Amusing Ourselves to Death —
Book Highlights & Its Implications to our Modern-day SHOW BUSINESS
Book Annotation 4
Moreover, television offers viewers a variety of subject matter, requires minimal skills to comprehend it, and is largely aimed at emotional gratification. Even commercials, which some regard as an annoyance, are exquisitely crafted, always pleasing to the eye and accompanied by exciting music. There is no question but that the best photography in the world is presently seen on television commercials. -Neil Postman
You are reading the fourth segment of my annotation series of Neil Postman’s ‘Amusing Ourselves to Death’ book. I’ll be presenting key-points about how the rise of television directly affects the status of show business in the past up until the present. If you happen to read this just now, here’s where you can check the entire series.
“Does television shape culture or merely reflect it?”
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 held considerable interest for many scholars and social critics. The question has largely disappeared as television has gradually become our culture.
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, it demonstrates 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.
BOOK HIGHLIGHTS
Ø In a sea of information, you may get a sense of what is meant by contextual 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?
KEY POINT 1:
Information-action ratio
- 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? Or the rates of inflation, crime and unemployment? What are your plans for preserving the environment or reducing the risk of nuclear war? What do you plan to do about NATO, OPEC, the CIA, affirmative action, and the monstrous treatment of the Baha’is 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 even 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 into — 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.
Ø 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.
KEY POINT 2:
Prior to Show Business was the Age of Telegraphy & Literacy
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.
Critical thinking, ethics, and philosophy as we know them are products of the Age of Literacy. Major philosophical and ethical traditions appear in literate cultures. (Not only does Western philosophy begin after the invention of the alphabet, but Hindu, Buddhist, and Confucian ethics and philosophies all appear in cultures where a significant minority could read.)
Critical thinking, ethics, and philosophy use habits of literacy. They work with concepts. They requires suspension of judgment while positions are being presented. They employ reasoning and use reason to evaluate reasoning. They require us to seek confirmation for alleged facts. And they are concerned with serious matters. In the past these skills and practices had to struggle to make room for themselves against mental habits based in an oral, preliterate culture. (This is part of the meaning of Plato’s Cave Allegory.) Within the context of the age of literacy they also have had to contend with lazy, prejudiced, and manipulative uses of reasoning. Today they additionally must struggle against the habits of the televisual age, which threaten to overwhelm the thought patterns of the literate and typographic age.
The Culture of Literacy asks (as do critical thinking, ethics, and philosophy): Is it consistent? Can it be backed up logically? The Culture of the Televisual Age asks, Is it exciting? Is it cool? Do I like it right now?
Read more: Thinking, Literacy, and the Televisual Age
Ø For on television, nearly every half hour is a discrete event, separated in content, context, and emotional texture from what precedes and follows it.
KEY POINT 3:
There’s No Business But Show Business
In part because television sells its time in seconds and minutes, in part because television must use images rather than words, in part because its audience can move freely to and from the television set, programs are structured so that almost each eight-minute segment may stand as a complete event in itself. Viewers are rarely required to carry over any thought or feeling from one parcel of time to another.
Of course, in television’s presentation of the “news of the day,” we may see the “Now . . . this” mode of discourse in its boldest and most embarrassing form. For there, we are presented not only with fragmented news but news without context, without consequences, without value, and therefore without essential seriousness; that is to say, news as pure entertainment.
Consider, for example, how you would proceed if you were given the opportunity to produce a television news show for any station concerned to attract the largest possible audience. You would, first, choose a cast of players, each of whom has a face that is both “likable” and “credible.” Those who apply would, in fact, submit to you their eight-by-ten glossies, from which you would eliminate those whose countenances are not suitable for nightly display. This means that you will exclude women who are not beautiful or who are over the age of fifty, men who are bald, all people who are overweight or whose noses are too long or whose eyes are too close together. You will try, in other words, to assemble a cast of talking hair-do’s. At the very least, you will want those whose faces would not be unwelcome on a magazine cover.
Hampered viewer acceptance means the same thing for television news as it does for any television show: Viewers do not like looking at the performer. It also means that viewers do not believe the performer, that she lacks credibility. In the case of a theatrical performance, we have a sense of what that implies: The actor does not persuade the audience that he or she is the character being portrayed. But what does lack of credibility imply in the case of a news show? What character is a co-anchor playing? And how do we decide that the performance lacks verisimilitude? Does the audience believe that the newscaster is lying, that what is reported did not in fact happen, that something important is being concealed? It is frightening to think that this may be so, that the perception of the truth of a report rests heavily on the acceptability of the newscaster.
In the ancient world, there was a tradition of banishing or killing the bearer of bad tidings. Does the television news show restore, in a curious form, this tradition? Do we banish those who tell us the news when we do not care for the face of the teller? Does television countermand the warnings we once received about the fallacy of the ad hominem argument? If the answer to any of these questions is even a qualified “Yes,” then here is an issue worthy of the attention of epistemologists. Stated in its simplest form, it is that television provides a new (or, possibly, restores an old) definition of truth.
