Neil Postman and the Disappearance of Childhood
The following 15 pages will, I think, rank among the most
thought-provoking material you've read this year, if not this decade.
Although I am renowned for verbosity, I don't think I have an
especially unfavorable signal-to-noise ratio.
I have recently been encouraged to learn that 19th century
political debates - such as the famous Lincoln/Douglas encounters -
customarily consumed a whole day --- with additional time allotted for
dinner.
It is the sway of television -- in conjunction with disjointed
information glut -- that inclines us to reduce our world to "sound bites"
and snappily edited "clips."
Recently, I've been re-reading some of the writers I hold in
highest regard: G. K. Chesterton, Lewis Mumford, Ivan Illich, Thomas
Merton, John Taylor Gatto, E. F. Schumacher, C. S. Lewis, Wendell Berry
and Neil Postman.
Great minds deserve more attention than our harried culture
affords.
Therefore, it is my intention to distribute engaging excerpts from
time to time.
In part, I am motivated by Diana McDuffee who recently confided
her despair of keeping abreast of all "the good stuff", and asked that I
keep her posted on any treasures stumbled upon in my own reading.
In similar vein, it is humbling to realize that if someone reads
two books weekly from age 20 to 70, s/he will read but 5000 books in a
lifetime.
If -- as is more likely -- you read only one book per month, your
total will be 600.
Go ahead!
Be bold.
Boost the total to 601!
Here's Postman...
*****
"Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show
Business", by Neil Postman. (Viking/Penguin Inc., 1986)
Foreword:
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 prophecy 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 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.
******
Excerpts from Chapter 1:
(Previously, I drew your attention to a Harper's interview involving
Postman and Camille Paglia. The first part of the following excerpt
reflects a concern Postman expressed during that conversation....)
My interest was first stirred by a prophet far more formidable
than McCluhan (to whom Postman expresses his debt), more ancient than
Plato. In studying the Bible as a young man, I found intimations of the
idea that forms of media favor particular kinds of content and therefore
are capable of taking command of a culture. I refer specifically to the
Decalogue, the Second Commandment of which prohibits the Israelites from
making concrete images of anything. "Thou shalt not make unto thee any
graven image, any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that
is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water beneath the earth." I
wondered then, as so many others have, as to why the God of these people
would have included instructions on how they were to symbolize, or not
symbolize, their experience. It is a strange injunction to include as part
of an ethical system unless its author assumed a connection between forms
of human communication and the quality of a culture. We may hazard a guess
that a people who are being asked to embrace an abstract, universal deity
would be rendered unfit to do so by the habit of drawing pictures or
making statures or depicting their ideas in any concrete, iconographic
forms. The God of the Jews was to exist in the Word and through the Word,
an unprecedented conception requiring the highest order of abstract
thinking. Iconography thus became blasphemy so that a new kind of God
could enter a culture. People like ourselves who are in the process of
converting their culture from word-centered to image-centered might profit
by reflecting on this Mosaic injunction. But even if I am wrong in these
conjectures, it is, I believe, a wise and particularly relevant
supposition that the media of communication available to a culture are a
dominant influence on the formation of the culture's intellectual and
social preoccupations.
What is peculiar about such interpositions of media is that their
role in directing what we will see or know is so rarely noticed. A person
who reads a book or who watches television or who glances at his watch is
not usually interested in how his mind is organized and controlled by
these events, still less in what idea of the world is suggested by a book,
television, or a watch. But there are men and women who have noticed these
things, especially in our own times. Lewis Mumford, for example, has been
one of our great noticers. He is not the sort of a man who looks at a
clock merely to see what time it is. Not that he lacks interest in the
content of clocks, which is of concern to everyone from moment to moment,
but he is far more interested in how a clock creates the idea of "moment
to moment. "He attends to the philosophy of clocks, to clocks as metaphor,
about which our education has had little to say and clock makers nothing
at all. "The clock", Mumford has concluded, "is a piece of power machinery
whose 'product' is seconds and minutes." In manufacturing such a product,
the clock has the effect of disassociating time from human events and thus
nourishes the belief in an independent world of mathematically measurable
sequences. Moment to moment, it turns out, is not God's conception, or
nature's. It is man conversing with himself about and through a piece of
machinery he created.
In Mumford's great book "Technics and Civilization," he shows how,
beginning in the fourteenth century, the clock made us into time-keepers,
and then time-savers, and now time-servers. In the process, we have
learned irreverence toward the sun and the seasons, for in a world made up
of seconds and minutes, the authority of nature is superseded. Indeed, as
Mumford points out, with the invention of the clock, Eternity ceased to
serve as the measure and focus of human events. And thus, though few would
have imagined the connection, the inexorable ticking of the clock may have
had more to do with the weakening of God's supremacy than all the
treatises produced by the philosophers of the Enlightenment; that is to
say, the clock introduced a new form of conversation between man and God,
in which God appears to have been the loser. Perhaps Moses should have
included another Commandment: Thou shalt not make mechanical
representations of time.
(The rest of Chapter 1 investigates "the medium as the metaphor" - i.e.,
how electronic media accelerate, inundate, enervate and trivialize
cultural processes while supplanting substance with surface, essence with
image, wisdom with data.)
******
(Chapter 5 - "The Peek-a-Boo World")
Americans of the 1800's were very much concerned with the problem
of "conquering" space. By the mid 19th century, the frontier extended to
the Pacific Ocean, and a rudimentary railroad system, begun in the 1830's,
had started to move people and merchandise across the continent. But until
the 1840's, information could move only as fast as a human being could
carry it; to be precise, only as fast as a train could travel, which, to
be even more precise, meant about 35 miles per hour. In the face of such a
limitation, the development of America as a national community was
retarded. In the 1840's, American was still a composite of regions, each
conversing in its own ways, addressing its own interests. A continent-wide
conversation was not yet possible....
(Then Samuel Finley Breese Morse wrapped the continent in an
information grid, collapsing regions and creating the possibility of a
unified American discourse.)
But at a considerable cost. For telegraphy did something that
Morse did not foresee when he prophesied that telegraphy would make "one
neighborhood of the whole country." It destroyed the prevailing definition
of information, and in doing so gave a new meaning to public discourse.
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 has the whooping cough."
Thoreau, as it turned out, was precisely correct. He grasped that
the telegraph would create its own definition of discourse; that it would
not only permit but insist upon a conversation between Maine and Texas;
and that it would require the content of that conversation to be different
from what Typographic Man was accustomed to.
The telegraph made a 3-pronged attack on typography's definition
of discourse, introducing on a large scale irrelevance, impotence, and
incoherence. These demons of discourse were aroused by the fact that
telegraphy gave a form of legitimacy to the idea of context-free
information; that is, to the idea that the value of information need not
be tied to any function it might serve in social and political
decision-making and action, but may attach merely to its novelty,
interest, and curiosity. The telegraph made information into a commodity,
a "thing" that could be bought and sold irrespective of its uses or
meaning.....
The penny newspaper, emerging slightly before telegraphy, in the
1830's, had already begun the process of elevating irrelevance to the
status of news. Such papers as Benjamin Day's New York Sun and James
Bennett's New York Herald turned away from the tradition of news as
reasoned (if biases) political opinion and urgent commercial information
and filled their pages with accounts of sensational events, mostly
concerning crime and sex. While such "human interest news" played little
role in shaping the decisions and actions of readers, it was at least
local --- about places and people within their experience --- and it was
not always tied to the moment. The human-interest stories of the penny
newspapers had a timeless quality; their power to engage lay not so much
in their currency as in their transcendence....
The telegraph changed all that, and with astonishing speed. Within
months of Morse's first public demonstration, the local and the timeless
had lost their central position in newspapers, eclipsed by the dazzle of
distance and speed. In fact, the first know use of the telegraph by a
newspaper occurred one day after Morse gave his historic demonstration of
telegraphy's workability. Using the same Washington to Baltimore line
Morse had constructed, the "Baltimore Patriot" gave its readers
information about action taken by the House of Representatives on the
Oregon issue. The paper concluded its report by noting: "...we are thus
enabled to give our readers information from Washington up to 2 o'clock.
this is indeed the annihilation of space."
.... It was not long until the fortunes of newspapers came to
depend not on the quality or utility of the news they provided, but on how
much, from what distances, and at what speed. James Bennett of the New
York Herald boasted that in the first week of 1848, his paper contained
79,000 words of telegraphic content -- of what relevance to his readers,
he didn't say. Only four years after Morse opened the nation's 1st
telegraph line on May 24, 1844, the Associated Press was founded, and news
from nowhere, addressed to no one in particular, began to criss-cross the
nation. Wars, crimes, crashes, fires, floods, -- much of it the social and
political equivalent of Adelaide's whooping cough --- became the content
of what people called "the news of the day."
As Thoreau implied, telegraphy made relevance irrelevant. The
abundant flow of information had very little or nothing to do with those
to whom it was addressed; that is, with any social or intellectual context
in which their lives were embedded. Coleridge's famous line about water
everywhere without a drop to drink may serve as a metaphor of a
decontextualized information environment: In a sea of information, there
was very little of it to use. A man in Maine and a man in Texas could
converse, but not about anything either of them knew or cared very much
about. The telegraph may have made the country into "one neighborhood,"
but it was a peculiar one, populated by strangers who knew nothing but the
most superficial fats about each other.
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? For most of
us, news of the weather will sometimes have such consequences; for
investors, news of the stock market; perhaps an occasional story about a
crime will do it, if by chance the crime occurred near where you live or
involved someone you know. But most of our daily news is inert, consisting
of information that gives us something to talk about but cannot lead to
any meaningful action. This 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."
In both oral and typographic cultures, information derives its
importance from the possibilities of action. Of course, in any
communication environment, input (what one is informed about) always
exceeds output (the possibilities of action based on information). But the
situation created by telegraphy, and then exacerbated by later
technologies, made the relationship between information and action both
abstract and remote. For the first time in human history, people were
faced with the problem of information glut, which means that
simultaneously they were faced with the problem of a diminished social and
political potency.
You may get a sense of what this means by asking yourself another
series of questions: What steps do you plan to take to reduce the conflict
in the Middle East... What do you plan to do about NATO, OPEC, the CIA,
affirmative action, and the monstrous treatment of the Baha'i in Iran. I
shall take the liberty of answering for you: You plan to do nothing about
them. You may, of course, cast a ballot for someone who claims to have
some plans, as well as the power to act. But this you can do only once
every two or four years by giving one hour of your time, hardly a
satisfying means of expressing the broad range of opinions you hold.
Voting, we might say, is the next to last refuge of the politically
impotent. The last refuge is, of course, giving your opinion to a
pollster, who will get a version of it through a desiccated question, and
then will submerge it in a Niagara of similar opinions, and convert them
to -- what else? -- another piece of news. Thus, we have here a great loop
of impotence: The news elicits from you a variety of opinions about which
you can do nothing except to offer them as more news, about which you can
do nothing.
Prior to the age of telegraphy, the information-action ratio was
sufficiently close so that most people had a sense of being able to
control some of the contingencies in their lives. What people knew about
had action-value. In the information world created by telegraphy, this
sense of potency was lost, precisely because the whole world became the
context for news. Everything became everyone's business. For the first
time, we were sent information which answered no question we had asked,
and which, in any case, did not permit the right of reply.
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. A book is an
attempt to make thought permanent and to contribute to the great
conversation conducted by authors of the past. Therefore, civilized people
everywhere consider the burning of a book a vile form of
anti-intellectualism. But the telegraph demands that we burn its contents.
The value of telegraphy is undermined by applying the tests of permanence,
continuity or coherence. The telegraph is suited only to the flashing of
messages, each to be quickly replaced by a more up-to-date message. Facts
push other facts into and then out of consciousness at speeds that neither
permit nor require evaluation.
The telegraph introduced a kind of public conversation whose form
had startling characteristics: Its language was the language of headlines
--- sensational, fragmented, impersonal. News took the form of slogans, to
be noted with excitement, to be forgotten with dispatch. Its language was
also entirely discontinuous. One message had no connection to that which
preceded or followed it. Each "headline" stood alone as its own context.
The receiver of the news had to provide a meaning if he could. The sender
was under no obligation to do so. And because of all this, the world as
depicted by the telegraph began to appear unmanageable, even
undecipherable. The line-by-line, sequential, continuous form of the
printed page slowly began to lose its resonance as a metaphor of how
knowledge was to be acquired and how the world was to be understood.
"Knowing" the facts took on a new meaning, for it did not imply that one
understood implications, background, or connections. Telegraphic discourse
permitted no time for historical perspectives and gave no priority to the
qualitative. To the telegraph, intelligence meant knowing of lots of
things, not knowing about them.
Thus, to the reverent question posed by Morse -- "What hath God
wrought?" -- a disturbing answer came back: a neighborhood of strangers
and pointless quantity; a world of fragments and discontinuities. God, of
course, had nothing to do with it. And yet, for all of the power of the
telegraph, had it stood alone as a new metaphor for discourse, it is
likely that print culture would have withstood its assault; would, at
least, have held its ground. 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.
.... By itself a photograph cannot deal with the unseen, the
remote, the internal, the abstract. It does not speak of "man", only of a
man; not of "tree" only of a tree. You cannot produce a photograph of
"nature," any more than a photograph of "the sea." You can only photograph
a particular fragment of the here-and-now -- a cliff of a certain terrain,
in a certain condition of light; a wave at a moment in time, from a
particular point of view. And just as "nature" and the "sea" cannot be
photographed, such larger abstractions as truth, honor, love, falsehood
cannot be talked about in the lexicon of pictures. For "showing of" and
"talking about" are two very different kinds of processes. "Pictures,"
Gavriel Salomon has written, "need to be recognized, words need to be
understood." By this he means that the photograph presents the world as
object; language, the world as idea. For even the simplest act of naming a
thing is an act of thinking -- of comparing one thing with others.
selecting certain features in common, ignoring what is different, and
making an imaginary category. There is no such think in nature as "man" or
"tree." The universe offers no such categories or simplifications; only
flux and infinite variety. The photograph documents and celebrates the
particularities of this infinite variety. Language makes them
comprehensible.
The photograph also lacks a syntax, which deprives it of a
capacity to argue with the world. As an "objective" slice of space-time,
the photograph testifies that someone was there or something happened. Its
testimony is powerful but it offers no opinions --- no "should have beens"
or "might have beens." Photography is preeminently a world of fact, not of
dispute about facts or of conclusions to be drawn from them. But this is
not to say photography lacks an epistemological bias. As Susan Sontag has
observed, a photograph implies "that we know about the world if we accept
it as the camera records it." But, as she further observes, all
understanding begins with our not accepting the world as it appears.
Language, of course, is the medium we use to challenge, dispute, and
cross-examine what comes into view, what is on the surface. The words
"true" and "false" come from the universe of language, and no other. When
applied to a photograph, the question, Is it true" means only, Is this a
reproduction of a real slice of space-time? If the answer is "Yes," there
are no grounds for argument, for it makes no sense to disagree with an
unfaked photograph. The photograph itself makes no arguable propositions,
makes no extended and unambiguous commentary. It offers no assertions to
refute, so it is not refutable.
The way in which the photograph records experience is also
different from the way of language. Language makes sense only when it is
presented as a sequence of propositions. Meaning is distorted when a word
or sentence is, as we say, taken out of context; when a reader or listener
is deprived of what was said before, and after. But there is no such thing
as a photograph taken out of context, for a photograph does not require
one. In fact, the point of photography is to isolate images from context,
so as to make them visible in a different way. In a world of photographic
images, Ms. Sontag writes, "all borders ... seem arbitrary. Anything can
be separated, can be made discontinuous, from anything else: All that is
necessary is to frame the subject differently." She is remarking on the
capacity of photographs to perform a peculiar kind of dismembering of
reality, a wrenching of moments out of their contexts, and a juxtaposing
of events and things that have no logical or historical connection with
each other. Like telegraphy, photography recreates the world as a series
of idiosyncratic events. There is no beginning, middle, or end in a world
of photographs, as there is none implied in telegraphy. The world is
atomized. There is only a present and it need not be part of any story
than can be told.
That the image and the word have different functions, work at
different levels of abstraction, and require different modes of response
will not come as a new idea to anyone. Painting is at least three times as
old as writing... What was new in the mid 19th century was the sudden and
massive intrusion of the photograph and other iconographs into the
symbolic environment. This event is what Daniel Boorstin in his pioneering
book "The Image" calls "the graphic revolution." By this phrase, Boorstin
means to call attention to the fierce assault on language made by forms of
mechanically reproduced imagery that spread unchecked throughout American
culture -- photographs, prints, posters, drawings, advertisements. I
choose the word "assault" deliberately here, to amplify the point implied
in Boorstin's "graphic revolution." The new imagery, with photography at
its forefront, did not merely function as a supplement to language, but
bid to replace it as our dominant means of construing, understanding and
testing reality. 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 "news" 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 19th 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.
(Readers who wish to pursue Postman's reflections on photography
may resume his discussion at the top of page 75.)
Together... this ensemble of electronic techniques called into
being a new world -- a peek-a-boo world, where now this event, now that,
pops into view for a moment, then vanishes again. It is a world without
much coherence or sense; a world that does not ask us, indeed, does not
permit us to do anything; a world that is, like the child's game of
peek-a-boo, entirely self-contained. But like peek-a-boo, it is also
endlessly entertaining. (Postman has a fascinating digression of the
relationship between crossword puzzles and games like Trivial Pursuit as
means to provide some sort of usability to all the meaningless,
de-contextualized data that floods our lives...)
Of course, there is nothing wrong with playing peek-a-boo. And
there is nothing wrong with entertainment. As some psychiatrist once put
it, we all build castles in the air. The problems come with we try to live
in them. The communications media of the late 19th and early 20 centuries,
with telegraphy and photography at their center, called the peek-a-boo
world into existence, but we did not come to live there until television.
Television gave the epistemological biases of the telegraph and the
photograph their most potent expression, raising the interplay of image
and instancy to an exquisite and dangerous perfection. And it brought them
into the home. We are by now well into a second generation of children for
whom television has been their first and most accessible teacher and, for
many, their most reliable companion and friend. To put it plainly,
television is the command center of the new epistemology. There is no
audience so young that it is barred from television. There is no poverty
so abject that it must forgo television. There is no education so exalted
that it is not modified by television. And most important of all, there is
no subject of public interest --- politics, news, education, religion,
science, sports ---that does not find its way to television. Which means
that all public understanding of these subjects is shaped by the biases of
television.
Television is the command center in subtler ways as well Our use
of other media, for example, is largely orchestrated by television.
Through it we learn what telephone system to use, what movies to see, what
books, records and magazines to buy, what radio programs to listen to.
Television arranges our communications environment for us in ways that no
other medium has the power to do.
As a small, ironic example of this point, consider this: In the
past few years, we have been learning that the computer is the technology
of the future. We are told that our children will fail in school and be
left behind in life if they are not "computer literate." We are told that
we cannot run our businesses, or compile our shopping lists, or keep our
checkbooks tidy unless we own a computer. Perhaps some of this is true.
But the most important fact about computers and what they mean to our
lives is that we learn about all of this from television. Television has
achieved the status of "meta-medium" - an instrument that directs not only
our knowledge of the world, but our knowledge of ways of knowing as well.
At the same time, television has achieved the status of "myth," as
Roland Barthes uses the word. He means by myth a way of understanding the
world that is not problematic, that we are not fully conscious of, that
seems, in a word, natural. A myth is a way of thinking so deeply embedded
in our consciousness that it is invisible. This is now the way of
television. We are no longer fascinated or perplexed by its machinery. We
do not tell stories of its wonders. We do not confine our television sets
to special rooms. We do not doubt the reality of what we see on
television, are largely unaware of the special angle of vision it affords.
Even the question of how television affects us has receded into the
background. The question itself may strike some of us as strange, as if
one were to ask how having ears and eyes affects us. Twenty years ago, the
question, Does television shape culture or merely reflect it? held
considerable interest for many scholars and social critics. The question
has largely disappeared as television has gradually become our culture.
This means, among other things, that we rarely talk about television, only
about what is on television --- that is, about its content. Its ecology,
which includes not only its physical characteristics and symbolic code but
the conditions in which we normally attend to it, is taken for granted,
accepted as natural.
Television has become, so to speak, the background radiation of
the social and intellectual universe, the all-but-imperceptible residue of
the electronic big band of a century past, so familiar and so thoroughly
integrated with American culture that we no longer hear its faint hissing
in the background or see the flickering gray light. This, in turn, means
that its epistemology goes largely unnoticed. And the peek-a-boo world it
has constructed around us no longer seems even strange.
There is no more disturbing consequence of the electronic and
graphic revolution than this: that the world as given to us through
television seems natural, not bizarre. For the loss of the sense of the
strange is a sign of adjustment, and the extent to which we have adjusted
is a measure of the extent to which we have been changed. 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. And if some of our institutions seem not
to fit the template of the times, why it is they, and not the template,
that seem to us disordered and strange.
It is my object in the rest of this book to make the epistemology
of television visible again. I will try to demonstrate by concrete example
that television's way of knowing; that television's conversations promote
incoherence and triviality; that the phrase "serious television" is a
contradiction in terms; and that television speaks in only one persistent
voice --- the voice of entertainment. Beyond that, I will try to
demonstrate that to enter the great television conversation, one American
cultural institution after another is learning to speak its terms.
Television, in other words, is transforming our culture into one vast
arena for show business. It is entirely possible, of course, that in the
end we shall find that delightful, and decide we like it just fine. That
is exactly what Aldous Huxley feared was coming fifty years ago.
*******
Which brings us back to Postman's foreword: "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."
End of Postman
*****
(The following quotes are out of sequence.)
American businessmen discovered, long before the rest of us, that the
quality and usefulness of their goods are subordinate to the artifice of
their display: that, in fact, half the principles of capitalism as praised
by Adam Smith or condemned by Karl Marx are irrelevant.... Economics is
less a science than a performing art.
Our politics, religion, news, athletics, education and commerce have been
transformed into congenial adjuncts of show business, largely without
protest or even much popular notice. The result is that we are a people on
the verge of amusing ourselves to death.
Not long ago, I saw Billy Graham join with Shecky Green, Red Buttons,
Dionne Warwick, Milton Berle and other theologians in a tribute to George
Burns, who was celebrating himself for surviving eighty years in show
business. The Reverend Graham exchanged one-liners with Burns about making
preparations for Eternity. Although the Bible makes no mention of it, the
Reverend Graham assured the audience that God loves those who make people
laugh. It was an honest mistake. He merely mistook NBC for God.
*****
To restore relevance to our lives as-we-live-them in our local
communities, I suggest close examination of compulsory government
schooling.
Like television's hidden agenda, the hidden agenda of compulsory
government schooling is invisible even to those - perhaps particularly to
those - who administer the status quo.
Since many of my educational ideas are already familiar to you, I
will not subject you to needless repetition. I would, however - in light
of Postman's analysis - make this fresh suggestion....
Let every school district in the nation create (at least) one
school whose only entrance requirement is elimination of television from
students' homes from pre-K through grade 12.
At the end of 12 years, do not subject these "un-plugged" kids to
the banality of quantitative analysis, but rather, examine the quality of
their lives. In particular, examine how the lives of "unplugged" kids
differ from students who spent their formative years in the presence of
television monitors. (Even the word is ominous.)
