I grew up in a house where TV was banned. Sugar cereal and candy were frowned upon, but television, especially Saturday morning cartoons, was the ultimate forbidden fruit. Prohibition rarely works and in my case that proved true; I begged for gum in the line at the supermarket, enjoyed orange-flavored aspirin a bit too much and looked longingly at lollipops dropped in parking lots. But nothing trumped TV. I remember waking early and sneaking downstairs to illicitly watch as the test pattern segued into Looney Toons. Yet my stealth was insufficient -- one day in 1975 my mother caught me and kicked a hole in the TV's screen. I'll never forget the days as the shattered set lay on the curb waiting for the garbage crew to haul it away.
Her logic was pretty simple (I think the words "rotting your brain in front of that wretched tube" may have been used). She wanted me to read, to love books, to learn in a particular way. Was she right? Well she may have been and today I'll explore the affect that the evolution that media is having on the stories we tell, how we think and the culture that we create.
I'll try to avoid any preachiness which won't be easy since I'm actually lamenting the possible disintegration of the Western mind.
The phrase "Amusing Ourselves to Death" comes from book of the same name, written in 1984 by Neil Postman. I discovered it earlier this year when talking to a newly-met friend named Ethan Russell. Ethan is a fascinating guy - a generation older than I am, he was the photographer for the Beatles, Rolling Stones and The Who. In a conversation that roamed around a lot (somewhere after telling me of the day he photographed John Lennon and Yoko Ono in bed, left for LA and landed to hear Lennon had been shot) he made a reference to the book. When I clearly didn't get the reference, he immediately bought it for me and sent it to my Kindle. It blew me away. (buy for yourself here)
Postman calls his book a "lamentation about the most significant cultural fact of the second half of the twentieth century: the decline of the Age of Typography and the ascendancy of the Age of Television". The effect of this is that "the content of politics, religion, education and anything else that comprises public business must change and be recast in terms that are most suitable to television".
He begins his argument with a series of vivid metaphors - describing the statues in American cities that typified the national character of particular era. In Boston it is the Minute Men and the Shot Heard Round the World; in New York; Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty; in Chicago, a statue of a hog farmer, representing the era in which America's industry revolved around cattle, steel mills, railroads and entrepreurship. Postman's city and image for modern America is Las Vegas which he calls "a metaphor of our national character and aspiration. . . a thirty-foot-high cardboard picture of a slot machine and a chorus girl. (It is) a city devoted to the idea of entertainment."
Postman uses a framing device for the book that is clever. He compares two great writers, George Orwell and Aldous Huxley, both of whom predicted that mankind would destroy itself, though each saw it happening differently. "There are two ways by which the spirit of a culture may be shriveled. In the first - the Orwellian - culture becomes a prision. In the second - the Huxleyan - culture becomes a burlesque." Amusing Ourselves to Death puts the debate to rest; Clearly Huxley was right.
The critical point to Postman is this: he is NOT objecting to modern media because it serves up junk. In fact, he says that the most compelling stuff on TV is the junk (he's right, as any late night anthropoligist will tell you). His point is that "our media are our metaphors" by which he means that the media is a tool and the tool determines how we describe ourselves and this becomes our culture.
Two things strike me here. I grew up with my father telling me stories about the radio dramas of his boyhood - of Superman and other heroes. I loved them before ever saw them and the magic was in my imagination, in being granted the words and the luxury to point my own pictures. When the Lord of the Rings came out, it was so glorious and stunning to see my favorite book lovingly, respectfully, amazing brought to the screen. Yet a tiny part of me died knowing my children would never be able to close their eyes and imagine Gandalf as looking like anything other than Ian McKellan.
Postman was prophetic, it seems, in 1984, and yet he focused on television, at a time before TV had even become a thousand channel clown car. Clearly his arguments about 1-way passivity and the effects of image-cultures work for TV, but would he feel the same about the modern Internet and social network. The clip below tells me that he'd remain a staunch humanist; he lived long enough to see the Internet arise and understood it to be inevitable. The questions he raises are great ones though - particularly when asked whether kids should use computers in the classroom. It seems clear to us now that computers are a great learning aid, but it's actually more complex as any parent will tell you.
My children are my only reference point, so I'll use them. They've grown up around me, which means computers and media have always been around. Like most kids their age Theo (7) and Phoebe (5) beg for the computer, ipad and iphone. They've learned to type and are processing information differently than I did, more visually, more fluidly and in a more linkage-oriented manner. Hops from one subject to the next seem natural to them - their brains are wired for hyperlinking and it's an unstoppable force that we've embraced. Yet 3 months ago we moved houses and were slow to hook up the cable. And an odd thing happened.. . . .
They began to create. They didn't whine that Hannah Montana or SpongeBob weren't on - instead they both began drawing and writing more. They invented their own stories. They went outside. They amused themselves. And not to death, either. The TV remains unordered.
With that said, I also believe that Steven Johnson book Everything Bad is Good for You was ahead of its time; his provocative idea being that video games and other fun forms of media actually teach the brain to do things much more complex than previous, more structured tasks. We all have memories of that obsolete methods by which we were taught - in my case it was lots and lots of memorization. My kids are on the brink of oursourcing memorization. All they need to learn is how to ask questions correctly - Google with do the rest. This may sound like part of the brain will atrophy, the equivalent of kids with calculators who cannot add and subtract but you could also argue that the essence of education is learning how to learn, knowing what questions to ask and where to find the answers.
I have a question I've been asking a lot recently, especially as financial news gets worse, education, health care, military spending and social security all intertwine and circle the toilet bowl. I ask what has happened to the American Dream. What do we make? We used to farm, bend steel, produce cars, furniture, jewelry, everything. We made Stuff. Now we have ideas (on a good day), we pump gas and espresso (also on a good day) and rely more and more on countries that made real stuff. One exception. We make entertainment -- movies, shows, games, distractions. It is our #1 industry (I'd have to check the figures on this but it's certainly the one that nobody will take from us any time soon). We own cool and produce it from field to table.
So here's where close out the night and ask some hard questions. How much does media (especially as seen 26 years ago) matter. I'd say a lot, in our post-industrial age, amidst the roars of anger towards Wall Street coming from Zucotti Park. Rome is burning and as it smolders, we're updating our Facebook status to "Housewives of Beverly Hills is Over. OMG" What Postman saw, the trivialization that comes in a descent from thoughtful written discourse, has come to pass. In 1860, thousands of citizens would sit all day to listen to Lincoln debate Stephen Douglas for 10 hours straight, trading 1.5 hour remarks and 45 minute rebuttals. Today you'd be hard pressed to get a majority of Americans to name both candidates and their home states. We have become ourselves; like one of those cowboy towns in Blazing Saddles, building with only fronts, a land of shallow substance but lots of pretty pictures.
It's entertainment though, and as we know, showbiz is highly countercyclical. The worse people feel, the more scared, the more atomized, the more they want to run away, the more they seek the warm, soothing bath of entertainment. And that's fine - I do it too. A lot.
Lest we finish on a down note, it must be mentioned that massive cultural trends can be predicted but often change in an instant. Who would have predicted that the rising anger in the Middle East and towards American Banks would trigger Occupy Wall Street. You want to look further out? Try calling the 2012 Election. Have Fun.
I'll leave you with this thought experiment. Having played the Orwell Huxley Game, now pretend that its 2000 and I tell you that in ten years, 800 million people will be connected in an online system that uses their real names, knows who their friends are, their families, their likes and dislikes. It gives them views into the most intimate details of people's lives and allows users to peer into eachother's windows and lives all day everyday. It is owned by a single company. What would you have imagined?
Orwell? Zuckerberg? The ghost of Jeremy Bentham?
Well, one guy did imagine that; he also lived it in 2000 and his then girl-friend made a film called "We Live in Public". The guy, Josh Harris, I remember as being a highly eccentric uber genius of early Silicon Alley in New York. He has not been seen more recently though is rumored to live in a African village as some sort of tribal elder.
Enjoy, amuse yourselves, but not to death.
A very interesting post. I was initially shocked at the thought of your mum putting her foot through the TV. Your observation with your kids is one that I also see with mine. Many of the pieces of technology magic that I think are special, because I remember seeing them evolve are less special to them. Yes they like playing games, watching TV, but they will also stop mid game put down the DS and go and do something else, or swap DS's mid game.
As for creating, they have more tools to create, and we can create together. Whenever my youngest sees the universal ident on a movie he mentions the Predlets movie trailer we made where i had them running around in the garden and then edited it up on imovie with the trailer wizard. (It starts with a very similar ident to universal).
It is very noticeable that maker culture holds the most interesting future. Now that people can truly share ideas and designs online it gives the opportunity to use the tech not just to spoon feed information but to share ideas. The starting point for that is sharing of ourselves and what we do. People have the opportunity to learn and explore in ways they have never had before. That does not mean they have all learned how to learn so we have to help them.
I now do a tech slot in a kids TV show here in the UK. My aim to get kids into Science and Tech. It is so noticeable that many of the things I bring to the show are easy to look up or get set up in schools to explore further. The thrill of being able to make their own toys, gadgets and gizmos and explore creativity through science seems a very positive undertone with our audience.
So I have great hope(as you finished on) that the inquisitive explorers out there will all grab hold of the mass of information and data and start to build upon in. As usual the vast proportion of the population will not be bothered to start with, but their lives will be enriched by the few.
Posted by: Epredator | November 17, 2011 at 04:06 AM
Just returned from the Desert glitz and caught up with you're latest blog, right on in every way. Thank you for giving my grandchildren the opportunity to express themselves creatively. We were so impressed when we witnessed the early morning exercises ( drawing and writing)
GG
Posted by: Mary Connors | November 19, 2011 at 01:53 AM
Ah yes. Neil Postman's book had an impact on my thinking, if not my TV viewing habits, when I discovered it.
I am also reminded of McLuhan: the medium is the message.
Which helps me conceptually relate Postman's thesis with where I find myself today.
I live in a society bred on passive consumption of predigested "information" (aka entertainment). This information product flooded the "market" with channel after channel of goods. A new asynchronous digital distribution channel delivered a whole new source of "information" on-demand. And with it come two new demand-generation mechanisms that tap deep into the human motivation system: inclusion and scarcity.
Now everyone can be involved in the "creation" of information, and the frequency of change is becoming so fast that the hunt for the scarce—the new and unknown—drives the consumption habits: always on, always connected, always monitoring....what? Possibly the greatest example of poor signal to noise ratio ever concocted?
Makes me think of some other McLuhanisms:
-Today the business of business is becoming the constant invention of new business.
-When a thing is current, it creates currency.
-The ignorance of how to use new knowledge stockpiles exponentially.
(Full disclosure: I found these with Google)
How do we equip our generation and future generations to understand, appreciate, and critically analyze information in a way that is rewarding and beneficial to the individual and to society?
How do we escape the game of information commoditization that elevates the monetization of "inclusion and scarcity" over the value of signal strength?
Are our children inherently inquisitive enough to find the real world that lurks beyond the information packages we create? Which one will they prefer to live in?
Posted by: Patrick | November 21, 2011 at 12:36 PM
Nice to be here and see your post!
Posted by: charmingdate.com | March 04, 2013 at 01:29 AM