I have been very anxious lately. Neil Postman gently washed this away from my mind as I read Amusing Ourselves To Death. I choose this book because I have continually run into references to it in many print media outlets that I have been sequestered with these quarters. I remember this book being published, and I was not yet mindful to believe the premise had value. At that time I was head deep in a tv-based media existence, and I had assumed his arguments specious. This book was interesting to me for several reasons. The contemporary nemesis of print journalism is a much more subtly related means of information distribution. It is still the written word. It is still touched by the nuance of font and kerning and of leading and trailing spaces. The distribution model of the Internet has questioned the existence of news offices themselves. Forget about the culture wars with print media and television. This is the new massage, or so it seems. I could not help but to begin reading this book with this pulsing subjectivity. I believed that Postman was being left behind before I had even begun page one.
And although I can still find such anachronistic gems as referring to Ralph Nadar solely as a “consumer advocate” (132), his messages have many angles I was unprepared for in my earlier anti-intellectual glassing. He began with the religious awakenings in United States American nineteenth century history. The early take-off of his point is that these religious folks were educated people of The Enlightenment; or rather their education was the product of The Enlightenment. He states that the likes of Jonathan Edwards were that of a person who reads and writes constantly rather than flips channels and clothing catalog pages. I believe that Postman is saying that their mind bent to the will of the word, while ours require images and entertainment. That the three hour political speeches could be comprehended by the general public while after five minutes the average contemporary (early 1990′s CE) era homo sapien from North America would loose interest and begin picking his nose and drool a bit on his sleeve.
I don’t know about three hours of politics. I have sat through a three hour Paula Poundstone show, although that goes to prove Postman’s point even further. But again he impresses upon to me the idea that the telegraph played a pivotal role not only as a carrier of the news, but rather entirely that the telegraphic retransmission process impacted the style of US American journalism for another two hundred years. Postman does not rest on these laurels. He next contentiously tears apart the differences between pictures and words. He states basically that words are understood, and pictures are recognized. I believe that is a childish and unrealistic semantic game. I agree somewhat with Postman saying, “Photography speaks only in particularities” (72). But I disagree wholeheartedly that photos can or cannot be read. If I can’t even understand what I am seeing, I cannot read the photograph. That he desires to exclude photography from his reindeer games is the type of closed-minded conservatism that print journalism is acting with today. His language of photography is that of assault and dismemberment (to which he cops to) and that the great minds that typographic thinking provided us are no longer available to us. I seem to think that those great minds did little to truly effect the pain and suffering in the world. So seems about even to me, Postman.
The thrust of Postman book is really against the tele-fication of contemporary creativity and thought. This message is the truth speaking to power from Postman. His strings pull the value and function of religion in our society, especially televangelism. He wants me to understand that television is about production values and viewership. He wants me to believe that like the telegraphs impression upon the print media television imparts with us to the same unknown casings.
I am repeatedly told by many members of the staff of The Olympian that, “The paper is mainstream media.” The cognitive dissonance is deafening while holding the ever-shrinking heft and density to the daily edition. And now the Internet is encroaching upon their territory. I don’t understand this at all. If I were a print media company I would rejoice that people are forced to read again. Even if usability studies have suggested that contemporary US Americans scan a web page rather than read it, we are seeing it impacted by print media. I see that television has impacted the Internet with the likes of http://www.hulu.com and http://www.surfthechannel.com/.
Postman continued to my amusement about how often the best teachers are amusing and entertaining because they must be to compete with television. I find this problem analogous to the student that sits in class with his laptop open correcting facts in the classroom discourse from wikipedia. His discussion of Huxley versus Orwell is colored as, “Big Brother does not watch us, by his choice. We watch him, by ours.” (155) I believe that this is reflected in facebook and myspace ad nausum. Dot com.
I am thinking now of Paula Poundstone and totally remembering I sat through three hours of Tom Brokaw, too. Now this is a new conundrum. I remember reading about this event in the paper, online, that a TV news personality was coming to speak in public. I paid thirty dollars.
With that I will leave a lovely quote: “TV shows not at all about the character of products to be consumed, it is about the character of consumers of the product.” (128)
Sources:
Postman, Neil. Amusing Ourselves to Death. Boston: Penguin (Non-Classics), 1986.