I thought I’d take a break from killer robots and Ray Kurzweil to write a summary of a book I recently read, interspersed with my own thoughts (which are in square brackets). Though at first glace, the book Amusing Ourselves to Death might seem out of place in this blog, it focuses on technology (specifically, television) and its effect on 1980s culture.
My interest in this book was piqued about two years ago when I started hearing it mentioned for its alleged prescience predicting the rise of today’s frenetic social media culture and “cancel culture.” After reading it, it’s clear that many of the defects of 1980s TV culture have carried over to 2020s internet culture, and in that sense, it is prescient. However, the book is in equal measure a time capsule that documents a defunct era, and as such, it serves as useful contrast against the way things are in the present era, and helped me to see how the shift in the dominant technological medium (TV to computer/internet) has changed American culture and behavior.
Doing this led to me to make unhappy realizations, which I invite you to read in the square brackets rather than in a summary here, as this isn’t that long of a blog post.
Chapter 1 – The Medium is the Metaphor
American culture is now focused on amusement. Politics, religion, and social discourse are presented to Americans as entertainment products.
Some proof of this is evident if one considers that the U.S. President at the time of the book’s publication, Ronald Reagan, was a former movie actor. Other presidential candidates were also former TV personalities.
To win a U.S. Presidential election, a candidate must be telegenic. This attribute is just as important as others that are much more critical for the position, like intelligence.
Through studying their audiences, news media companies discovered that viewers would watch news programs more regularly and for longer periods if the newscasters were telegenic. This is why newscasters are now almost universally good-looking and well-spoken.
There are different mediums of communication, and each medium has unique characteristics that determine which types of content it can convey. Each has strengths, weaknesses, and limits:
- Smoke signals can’t convey complex ideas, so it is impossible to use this medium to discuss philosophy.
- Television (TV) is a visual medium, so it conveys ideas and stories principally through images and not through words. Things that look unappealing evoke negative reactions from viewers. As a result, an obese man like William Taft couldn’t become President in today’s era of political commercials and televised debates, even if he were in fact the best-suited candidate for the position. [Donald Trump won the 2016 election in spite of being obese and physically ugly in other ways. However, his prowess as a showman overcame those deficits, at least among a sufficient number of American voters to secure him a narrow victory.]
This book’s core thesis is that TV is fundamentally unsuited as a medium for the complex discussion of ideas.
The telegraph brought the “news of the day” into existence: Instant communication allowed everyone to be aware of events everywhere else on the planet, which might sound like a good thing, but hasn’t been because of how the new information has been used. Most of the information presented in the “news of the day” is irrelevant to any particular consumer because it has no impact on him and/or because he can’t exert any influence on the people and events described in it. Stories that fill the news of the day are also usually presented without enough context for consumers to understand them or to draw the proper conclusions from them.
The author, Neil Postman, met Marshall McLuhan, and some of the latter’s ideas influenced this book. However, Postman also disagrees with McLuhan on some points.
A culture’s dominant communications medium will determine how it thinks. America is a TV-dominated culture. [As of the time this analysis is being written, America is well into a transition to being an internet-dominated culture, which is even more hostile to intelligent discourse and maturity. Neil Postman died in 2003, before the invention of smartphones and before the rise of social media, internet celebrities, “curated realities,” and “echo chambers,” and I think he’d view today’s situation as even worse than it was in the 1980s.]
The advents of past technologies have changed how humans think, and expanded what we were capable of imagining.
- The invention of clocks changed the human relationship with time. Seasons and the sense of eternity lost importance once people had an accurate, finely gradated way to measure time.
- The invention of writing allowed humans to synthesize more complex ideas. Once written down, ideas can be studied, their flaws found, and the ideas either rejected or revised.
- Writing also allowed ideas to spread faster and more widely, since they persisted over time and could be received by more people.
America is transitioning from a print/writing culture to a visual culture.
Chapter 2 – Media as Epistemology
TV has made American public discourse silly and dangerous.
The medium determines what is considered to be “true.” Proof:
- Oral cultures that lack writing systems rely on proverbs and sayings to remember what is “true” or “right.” “Haste makes waste” is a good example of one of these. In oral cultures, these will be more commonly known and taken seriously.
- A relevant anecdote from when the author was examining a Ph.D. dissertation: ‘You are mistaken in believing that the form in which an idea is conveyed is irrelevant to its truth. In the academic world, the published word is invested with greater prestige and authenticity than the spoken word. What people say is assumed to be more casually uttered than what they write. The written word is assumed to have been reflected upon and revised by its author, reviewed by authorities and editors. It is easier to verify or refute, and it is invested with an impersonal and objective character…The written word endures, the spoken word disappears; and that is why writing is closer to the truth than speaking. Moreover, we are sure you would prefer that this commission produce a written statement that you have passed your examination (should you do so) than for us merely to tell you that you have, and leave it at that. Our written statement would represent the “truth.” Our oral agreement would be only a rumor.’
- [One of the worst aspects of social media is that content can be produced and circulated instantaneously, like speech, but that it persists permanently, like writing. As a result, social media is awash in impulsive utterances that unfairly destroy careers and lives in seconds.]
- The ancient Athenians considered “rhetoric,” the persuasiveness and emotion of an oral performance, to be the best measure of its truthfulness. Good public speaking skills were prized personal attributes. [The problem in elevating this to such a high level of cultural importance is that it is entirely possible for a person to be persuasive and dishonest at the same time. The quality or truthfulness of an idea shouldn’t be judged based on how well the person espousing it can debate or think on his feet. A responsible citizen takes the time to study all sides of an issue alone and to make a dispassionate judgement, and doesn’t let himself be swayed by someone who is skilled in manipulating his emotions or forcefully presenting only one half of the story. “You have to convince me” is a lazy and unintellectual stance.]
- Side note: In spite of their seminal contributions to Western civilization, the philosophers of ancient Greece made the monumental flaw of assuming that all knowledge could be gleaned through deduction. In other words, starting with a handful of facts that were known to the true, they believed they could use reasonable assumptions to discover everything else that was true. This was a fundamentally anti-scientific way of thinking that stymied them, as it led them to believe that new knowledge didn’t need to be gained by running experiments.
Different types of media put different demands on people, leading to those people forming different values:
- In oral cultures that lack writing, people value the ability to easily memorize things, and the better your memory, the smarter you are perceived as being.
- In print cultures that have writing, having a good memory is much less important since any person can look up nearly any piece of information. Being able to memorize and recite facts is useful for trivia. People who are able to sit still for long periods in silence reading books, and who can easily absorb the things they read, are perceived as being smart.
Different types of media encourage and nurture different cognitive habits.
TV is an inferior medium to print when it comes to conveying serious ideas.
However, the TV medium has some positive attributes:
- Having a moving, talking image of another human being in the room with you can provide emotional comfort. TV makes the lives of many isolated people–especially the elderly–slightly better.
- Films and videos can be highly effective at raising awareness of problems, like racism and social injustice. [The implication is that seeing a lifelike image of someone else suffering is more emotionally impactful than merely reading about it or listening to a third person speak about it.]
Chapter 3 – Typographic America
In 1600s New England, the adult literacy rate was probably the highest in the world. The region was heavily Protestant, and their faith emphasized the importance of reading the Bible to have a more direct relationship with God, so literacy became widespread.
England’s literacy rate was slightly lower than New England’s.
New Englanders also valued schooling, which is another reason why literacy rates were high.
Even among poor colonial New Englanders, literacy rates were high, and reading was a common form of recreation.
The political essay “Common Sense” was published in 1776 as a short book that could be bought cheaply. The percentage of Americans that read it within the first few months of its publication was comparable to the share of Americans that watch the Superbowl today.
Newspapers and pamphlets were more widely read in colonial America than they were in Britain.
By 1800, the U.S. was a fully “print-based” culture. Even in poor parts of the South, literacy rates were high and reading was a common daily activity. The best American authors were as famous then as movie stars are now.
Attending public lectures also became a popular pastime, and by 1830, there were 3,000 lecture halls in America. Average people commonly went to local lecture halls after work to see presentations about academic subjects, as well as to see debates.
The fact that the U.S. was founded by upper-class, intellectual people helped establish the country’s literary culture.
The printing press made epic, lyrical poetry obsolete.
Chapter 4 – The typographic mind
In 1858, U.S. Senate candidates Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas toured Illinois together and held public debates with each other over the subject of slavery. The events took place in seven cities, were well-attended, and each went on for hours. They became known as the “Lincoln-Douglas debates.”
The transcripts of the Debates still exist, and show both men were extremely gifted orators. Their statements were information-dense and assumed a high level of knowledge on the part of listeners; none of what they said was dumbed down. The fact that average people who attended the Debates could understand them indicates that the Americans of the 1850s had better attention spans, listening skills, and probably reading comprehension skills than Americans today. Such are the advantages of being in a print-based culture. [Note that this book was published in 1986, and there’s a widespread belief among Americans now, in 2021, that the internet and personal computing devices have made those three attributes even worse.]
Today’s TV culture promotes stupidity and stupid thinking, by comparison.
The Lincoln-Douglas debates were civil and complex, and so were their audiences. While the Debates were of course conducted orally, much of what was said came from written notes.
By its nature, writing must always convey some kind of proposition. [Meaningless writing might take the form of a series of random words, or bad poetry that no one can understand.] Thus, a print-based culture encourages meaningful and intelligible discourse.
‘Thus, reading is by its nature a serious business. It is also, of course, an essentially rational activity. From Erasmus in the sixteenth century to Elizabeth Eisenstein in the twentieth, almost every scholar who has grappled with the question of what reading does to one’s habits of mind has concluded that the process encourages rationality; that the sequential, propositional character of the written word fosters what Walter Ong calls the “analytic management of knowledge.” To engage the written word means to follow a line of thought, which requires considerable powers of classifying, inference-making and reasoning. It means to uncover lies, confusions, and overgeneralizations, to detect abuses of logic and common sense. It also means to weigh ideas, to compare and contrast assertions, to connect one generalization to another.’
[I independently came to the same conclusion years ago. Written communication’s great advantage is that it forces a person to reflect upon his own thoughts and to organize them into a rational form. This is crucially important since raw human thinking is chaotic, fragmentary and impulsive. This also leads me to believe that mind-reading technologies that allow people to share thoughts will have major downsides. Having direct access to another person’s inner monologue in real time could be confusing and lead to strife as you became aware of every fleeting thought and uncontrollable impulse they had. In most cases, it would be preferable to wait a little longer for them to convert their thoughts into spoken or written words.]
Reading and writing require and encourage grounded, meaningful, analytical thinking. Watching TV does not.
By necessity, writing must be orderly, so reading encourages orderly thinking. It even promotes more orderly verbal discourse between people.
It’s no coincidence that the Age of Reason happened while print culture was at its peak in the West:
- Rise of capitalism
- Rise of skepticism of religion
- Divine right of kings rejected
- Rise of idea of continuous progress
- Rise of an appreciation for the value of mass literacy
Early American theologians were brilliant, literary men who valued education, including in secular subjects. Congregationalists founded many important universities that still exist.
The different effects of print culture and TV culture on religious discourse are evident if one compares the sermons and religious essays of John Edwards with those of Jerry Falwell. Edwards’ ideas are complex and logically argued, whereas Falwell’s are simpler and designed to play on the listener’s emotions.
Newspaper ads were originally lineal and fact-based. During the 1890s, they changed so as to be amusing and to appeal to consumers’ emotions. The Kodak camera ad featuring the jingo “You Press the Button, We Do the Rest” was the first “modern” ad.
Though no one knew it at the time, this was a bad milestone for print culture, as it marked the dawn of an age when printed words and images would be crafted to manipulate emotions and human psychology, rather than to appeal to reason and to present complete ideas.
Without televisions or even many photos (even in newspapers), Americans in the 1800s knew famous people through their writings and ideas. Few would even have recognized their own President on sight. By contrast, because today’s TV culture is visual and disjointed, we know famous people by their faces and soundbites. [Videos of American political activists being interviewed on the street and asked to name one accomplishment or policy stance of their preferred Presidential candidate attest to this. Often, a person waving around a political placard with a politician’s face on it can’t describe what that politician stands for or plans to do if elected.]
‘To these people, reading was both their connection to and their model of the world. The printed page revealed the world, line by line, page by page, to be a serious, coherent place, capable of management by reason, and of improvement by logical and relevant criticism.
Almost anywhere one looks in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, then, one finds the resonances of the printed word and, in particular, its inextricable relationship to all forms of public expression. It may be true, as Charles Beard wrote, that the primary motivation of the writers of the United States Constitution was the protection of their economic interests. But it is also true that they assumed that participation in public life required the capacity to negotiate the printed word. To them, mature citizenship was not conceivable without sophisticated literacy, which is why the voting age in most states was set at twenty-one, and why Jefferson saw in universal education America’s best hope. And that is also why, as Allan Nevins and Henry Steele Commager have pointed out, the voting restrictions against those who owned no property were frequently overlooked, but not one’s inability to read.’
Chapter 5 – The Peek-a-Boo World
In the mid-1800s, two ideas changed American discourse: 1) instant communication (e.g. – speed of ideas and news no longer limited by how fast a person can travel), and 2) the birth of photography.
The telegraph and Morse Code unified and redefined public discourse in the U.S. Previously, the vast majority of news Americans knew of was about local events and local people. It was directly relevant to them, and they could exercise some influence over it. However, the telegraph made it possible for people to hear about events and people from the far-flung corners of the planet, instantaneously. This exponentially increased the quantity of “news” content average Americans were exposed to. However, the vast majority of this new information was irrelevant to them, was about people and things they couldn’t control, and was usually presented without enough contextual information.
Before the telegraph, news was presented rationally, and was about urgent things that had some direct impact on the people receiving the news. After the telegraph, the news largely consisted of irrelevant information that profit-hungry news media companies picked for shock value and entertainment value.
For proof of this, ask yourself the following questions:
- Aside from weather reports, when is the last time a news story that you heard or read about in the morning convinced you to change your plans for the day, or to take some kind of action you wouldn’t have otherwise taken?
- When is the last time something you learned from a news report helped you to solve a problem in your everyday life?
The news is mostly trivia. Like sports, it gives people something to talk about, but has no tangible use.
The telegraph created an “information glut” across the world, for the first time in history. However, most of the information has never been useful to most of the people receiving it.
The information glut also changed the cultural definition of what counts as a “smart” person. Smart people are now those who have a very broad but shallow knowledge of disconnected things, most of which are irrelevant to everyday life.
Before the telegraph, the stereotypical “smart” person was one who had deep, contextualized knowledge about a small number of topics. Also, people sought out information for its usefulness to them, they were not awash in a sea of useless information.
[But by this logic, weren’t many of the attendees to the Lincoln-Douglas debates “wasting their time” since they spent hours listening to two men talk about a subject that had no bearing on their daily lives since Illinois was not a slave state and none of them had black friends? The institution of slavery didn’t directly affect them, so wasn’t the subject mere trivia for them? Learning about and talking about things that have no relevance to the needs of the moment, and that affect people different from you is basic civic engagement, and not doing it is just as damaging to a culture as having everyone watch foolish TV programs all day. Though the author could surely render a satisfying answer to this paradox if he were alive, he doesn’t do so in the book, which is a mark against it.]
Photography is a shallow medium since it can’t convey internal states or depict meaning with the same depth as the written word. [I don’t fully agree. Also, recall that the author praised the TV medium’s effectiveness at raising awareness of problems, like racism and social injustice, by depicting human suffering in a way more visceral than the written word. Well, a video is nothing but a series of photographs showed in rapid sequence, so why shouldn’t it be true by extension that photography has the same virtues as video? After all, there are countless, famous photographs that have raised the public’s consciousness about important social issues and tragedies.]
It can also be a deceptive medium since photos can remove images of events and people from their contexts. Like the telegraph, it presents an atomized vision of reality where context is missing. [As an amateur photographer, I strongly agree with this. Walking around on a normal day, and in a not particularly interesting or unusual place, it’s quite possible to take snapshots of objects, people, and landscapes that, thanks to some trick of the lighting, camera angle, or momentary facial expression from a subject, look dramatic or emotionally evocative, and don’t portray what that scene really looked like or felt like to the people who were there at that moment. Black-and-white photography’s stylized appearance and the often-coarse appearance of developed film lends itself particularly well to this.]
It was soon found that news articles and ads that included photos were more eye-catching to people than those without.
“Pseudo-context” refers to how news publishers structure their articles to make them seem relevant and coherent to consumers, when in fact they have neither of those qualities. It’s a deception meant to hide the fact that consumers are being exposed to vast amounts of disconnected stories and facts about irrelevant things.
“Pseudo-events” are events that are deliberately staged to be reported upon by the news media, and in a way that benefits the people who have staged it. Press conferences and speeches to supporters are common examples. Pseudo-events have the superficial trappings of being important and significant, but they actually convey little or no useful or new information. Daniel Boorstin coined the term “pseudo-event” after observing the phenomenon.
[From other research, I found useful contrast between a “real” event with real consequences, and a pseudo-event that merely gives off the impression of being consequential: If the owners of a hotel want to boost their establishment’s value and appeal to customers, a legitimate strategy would be to improve some aspect of the hotel or their operations. This might involve hiring a better chef, installing new plumbing, or repainting the rooms, and then publicly announcing that the changes had been made. An alternative strategy, which could be just as effective at boosting profits, would be to hold a “pseudo-event” in the form of a banquet celebrating the hotel’s 30th anniversary. Important members of the community would be invited and praised, the owners of the hotel would make speeches about how it had somehow served the community, and members of the media would be invited and would almost certainly publish glowing news stories about the event. The perception that the hotel was better and more important than it actually was would be created in the minds of news consumers.]
[Thanks to social media and the proliferation of cable TV channels, we now have what could be called “pseudo news” shows, which superficially resemble respectable, traditional news broadcasts since they have charismatic presenters and move from discussing one recent event or pressing issue to the next, but which are actually entertainment and/or editorialization shows. Real events are brought up, but discussed in misleading ways. The viewer walks away from such a show thinking they are now well-informed, but in fact, they might have been better off not watching the show and never hearing about the event at all.]
Thanks to the information glut, we live in a “peek-a-boo” world full of nonsensical things that are presented to us in entertaining ways.
As a medium, television takes the worst and most distinctive elements of telegraphy and photography to new extremes. TV content is even more decontextualized, deceptive, irrelevant, and slanted towards amusement and shock value.
America now has a “TV culture,” whose features are antithetical to the nation’s former print culture. The deficiencies of TV as a medium make it fundamentally unsuited for supporting intellectual thinking or discourse.
Chapter 6 – The Age of Show Business
TV culture attacks literary culture
[Why does the author skip a discussion of radio culture by jumping from print culture to TV culture?]
American-made TV and film content is a major export. People in other countries consider it more entertaining than their own content. U.S. TV shows and films are more emotionally evocative, visually stimulating, and entertaining. [My years of traveling to other countries confirm this is true. In spite of how hollow and socially corrosive American pop culture is, it excels like none other at appealing to humans across the world. Additionally, the most successful TV shows and films indigenous to other countries usually copy elements from their American counterparts.]
All TV content is presented as entertainment. Even somber news shows are glitzy and entertaining.
The 1983 broadcast of the TV film The Day After was the most prominent attempt to use the TV medium for a serious, intellectual purpose. The film is a docu-drama about a nuclear war between the U.S. and U.S.S.R., and is jarring and disturbing to watch. The national broadcast was presented without commercial interruption, and was punctuated by comments from a panel of well-known American intellectuals including Carl Sagan and Henry Kissinger. Nonetheless, the broadcast failed in its attempt to foster meaningful discussion or insight into the topic, due to the limitations of the TV medium.
For example, the members of the panel never had a real “discussion” with each other–they delivered prepared talking points and avoided deeply addressing each others’ ideas.
A fundamental problem with TV as a medium is that people come across as stupid and/or boring if they pause to think about something, or if they appear uncertain about something. The medium is friendly to people who can give quick responses and who come prepared with rehearsed performances. Hence, TV is unconducive to most intellectuals and to “the act of thinking.” [This is extremely unfortunate, since the best ideas typically come after considerable time spent thinking, and since many great thinkers are not also great performers.]
Studies show that people instinctively prefer TV content that is visually stimulating and fast-paced. This means the sorts of TV programs that could be intellectual and serious, like two smart people sitting at a table having a long, focused discussion, are not considered as interesting. Since TV networks are always striving to find content that generates the highest ratings and hence profits, they naturally eschew those kinds of intelligent, serious programs in favor of flashy, entertaining programs.
[The rise of long-format podcasts in the 2010s partly contradicts this.]
In the U.S., all cultural content is filtered through the TV medium, and as such has acquired the negative qualities of typical TV programming. News programs are glitzy, shocking and entertaining when they should be serious, and religious broadcasts are also made to be entertaining rather than contemplative.
Because everything on TV is presented to Americans this way, Americans have come to expect everything to be entertaining:
- Legal trials about serious crimes like murder are televised for entertainment and shock value.
- Education courses include more and more videos that present subjects as entertainment.
- The 1984 Presidential debates between Ronald Reagan and Walter Mondale were nothing like the Lincoln-Douglas Debates. Instead of spending a lot of time deeply discussing and debating a narrow range of related issues, the 1984 Debates only devoted five minutes to each issue, which was an impossibly short amount of time to discuss any of them in depth or for one participant to rigorously cross-examine the other. There was little focus on the candidates’ ideas or logic undergirding their ideas. Instead, it was a contest of who could get out the best “zingers” and who looked better in front of the camera. [The 2016 and 2020 Presidential Debates were infinitely worse.]
Chapter 7 – “Now…this.”
The expression “Now…this” is commonly used on news broadcasts when moving from one story to the next. It forces viewers to stop thinking about one thing and to focus on another. Its use shows how the news us full of disconnected events, people and ideas.
Studies of viewer preferences show that people are more likely to watch news broadcasts that have physically attractive anchors. News media companies have thus gravitated towards hiring attractive anchors to maximize their ratings and hence profits. [The profit motive is behind most of the dysfunctions in TV and internet news.]
Studies also show that humans are likelier to believe something if the person saying it appears sincere. This more intangible but still detectable quality is also used as a basis for hiring and promotion decisions at TV news stations. This is problematic because such things as skillful liars exist, and there’s no reason an off-putting people can’t be speaking the truth about something.
[To be fair, since this book was published, science has learned a large amount about how nonverbal aspects of communication in the forms of facial microexpressions, eye movements, body language, appropriateness of emotional displays, and other unconscious aspects of speech and behavior reveal deceit. In most cases, people’s instincts let them accurately detect dishonesty or malice.]
The fact that news anchors must recite their lines with a more-or-less upbeat tone, even when describing tragedies, lends a degree of unreality to TV news and prevents the TV medium from accurately conveying the sense of tragedy or loss associated with the event. [What’s the alternative? Should news programs relentlessly dwell on every report of a major loss of life so as to make sure viewers end up feeling depressed and disgusted? It’s a big world, and on any given day, a major loss of life or gruesome crime is happening somewhere, and portraying those events in ways that accurately conveyed their impacts would make the daily news too traumatic and emotionally draining for people to watch.]
[The author’s complaint that TV news anchors lack emotional investment in the stories they report on is obsolescent. The internet age has caused the news media landscape to fragment into thousands of smaller outlets catering to highly specific demographics of viewers. The anchors who lead these new programs are guilty of the opposite sin–overinvestment of emotion into their reporting, and to such a degree that any pretense of neutrality (and sometimes, adult maturity) is sacrificed. The inhuman detachment of 1980s TV news anchors has mostly been replaced by excessive outrage, crocodile tears, sanctimony, and sarcasm.]
“Now…this” is also often used as a lead-in for commercials. The seriousness of news broadcasts is undermined by the fact that they are punctuated by commercials, which are usually lighthearted.
TV news shows avoid complexity and move through a diverse range of stories and topics quickly.
Partly as a result of news broadcasts’ deficiencies, Americans are poorly informed about people and events outside of their country.
Again, the features and limitations of TV as a medium of communication alter how news is presented through it. TV news programs will inevitably gravitate towards presenting news content as entertainment, and as a series of disconnected, bite-sized stories. The result is in fact “disinformation” since it leaves viewers with the false impression that watching a news broadcast has made them well-informed about events, issues and important people, when in fact they aren’t.
TV news broadcasts also annihilate the sense that a “past” exists because all they depict is a churning of “present” events. Things that happened in the past are quickly muscled out by a deluge of new things. The perpetual focus on the present moment makes it harder for news consumers to notice lies and inconsistencies, as the news seldom has the time to dredge up older things that a person said or did that proved to be wrong or contradict what they are saying or doing now.
[Again, the internet age has turned the problem on its head. Because every famous person’s quotes and records of their actions are now available on the internet and instantly searchable, it has become easy to find every tasteless statement, lie, and contradiction, and to package them into a bite-sized product like a social media meme. With access to a lifetime’s worth of records, you can make any person look like an evil liar. If the TV culture of the 1980s was one where there was only ever a “present moment,” the new internet culture is one where you can pick whatever moment you want to live in. If you don’t like a specific politician, you can curate your social media and TV news bubble so as to only allow in negative content about them, including every lie or crass statement from decades ago. As a result, this is an age of cynicism and self-righteousness. While the TV news “gatekeepers” of the 1980s had their flaws and biases, they were more sensible and grounded in reality than the multitudes of amateurs who today manufacture biased memes and make extremist podcasts, and define what “reality” is for a large and growing share of the human population.]
Print culture encourages the opposite mindset. Since it is easy to turn pages back and forth in a book or newspaper, readers are aware of context and of the linear order of events, and they can spot lies and inconsistencies by cross-referencing different passages.
Aspects of Aldous Huxley’s dystopia, described in his book Brave New World, now exist in modern America. The government has no need to censor anything because its citizens are so occupied with silly pursuits and so easily misled by corporate-manufactured disinformation that they have no time or interest in uncovering the truth about the world. Specifically, accurate reporting about important events and people can still be found in America, as can thoughtful discourse about every issue and problem, but few Americans pay attention to it, largely because they consider it to be too boring. The market has given Americans what they want, and it is trash TV and dumbed-down news programs.
Even newspapers are mimicking aspects of TV news broadcasts. USA Today is the leading example of this transition.
Radio is more resistant to the transition, but it is declining nonetheless. Radio broadcasts increasingly resemble TV programs, in the worst ways.
Chapter 8 – Shuffle off to Bethlehem
Televangelists are the new faces of Christianity in America.
Episodes of the 700 Club are slickly made, entertaining, comforting, and superficially serious in tone.
Televangelist shows always focus on the preacher and his personality. God is never the central figure in the broadcasts, and instead exists in the background. Major religious themes like hallowed rituals and achieving transcendence through religion are absent.
Again, the TV medium forces televangelist shows to have these qualities.
The social and psychological meaning of religion in America has changed since people started watching televangelist broadcasts.
- Traditional, in-person religious services happen in houses of worship, which are quiet, and, in the case of cathedrals, grand places. The central portions of houses of worship are also only ever used for religious ceremonies. As a result, the environments naturally lend themselves to serious and contemplative thinking among visitors. In a church, a person can really immerse himself in prayer and religious thought, and pull himself out of his everyday mindset. [In the modern era of skyscrapers and technological wonders, many of the old cathedrals of Europe are still awe-inspiring. You can appreciate how those same cathedrals would have made peasants feel the grandeur of God in the Middle Ages, when most people lived in terrible conditions and had very little mental stimulation each day. Yes, the form a religious house of worship takes has a major impact on the psychology of its adherents.]
- By contrast, televangelist broadcasts are watched on living room televisions in private homes. The spaces where religious services thus occur are not consecrated, and the viewer does not associate them with anything especially divine or otherworldly. Viewers associate their own TV sets with entertainment and the secular world, which unconsciously affects how they perceive religious shows. It’s nearly impossible to get into the right mindset. [Will full-immersion virtual reality fix this?]
A valuable and authentic religious experience is enchanting, not entertaining.
Chapter 9 – Reach out and elect someone
The TV commercial is now a metaphor for American politics.
Capitalism is an efficient system for allocating resources only if certain conditions exist. One of those conditions is that buyers and sellers are rational, and the other is that they are just as informed as each other about market conditions and the quality of the good or service they are considering exchanging. In reality, these ideal conditions seldom exist.
Modern advertisements, and especially TV commercials, show how reality diverges from theory in ways that encourage capitalist systems to misallocate resources:
- In a rational world, companies would only create ads that contained factual information about the quality of their goods and services, and consumers would coolly study different ads to empirically determine which product among the competing companies best satisfied their needs.
- In the real world, ads contain little or no factual information about the goods or services being offered, and they are instead meticulously designed to prey upon the emotions, insecurities, and psychological weaknesses of consumers. Thanks to ads, consumers are frequently persuaded to spend money on things that don’t satisfy their actual needs well, or at all, and companies offering superior goods and services can go bankrupt if they don’t market themselves the right way.
[As I’ve mentioned before, and plan to discuss at greater length in a future blog post, this inefficiency could shrink and ultimately disappear in the future thanks to better technology. In the very long run, once posthumans and/or AIs take over civilization, the phenomenon of disingenuous marketing will probably vanish since consumers will be too smart and self-controlled to fall for such tricks. Being prey to one’s uncontrollable emotions and not having the cognitive capacity to remember and mentally compare the qualities and prices of different things will turn out to be uniquely Homo sapien problems.]
In modern America, politicians use TV commercials as their primary means of communicating with voters.
By necessity, commercials must be short, and must tell simple stories about things and offer simple solutions to problems. Years of seeing political commercials like these have shaped the expectations of American voters.
To succeed, modern politicians need “image managers,” and they must have personal appeal that comes across clearly on TV. Elections are no longer decided on the basis of which candidate is the better technical fit for the position’s demands; they are decided based on who looks better on TV.
Relevant credentials for holding elected office include:
- Skills as a negotiator
- Past success in an executive position
- Knowledge of international affairs
- Knowledge of economics
Public speaking ability, physical attractiveness, and debating skills don’t have any bearing on a person’s ability to make good policy decisions in a political position. Unfortunately, few American voters grasp this, and they routinely choose candidates based on those kinds of unimportant traits. The TV medium makes voters aware of those traits.
Commercials have primed Americans to vote for politicians that have the best TV personas.
Americans don’t vote in their own rational self-interests anymore; they vote for politicians who have the best TV images. The term “image politics” describes the phenomenon.
In the past, when America was a print culture, few people saw images of national politicians. They had no clue what different candidates looked like, and had to make voting decisions based on things they read in newspapers and pamphlets, and through discussions with their peers. A candidate’s “image” was not a factor.
Because TV culture is image-based, the medium has the immediacy and decontextualized qualities of photography. In infuses a mindset among its viewers that there is only a present moment, and that the past does not exist. This is partly why Americans know so little about history.
Even in Ancient Greece, a place associated with wisdom and intellectualism, government censorship of books was common (Protagoras).
George Orwell’s prediction that Western governments would eventually resort to book censorship as a way to control their citizens proved wrong. Instead, the same end has been achieved through the creation of fickle cultures in which people don’t want to read books. Huxley’s dystopia proved accurate.
In the U.S., TV censorship is done by the three big corporate media networks, not the government. This is also not what Orwell predicted. [But as internet culture shows, atomizing the media landscape and effectively eliminating the small clique of corporate gatekeepers brings a different set of problems. Now, nothing is censored, and anyone in America can look at whatever he wants. This has led to people self-segregating into highly specific demographics with their own realities and belief systems. It has also worsened the “information overload” problem, and made it harder for people to tell which information is reliable and which is not. ]
TV programs have muscled out books in the competition for Americans’ spare time.
Thanks to TV, Americans can’t tell the difference between entertainment and serious discourse anymore.
Chapter 10 – Teaching as an amusing activity
Sesame Street is a popular show for young children that is both entertaining and educational.
The author is skeptical of claims that any type of TV program can be very educational. Again, this owes to fundamental aspects of TV as a medium. TV watching is a passive, solitary activity, whereas effective classroom instruction is an interactive and social one.
Sesame Street encourages viewers to love TV, not school. In habituating children to TV watching, it and other “educational” programs encourage mindsets and skills that are unlike those they need to excel in the classroom.
TV is the first medium to merge teaching with entertainment. [Is the internet the second?] Learning is not supposed to be pleasurable.
Three commandments of educational TV content:
- “Thou shalt have no prerequisites.” A program can’t require the viewer to have previous knowledge, and it must stand alone as a complete package. The process of learning must not be depicted as a sequential one, where learning one thing establishes a foundation for one or more new things.
- “Thou shalt induce no perplexity.” All information that the program presents must be simple enough for anyone to understand. This does an injustice, since many concepts are not easy to grasp, and must be thought about again and again until the learner understands them.
- “Thou shalt avoid exposition like the ten plagues visited upon Egypt.” All content must be presented as a story, with everything depicted visually. The viewer should never have to read a dense passage of text on the screen or see an intellectual talking at length using complex language.
Classroom instruction is taking on more aspects of entertainment. “The Voyage of the Mimi” epitomizes everything about this trend. It is a 26-episode educational TV series focusing on lessons in science and math. A package of materials includes all the videos, along with worksheets and tests that teachers use in the classroom to accompany the footage.
[Embracing the opposite extreme, which would be an overly serious and intense teaching style where no effort was made to make lessons fun, would also create problems since many students wouldn’t mentally engage. Formal classroom settings are very artificial environments and are especially unnatural for children: For 99% of our species’ existence, there were no classrooms, and children learned things informally and each day from older children and adults, who interacted with them in informal settings or during work. ]
The effectiveness of that series and others like it is dubious. Studies show that students quickly forget almost all the new information they are exposed to in video lessons.
Similarly, people quickly forget most of what they see on TV news broadcasts. However, they remember more information if they read a newspaper. The act of reading is a better way to learn something than watching a video.
As a medium, TV is suited for entertainment, not learning.
[I think the author overreacted to the first intrusions of TV into mass education in the 1980s, possibly because he assumed the trend would continue as time passed, until someday, students only watched TV programs at school. Fortunately, that didn’t come to pass, and classroom instruction is still mostly traditional and didactic, involving a teacher standing at the front of the room where he talks and writes things on a blackboard or big screen.]
Chapter 11 – The Huxleyan warning
We are now living in a Huxleyan dystopia: People voluntarily occupy themselves with entertainment and trivialities. Politics are no longer serious.
If the situation worsens, America could experience “culture-death.”
The Orwellian dystopia is no longer a threat to the world. [It’s too early to say this. As China shows, new technologies have renewed the threat and effectiveness of government-directed mass surveillance and mass control. We could be headed for a future where it is technologically possible to monitor every human in real time, and to even infer what they are thinking and feeling.]
Americans live in an invisible, insidious prison.
America’s Huxleyan dystopia is hard to fight since no one has forcefully imposed it on us, it is not centrally planned, and it lacks a written doctrine like Mein Kampf. It is everywhere and nowhere.
As a technology, TV is destroying American culture. This is hard for Americans to see and to accept, since they have a uniquely strong faith in technology and progress. Convincing them that a technology is hurting them is a major challenge.
[Since the 1980s, Americans’ opinions of technology and progress have become schizophrenic. In the 2020s, there is widespread agreement that social media and biased TV news networks have damaged American culture and discourse, that smartphones and cleverly designed apps have made people addicted to their personal devices, and that civilizational progress has already halted or soon will, leading to a long decline of living standards and order. The preoccupation with global warming doomsday scenarios and the proliferation of post-apocalyptic future movies partly speak to the latter point. At the same time, Americans are unwilling to do much to address these problems, and very few of them are taking any personal measures to prepare for the doomsday futures they say they believe are coming.]
The author’s suggestions for fighting against TV culture:
- Don’t try banning TV. It’s too popular, so there’s no hope of success, and proposing such a thing will only alienate people.
- Start a cultural movement in which people take long breaks from TV watching. [Reminds me of today’s phenomena of “digital detoxing” and “social media breaks.”]
- Ban political commercials.
- Spread awareness of this book’s main points, including the fact that different types of media have different effects on culture and mindsets.
- Ironically, an effective way to make people aware of the toxic effects of TV and of the stupidity of TV programming would be to air comedy skits on TV that mocked TV and showed how the programs stupefied their viewers. Use TV to lampoon TV.
- Better public education.
The author’s passing analysis of personal computers as a medium:
‘For no medium is excessively dangerous if its users understand what its dangers are...To which I might add that questions about the psychic, political and social effects of information are as applicable to the computer as to television. Although I believe the computer to be a vastly overrated technology, I mention it here because, clearly, Americans have accorded it their customary mindless inattention; which means they will use it as they are told, without a whimper. Thus, a central thesis of computer technology–that the principal difficulty we have in solving problems stems from insufficient data–will go unexamined. Until, years from now, when it will be noticed that the massive collection and speed-of-light retrieval of data have been of great value to large-scale organizations but have solved very little of importance to most people and have created at least as many problems for them as they may have solved. ‘
[The analysis is both very wrong and very right. Personal computing devices have transformed society, the economy, and our daily habits so much since the 1980s that it’s hard to defend a claim that they have proved “to be a vastly overrated technology.” However, the author rightly predicted that computing devices paired with the internet would, like TV, inundate people with large amounts of irrelevant, decontextualized information. In fact, the problem has gotten worse since the amount of internet content available now is exponentially larger than the amount of TV content that was available in the 1980s. In the internet era, American politics have gotten more dysfunctional and childish, and elections are decided for more fickle reasons than in the 1980s. Today, Americans actually look back on the 1980s as a calmer and more hopeful era when people had better social skills. Ronald Reagan, whom the author bashes as being a superficial and dishonest man who cleverly exploited the TV medium to become President and hide his later mistakes, was much more intellectual, dignified and well-spoken than Donald Trump, who exploited social media (Twitter, specifically) to become President and to control the national political narrative during his term of office.
It’s certainly true that more data about a problem helps you to formulate a good solution to it, and that personal computing devices and the internet can be used to gather data about problems. However, the medium’s flaw is that bad data is mixed in with good data, it can be very hard for people to tell them apart, and human psychology naturally leads people to latch on to data that are psychologically or emotionally comforting to them. There’s no correlation between how comforting a belief is and how true it is.
The author’s point that the computer / internet era would enrich large organizations that found ways to leverage information technology to make money was very accurate. As of this writing, six of the top ten global companies with the highest market caps are technology companies that use customer data collection and analysis to make most or all of their money.
The author’s final prediction that computers will end up creating at least as many problems for ordinary people as they solve is debatable. Certainly, computing devices and the internet have created a variety of problems and worsened problems that existed during the TV culture era of the 1980s, but the new paradigm has also benefitted people in many important ways. For example, it has made commerce easier and more efficient since customers now have access to a much larger array of goods and services, which they can purchase by pushing a button, without having to leave home. It’s debatable whether computers an the internet have, on balance, not improved the lives of ordinary people.]
