus on oral, print, and television, limit discourse to different kinds of knowledge. It is impossible to convey the information from a well-written article in a modern newscast - at best we get a series of 5 minute summaries and commentary, but it cannot convey the entire argument.
He goes on to state:
"We are now a culture whose information, ideas, and epistemology are given form by television, not by the printed word... Print is now merely a residual epistemology, and it will remain so, aided to some extent by the computer, and newspapers and magazines that are made to look like television screens. Like the fish who survive a toxic river and the boatmen who sail on it, there still dwell among us those whose sense of things is largely influenced by older and clearer waters."
The river is our public discourse, and it is hard to deny that what qualifies as public discourse in America is completely incoherent. Several chapters are devoted to the nature of public discourse in America before the advent of modern technology, with Thomas Paine's Common Sense serving as a strong example of how things have changed. When Common Sense was written, it sold between 300,000 and 500,000 copies in a population of 3 million. To achieve equivalent penetration, a book nowadays would need to sell 30 million copies. A quick look at modern best-sellers shows that the only recent books who have reached that level are The Da Vinci Code, Harry Potter, and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and these numbers include worldwide sales. Postman claims that the only cultural event in America to reach such a widespread audience is the Super Bowl. To be fair, we must admit that some modern presidential debates have reached extremely large audiences, but Postman later describes how modern debates have suffered in quality due to the nature of television.
Postman goes on to discuss the nature of show business, how television is an entertaining medium, not primarily an informative one, and discusses its impact on religion, education, and politics. With regards to religion, he discusses the shift from religious leaders as powerful intellectuals including George Whitefield (a founder of Methodism) and Jonathan Edwards (widely regarded as one of America's greatest intellectuals), towards modern television evangelicals including Pat Robertson and Billy Graham. His intent is not to gloss over the many deep thinkers among modern religion, but simply to point out that it is a different style of person who becomes a powerful cultural icon in the television age.
Politics and Public Discourse
Of most relevance to this community is Postman's discussion of politics, public discourse, and what can be done to counteract the negative influence of our entertainment culture. Rather than treat his exposition linearly, I'll first describe his take on television politics and then go on to a prediction he gets completely wrong, which is the irrelevance of the computer. He viewed the computer as another type of television, and he didn't foresee the rise in political blogging that is transforming our public discourse.
With regards to television politics, Postman quotes Reagan's famous saying: "Politics is just like show business." A famous example is the Kennedy-Nixon debate in 1960, in which it is widely believed that Kennedy's use of makeup and appearance led him to win the televised debate, while those who only listened via radio thought Nixon did better. While this is somewhat controversial, it is hard to argue that modern political candidates do better when they tall and attractive, or at the very least photogenic.
In addition to making personal appearance an issue in elections, television completely transforms the types of debates we have. No longer do we let candidates speak for more than an hour at a time as in the famous Lincoln-Douglas debates, but instead candidates are restricted to 5 minute commentaries about a variety of topics, with little possibility for real debate. Anybody who has observed the recent GOP primary debate has seen this effect, and while it is somewhat ameliorated in debates between only two people, the nature of modern televised debates prevents real dialog from taking place. It becomes a battle of soundbites and image, and a well-placed joke, quip, or cut that makes for good television can easily become the primary focus of the event.
During Postman's chapters on the characteristics of a pre-television America, he provides numerous examples of the nature of public discourse. These include The Federalist Papers, Thomas Paine, and the treatment of writers of celebrities. Of particular interest to DKos is not just that Americans read vociferously, it is the particular nature of the dialog:
In 1786, Benjamin Franklin observed that Americans were so busy reading newspapers and pamphlets that they scarcely had time for books... Alexis de Tocqueville took note of this fact in his Democracy in America, published in 1835: "In America," He wrote, "parties do not write books to combat each other's opinions, but pamphlets, which are circulated for a day with incredible rapidity and then expire." And he referred to both newspapers and pamphlets when he observed, "the invention of the firearms equalized the vassal and the noble on the field of battle; the art of printing opened the same resources to the minds of all classes; the post brought knowledge alike to the door of the cottage and to the gate of the palace.
It is almost eerie how accurately this describes the nature of dialog on political blogs. We write posts and comments to be rapidly circulated and consumed and which then expire, although certain themes are revisited and posts are often referenced at a later date thanks to the magic of the hyperlink. To Postman, who wrote this in 1985, there was simply no comparison with the public discourse of the past and that of the present. He died in 2003, perhaps too soon to observe the rise of the Progressive Movement driven by internet technology. The other obvious similarity is that, just as the pamphlet made public discourse readily available to anybody who could afford to print one, political blogs are available to anybody with access to the internet and the will to write. This is in marked contrast to the mainstream media which effectively locks out the average citizen from contributing to the dialog. In the past few years a few prominent bloggers have appeared on television, but that was only after they became cultural icons with access to a wide audience - something that would have been nigh impossible in the pre-internet era.
What can be done?
Postman concludes with a few thoughts on how to change the nature of our public dialog, and he first completely discounts any Luddite tendencies. It is absurd to think that Americans will give up their technologies and their entertainments, he writes, and so any such suggestion is no suggestion at all. Instead, he argues for public education on the influence of television. He concludes that this is a desperate approach, but it is one of the few remedies available to the public. If a course were developed on this topic at a high school level, it might be possible to get it introduced via political action on local and state school boards, but I do not think this is enough, and besides it ignores the rise of online political dialog that currently serves as a (admittedly weak) counterweight to mainstream television. Instead of focusing on the negative of television, it would be better to develop a course that focuses on public discourse on the internet, including the use of Facebook, twitter, blogs, and its influence on society and politics. A nonpartisan course would not only be unarguably useful to children and teenagers, but it could expose them to the online world where the type of information is very different from a 22 minute television news cast. This might not be enough in an age of entertainment, and the internet has problems similar to television in terms of the rapidity, quantity, and sometimes the lack of relevance of information, but at least it changes towards an active consumption, and getting people exposed to alternative forms of information as early as possible is certainly preferable.
I'll end with Postman's description of another possible solution one he calls nonsensical in contrast to the desperate solution of public education. He states that our society must acquire an awareness of the structure and effects of information, and wonders how it might be possible. He continues:
The nonsensical answer is to create television programs whose intent would be, not to get people to stop watching television but to demonstrate how television ought to be viewed, to show how television recreates and degrades our conception of news, political debate, religious thoughts, etc. I imagine such demonstrations would of necessity take the form of parodies, along the lines of "Saturday Night Live" and "Monty Python," the idea being to induce a nationwide horse laugh over television's control of public discourse. But, naturally, television would have the last laugh. In order to command an audience large enough to make a difference, one would have to make the programs vastly amusing, in the television style. Thus, the act of criticism itself would, in the end, be co-opted by television. The parodists would become celebrities, would star in movies, and would end up making television commercials."
What struck me about this "nonsensical" solution is that it describes, almost exactly, The Daily Show and the Colbert Report. When we hear Jon Stewart talk about what he thinks he's doing, it is exactly the solution proscribed by Postman. Stewart is making a mockery of television news, demonstrating just how degrading it is to our public discourse. "Stop it, you're hurting America," he says to the newscasters. And while Stewart is a celebrity, he seems to be remarkably cognizant of the effect he intends to have, which so far seems to have prevented him from succumbing to the detrimental effects of celebrity.
We are in difficult times, made darker by the inanity spewing forth daily on television, but there are bright lights we can look towards and examples to follow. Every blog we write, every time we get our information from somewhere other than mainstream television, contributes to a shift in our cultural consciousness. Even Postman acknowledges that junk entertainment is not a problem, and we can say, when we watch Jon Stewart and laugh, that we're actually educating ourselves for the betterment of America, and point out precisely why to anybody who asks.