Thursday, January 21, 2010

January 21, 2010--Amusing Ourselves to Death

A former NYU colleague, media ecologist Neil Postman, wrote widely about the ways in which the electronic media are affecting our lives and consciousness. The title of one of his books, from 1985, in itself sums up much of what is infecting and endangering our current culture and political environment—Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business.

Now, from a study by the Kaiser Family Foundation, we have the data that support Neil’s early insight. (A report about it in the New York Times is linked below.)

Are you sitting down?

Except for their relatively few hours in school, America’s youth on average spend nearly every other waking hour hooked up to and/or involved with smart phones, computers, television, computer games, and iPods.

Kids between 8 and 18 spend more than seven and a half hours a day involved with this stuff; and this doesn’t count the additional hour and a half during which they text message or the other half hour they spend yakking on their cell phones. Add it all up, and if you include time spend multitasking—listening to music while surfing the Internet—and this means that they are hooked up this way for about 10 or 11 hours a day every day.

Postman’s was a TV-suffused world. At the time he could hardly imagine what might be coming next. If he were alive today, I can only imagine what he would have to say about our media-addled kids. But much of what he wrote about the TV generation is extrapolatable to what we see today as young people wander the streets while texting as if in a somnambulant state or spend countless hours up in their bedroom addicted to electronic games such as Assassin’s Creed or Left 4 Dead.

To Neil, TV, and by extension these newer media, portended an Orwellian vision of the future, in which totalitarian governments seize individual rights. Or a world not unlike the one described in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, where people medicate themselves into bliss and voluntarily sacrifice their rights. Postman saw television's entertainment value as a "soma" for the contemporary world, and he worried that we as a result were surrendering our rights in exchange for entertainment.

Citing Marshall McLuan, Neil claimed it is in the DNA of electronic media that their “form” is so powerful and intoxicating that it becomes more important than the “content.” Fostering rational argument, an integral attribute of print media, cannot occur through the medium of television because "its form excludes the content."

One consequence of this is that politics and religion get diluted and the "news of the day" is transformed into a commodity. The presentation itself deemphasizes quality; all data, all information is thus devoted to the unquenchable need for entertainment.

Similar kinds of concerns were expressed early in the 16th century when books came into wide circulation. They contributed to democratizing what to that point had been a monopoly of knowledge; and those with vested interests in maintaining that exclusivity of literacy, those at the top of the social and religious hierarchies that depended on the privileged possession of the kinds of knowledge previously available only in manuscripts, objected vigorously and did what they could to contain the spread of ideas that were the result of the books that became available after the Guttenberg Revolution.

I used to argue with Neil about this. If as it turned out books and later newspapers contributed to the dissemination of knowledge, the scientific revolution, and the empowerment of more people that at any time in the historical past, wasn’t he being premature in his Luddite-like opposition to the perils of the emerging media? Could we possibly know so early on in the development of these new media what good they might spawn?

“Wait,” he would say to me with his always generous smile, “This is just the beginning. I do not know what will follow, but this is just the beginning.”

Though I know he would not be happy, I wish he could still be here and again between classes stroll down University Place with me to witness all the wired-up, zombie-like kids.

Then again, he would likely still say, “Wait.” Perhaps this time wondering if perhaps some good might still come of this.

1 Comments:

Blogger The English Walker said...

Thanks for reminding me of Neil. I think of him every time I read about media, reality TV, and such. Wondering what he would think... I miss him.

January 21, 2010  

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