Amusing Ourselves to Death

A summary of:

Postman, N. (1985). Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. Methuen London Ltd: London.

Take a look at this truly creepy advertisement for Apple’s Macintosh computers in 1984:

This preys on our very rational fear that our society could easily succumb to Orwellian control. But while our eyes are peeled for the signs of Big Brother’s takeover, a more insidious villain has been operating behind the scenes. The main thesis of Postman’s book is that it is Huxley’s vision that has come true:

“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” (vii).

“What Huxley teaches is that in the age of advanced technology, spiritual devastation is more likely to come from an enemy with a smiling face than from one whose countenance exudes suspicion and hate. In the Huxleyan prophecy, Big Brother does not watch us, by his choice. We watch him, by ours” (160).

In other words, we are lining up to be imprisoned in our self-made iron cages. We are dazzled; and we stumble willingly to our own spiritual and cultural destruction.

How did this situation come to be? The first step, according to Postman, is the trivialization of information, beginning with the telegraph. He quotes Thoreau, from Walden:

‘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’ (66).

The point is that information, in its new abundance, became divorced from relevance, as well as from context (69). Information became a commodity; and its acquisition became the goal. This has led to today’s information pleonexia, as Schultze described it – where we pathologically consume information. Meanwhile, what are we meant to do with this information? As Postman rightly points out,

“…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’” (69).

Information, in short, has become entertainment, rather than meaning. And indeed worse things can be said about this disturbing transformation. Once entertainment becomes the point of information, truth becomes irrelevant as well. Television, perhaps because of its esteemed position in the household’s living room, has exacerbated this condition considerably. Now: “I should go so far as to say that embedded in the surrealistic frame of a television news show is a theory of anticommunication, featuring a type of discourse that abandons logic, reason, sequence and rules of contradiction. In aesthetics, I believe the name given to this theory is Dadaism; in philosophy, nihilism; in psychiatry, schizophrenia. In the parlance of the theatre, it is know as vaudeville” (107).

Postman uses the Orwell vs. Huxley comparison:

“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” (vii).

Further: “What is happening here is that television is altering the meaning of ‘being informed’ by creating a species of information that might properly be called disinformation. I am using this word almost in the precise sense in which it is used by spies in the CIA or KGB. Disinformation does not mean false information. It means misleading information – misplaced, irrelevant, fragmented or superficial information – information that creates the illusion of knowing something but which in fact leads one away from knowing” (109).

In October of 2010, Jon Stewart (who, it should be noted, hosts the fake-news program, The Daily Show, from which 70%+ of Americans get their news) organized a Rally To Restore Sanity in Washington DC. One of the main things Stewart takes issue with is the way in which, because news has become entertainment, it has become a boxing match between mythologized characters of the Left and the Right:

"We've all bought into the idea that the conflict in the country is left and right, Republicans and Democrats." Furthermore, an insidious, attention-grabbing news media "amplifies a division that I don’t think is the right fight ... [because] both sides have their way of shutting down debate" (from Salon.com)

A similar argument has been made by Nicholas Carr as well, in relation to the Internet. He uses the phrase, “The Great Unbundling”, meaning “we are able to pick and choose with advanced selection tools what we read/consume, etc., leading to a greater symbiosis between media and advertising (news stories are selected on the basis of their ability to get individuals to click on advertisements, rather than their substantive quality) and also to greater polarization of beliefs” (Carr, 2008).

As a society, we have bought into the notion that information media shrinks the world, and in doing so, brings us together. Morse prophesied that “telegraph would make ‘one neighbourhood of the whole country’” (66). But decontextualized information sharing does not seem to be doing this: “The telegraph may have made the country into ‘one neighbourhood’, but it was a peculiar one, populated by strangers who knew nothing but the most superficial facts about each other” (69).

This exact same argument could be made about Facebook. You may call Facebook a community; but it is a community in which members share only the most superficial facts about each other. The whole endeavor is disappointing, the results banal.

This is a fault of the medium: “that the form in which ideas are expressed affects what those ideas will be” (32). In other words, not only is McLuhan’s famous phrase, ‘The medium is the message’ (“Each medium, like language itself, makes possible a unique mode of discourse by providing a new orientation for thought, for expression, for sensibility. Which, of course, is what McLuhan meant in saying the medium is the message” (10)), true; but the medium delineates the boundaries of possibility for its use. For example, a medium (i.e. technology) that is at its foundation non-spiritual, cannot facilitate the spiritual. Postman uses the example of televangelists, who he rightly criticizes as not doing particularly spiritual work: “What makes these television preachers the enemy of religious experience is not so much their weaknesses but the weaknesses of the medium in which they work” (119).

The implication of this is that, given that the world wide web is not built on a spiritual foundation, we cannot expect to be able to do anything particularly spiritual with it. In other words, what we need, if we desire a spiritual internet, is a completely separate medium, built upon spirituality, thus delineating the possibility for spiritual experiences. We need an alternative that does not just tweak the old, but actually exists on a completely different historical/developmental track.

Postman makes another interesting point about media. He says,

“…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….” (80).

This is exactly how power operates – once it becomes invisible, it can exert itself. And as Postman says, “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” (81). We have implicitly accepted technology, and in doing so, accepted its values, meanwhile abandoning our own.

Postman emphases the questions are we must necessarily ask: “What is television? What kinds of conversations does it permit? What are the intellectual tendencies it encourages? What sort of culture does it produce” (86)? I suggest we should be asking this about all of our technology, and I will use these as a starting point for discussion about the pros and cons of various technologies. What’s clear is that “ignorance of the score is inexcusable. To be unaware that a technology comes equipped with a programme 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” (162).

So in conclusion, what are the main issues Postman raises with regards to the television:

1. Lack of context

2. Lack of continuity

And these in turn contribute to 3. Incoherence, and 4. It erodes our human mental abilities:

“In the absence of continuity and context, [Terence Moran] says, ‘bits of information cannot be integrated into an intelligent and consistent whole.’ We do not refuse to remember, neither do we find it exactly useless to remember. Rather, we are being rendered unfit to remember. For if remembering is to be something more than nostalgia, it requires a contextual (140) basis – a theory, a vision, a metaphor – something within which facts can be organized and patterns discerned. The politics of images and instantaneous news provides no such context, is, in fact, hampered by attempts to provide any” (141).

5. Age of Show Business – all is produced for purposes of entertainment

So what are the solutions? Should we just switch off? Clearly, this is not a viable option, in part because no one will do it. George Gerbner, Dean of the Annenberg School of Communication, says: “Liberation cannot be accomplished by turning [television] off. Television is for most people the most attractive thing going any time of the day or night. We live in a world in which the vast majority will not turn off. If we don’t get the message from the tube, we get it through other people” (143).

As Postman aptly summarizes, “Americans will not shut down any part of their technological apparatus, and to suggest that they do so is to make no suggestion at all. It is almost equally unrealistic to expect that nontrivial modifications in the availability of media will ever be made” (163).

So it is hopeless? Postman proposes two solutions, one he calls the ‘nonsensical answer’ and the other the ‘desperate answer’:

“The nonsensical answer is to create television programmes whose intent would be, not to get people to stop watching television but to demonstrate how television ought to be (166) viewed, to show how television recreates and degrades our conception of news, political debate, religious thought, etc.” (167).

“The desperate answer is to rely on the only mass medium of communication that, in theory, is capable of addressing the problem: our schools” (167).

He concludes his book with this appeal for educating the masses about the effect media is having on us:

“What I suggest here as a solution is what Aldous Huxley suggested, as well. And I can do no better than he. He believed with H. G. Wells that we are in a race between education and disaster, and he wrote continuously about the necessity of our understanding the politics and epistemology of media. For in the end, he was trying to tell us that what afflicted the people in Brave New World was not that they were laughing instead of thinking, but that they did not know what they were laughing about and why they had stopped thinking” (168).

Perhaps this is precisely what Jon Stewart was trying to do.