Amusing Ourselves to Death - Neil Postman Flashcards
Introduction
Postman distinguishes the Orwellian vision of the future, in which totalitarian governments seize individual rights, from that offered by Aldous Huxley in Brave New World, where people medicate themselves into bliss, thereby voluntarily sacrificing their rights.
Drawing an analogy with the latter scenario, Postman sees television’s entertainment value as a present-day “soma”, the fictitious pleasure drug in Brave New World.
The essential premise of the book is that a particular medium can only sustain a particular level of ideas. Thus rational argument, integral to print typography, is militated against by the medium of television for this reason.
Owing to this shortcoming, politics and religion are diluted, and “news of the day” becomes a packaged commodity.
Television de-emphasises the quality of information in favour of satisfying the far-reaching needs of entertainment, to which it is subordinate.
Because commercial television is programmed according to ratings, its content is determined by commercial feasibility, not critical acumen. Television in its present state, he says, does not satisfy the conditions for honest intellectual involvement and rational argument.
He repeatedly states that in the eighteenth century, the “Age of Reason”, was the pinnacle for rational argument.
Only in the printed word, he states, could complicated truths be rationally conveyed.
Postman gives a striking example: many of the first fifteen U.S. presidents could probably have walked down the street without being recognized by the average citizen, yet all these men would have been quickly known by their written words. However, the reverse is true today.
“In a word, they failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.” Huxley - Brave New World Revisited
This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right.
Artifice - clever trick / cunning device
American businessman discovered, long before the rest of us, that the quality and usefulness of their goods are subordinate to the artifice of their display.
‘Descent into a vast triviality’
Television gives us a conversation in images, not words. Television demands a different kind of content form other media.
The cleverest way to see through a culture is to attend to its tools for conversation.
Each medium, like language itself, makes possible a unique mode of discourse by providing a new orientation for thought, for expression, for sensibility.
Media as Epistemology
Epistemology = the theory of knowledge, especially with regard to its methods, validity, and scope, and the distinction between justified belief and opinion
I believe the epistemology created by television not only is inferior to a print-based epistemology but is dangerous and absurdist.
The definitions of truth are derived, at least in part, from the character of the media of communication through which information is conveyed. The media is always implicated in the ways we define and regulate truth.
For the Sophists of 5th century BC Greece and their heirs, rhetoric was not merely an opportunity for dramatic performance but a near indispensable means of organising evidence and proofs, and therefore of communicating truth. It was a form of spoken writing.
To disdain rhetorical rules, to speak one’s thoughts in a random manner, without proper emphasis or appropriate passion, was considered demeaning to the audience’s intelligence and suggestive of falsehood.
“To acquire immunity to eloquence is of the utmost importance to the citizens of a democracy” - Bertrand Russell
Typographic America
No literary aristocracy emerged in Colonial America. Reading was not regarded as an elitist activity.
Thomas Paine (from the lowest labouring class) is a measure of the high and wide level of literacy that existed in his time.
Paine wrote political philosophy and polemics the equal in lucidity and vitality (although not quantity) of Voltaire’s and Rousseau’s.
It was never doubted that such powers of written expression could originate from a common man.
Common Sense was a pamphlet written by Thomas Paine in 1775–1776 advocating independence from Great Britain to people in the Thirteen Colonies. Writing in clear and persuasive prose, Paine marshaled moral and political arguments to encourage common people in the Colonies to fight for egalitarian government. It was published anonymously on January 10, 1776, at the beginning of the American Revolution, and became an immediate sensation.
The Typographic Mind
Words have very little to recommend them except as carriers of meaning.
Almost every scholar who has grappled with the question of what reading does to one’s habit of mind has concluded that the process encourages rationality and fosters the ‘analytic management of knowledge’.
To engage the written word requires considerable powers of classifying, inference making and reasoning. It means to uncover lies, confusions, and overgeneralisation, to detect abuses of logic and common sense.
In a culture dominated by print, public discourse tends to be characterised by a coherent, orderly arrangement of facts and ideas.
In the 18th and 19th centuries, print put forward a definition of intelligence that gave priority to the objective, rational use of the mind and at the same time encouraged forms of public discourse with serious, logically ordered content. It is no accident that the Age of Reason was coexistent with the growth of a print culture, first in Europe and then in America.
One must keep in mind that the act of reading in the 18th and 19th centuries had an entirely different quality to it than the act of reading does today. The printed word had a monopoly on both attention and intellect. To think about a US President was to think about what he had written.
Thinking of Trump today, this is the difference between thinking in a word-centred culture and thinking in an image-centred culture.
Almost all of the characteristics we associate with mature discourse were amplified by typography, which has the strongest bias toward exposition: a sophisticated ability to think conceptually, deductively and sequentially; a high valuation of reason and order; an abhorrence of contradiction; a large capacity for detachment and objectivity; and a tolerance for delayed response.
The Peek-a-Boo World
Most of our daily news is inert, consisting of information that gives us something to talk about but cannot lead to any meaningful action. The legacy of the telegraphic thus: by generating an abundance of irrelevant information, it dramatically altered what may be called the “information-action” ratio. It also brought into being a world of broken time and broken attention.
A book is an attempt to make thought permanent and to contribute to the great conversation conducted by authors of the past. The telegraph was only suited to the flashing of messages. Fascination is offered in place of complexity and coherence.
To the telegraph, intelligence meant knowing of lots of things, not knowing about them.
The phrase “serious television” is a contradiction in terms; television speaks in only one persistent voice - the voice of entertainment.
The Age of Show Business
Like the brain itself, every technology has an inherent bias. It has within its physical form a predisposition toward being used in certain ways and not others.
Only those who know nothing of the history of technology believe that a technology is entirely neutral.
What I am claiming here is not that television is entertaining but that it has made entertainment itself the natural format for the representation of all experience.
A news show, to put it plainly, is a format for entertainment, not for education, reflection or catharsis. Thinking does not play well on television, a fact that television directors discovered long ago.
Sustained, complex talk does not play well on television.
Now…This
“Now…This” serves as a compact metaphor for the discontinuities in so much that passes for public discourse in present-day America.
On television, nearly every 30 minutes is a discrete event.
Television produces a new definition of truth: the credibility of the teller is the ultimate test of the truth of a proposition.
The idea for television news is to “keep everything brief, not to strain the attention of anyone but instead to provide constant stimulation through variety, novelty, action and movement”
The assumptions controlling a news show are “that bite-sized is best, that complexity must be avoided, that nuances are dispensable, that qualifications impede the simple message, that visual stimulation is a substitute for thought, and that verbal precision is an anachronism.”
The result of all of this is that Americans are the best entertained and quite likely the least well-informed people in the Western world.
“There can be no liberty for a community which lacks the means by which to detect lies”.
The public has adjusted to incoherence and been amused into indifference.
Huxley grasped, as Orwell did not, that it is not necessary to conceal anything from a public insensible to contradiction and narcoticised by technological diversions.
“Television is the soma of Brave New World”
Reach Out and Elect Someone
The TV commercial is about the identity of the consumer, not the product.
TV commercials tell us everything about the fears, fancies and dreams of those who might buy them.
What the advertiser needs to know is not what is right about the product but what is wrong about the buyer. The balance of business expenditure shifts from product research to market research.
Orwell thought of Newspeak as originating, in part, from the “verbiage of commercial advertising”.
History is only of value to someone who takes seriously the notion that there are patterns in the past which may provide the present with nourishing traditions.
“We Americans seem to know everything about the last 24 hours but but very little of the last 60 centuries or the last 60 years.”
Liberation cannot be accomplished by turning television off. Television is for most people the most attractive thing going on any time of the day or night. Television does not ban books; it simply displaces them.
Tyrants of all varieties have always know the about the value of providing the masses with amusements as a means of pacifying discontent.
The Huxleyan Warning
There are two ways by which the spirit of a culture may be shrivelled. In the first - the Orwellian - culture becomes a prison. In the second - the Huxleyan culture becomes a burlesque.
When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, then culture-death is a clear possibility.
An Orwellian world is much easier to recognise and to oppose than a Huxleyan.
Television serves us most usefully when presenting junk entertainment.
Huxley wrote continuously about the necessity of our understanding the politics and epistemology of media.
