NEIL POSTMAN AMUSING OURSELVES TO DEATH TV
The appeal of the moving images, the abrupt shifts from one topic to the next - “now this,” as he titles a chapter in broadcast-ese - buried us deeper in an avalanche or names and faces, places and incidents, about which we understood little of significance.Įverybody knew of the Iran hostage crisis of 1979-81, for example, an event that spawned its own TV show, Nightline. Postman answers: “a neighborhood of strangers and pointless quantity a world of fragments and discontinuities.” His assessment might be cut and pasted into a sentence about social media today.īy the time TV came along, in Postman’s telling, the collective intellectual damage had been done. Telegraph inventor Samuel Morse asked “What hath God wrought?” in the first wired message. “Intelligence,” he writes, “meant knowing of lots of things, not knowing about them.” So fundamental was the impact of this technological change, it altered the definition of being informed. “Implications, background, or connections” became irrelevant, he says, and historical context a telegraphic excess. But the demands of the format rewarded superficial breadth. On the contrary, Postman argues, the telegraph inundated us with it - about everything from everywhere. Not that information was in short supply. Sensational news from far away could be delivered fast - and with pictures! The Age of Typography, as Postman dubs the literate era that showbiz came to overshadow, began to decline even then, with newspapers still ascendant but their journalism yellowing.Įntertainment not only began to be elevated over information, even when it came to issues of serious public importance, but the two also became indistinguishable. That wall, he writes, went down around the turn of the 20th century, when the diverting visuals of photography met the speed of the telegraph wire. In Amusing Ourselves to Death he palpably longs for the days of Lincoln-Douglas and for American audiences that could stand hours of that kind of thing.
Postman, who died in 2003, no doubt would have much much to say about the impact of the internet in general, and social media in particular, in furthering the degradation from what, by the 1980s, already felt to him like a rhetorical rock bottom. “Omg there’s so much much substance and class here.” begins a commenter called Alice Aquarius. Read the YouTube comments on this Reagan-Bush debate video, though, to discern a retrospective astonishment that the American electorate ever could have had it so good. “There you go again” and “Where’s the beef?” endure as the sound bites of that era. Granted, nobody cites the Reagan-Bush debates from the 1980 Republican primary as a high point in American political discourse. That seems like a long time ago, technologically and politically speaking, but the insights in Postman’s book feel all the more acute and applicable now that Reagan, in retrospect, seems positively Lincoln-esque compared to many of today’s elected officials. The year was 1985 and the culprit was television, the perfected instrument of what Postman called the Age of Show Business. And if he were, he would surely do so at the risk of burdening the comprehension or concentration of his audience.”Īt the time Postman published his indictment of the technology-shriveled American attention span, the occupant of the White House was Ronald Reagan. In Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman writes, “It is hard to imagine the present occupant of the White House being capable of constructing such clauses in similar circumstances. “I hope, therefore, if there be anything that he has said upon which you would like to hear something from me, but which I omit to comment upon, you will bear in mind that it would be expecting an impossibility for me to cover his whole ground,” Lincoln said. Abraham Lincoln confessed to a debate audience in 1858 that, in the mere half hour allotted to him for rebuttal, he could not possibly address all the points Stephen Douglas had raised in his 90-minute oration.
0 kommentar(er)
