I recently read Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death. A few parts caught my attention:
As Father John Culkin of Fordham University likes to say, a lot of things have happened in this century and most of them plug into walls. To get some perspective on the electronic plug, imagine that your home and all the other homes and buildings in your neighborhood have been cordoned off, and from them will be removed all the electric and electronic inventions that have appeared in the last 50 years. The media will be substracted in reverse order, with the most recent going first. The first thing to leave your house, then, is the television set-and everybody will stand there as if they are attending the funeral of a friend, wondering, “What are we going to do tonight?”
Neil Postman
After rearranging the funiture so that it is no longer aimed at a blank space in the room, you suggest going to the movies. But there won’t be any. Nor will there be LP records, tapes, radio, telephone, or tele-graph. If you are thinking that the absence of the media would only affect your entertainment and information, remember that, at some point, your electric lights would be removed, and your refrigerator, and your heating system, and your air conditioner. In short, you would have to be a totally different person from what you are in order to survive for more than a day. The chances are slim that you could modity yourself and your patterns of living and believing fast enough to save yourself. As you were expiring, you would at least know something about how it was before the electric plug. Or perhaps you wouldn’t.
In any case, if you had energy and interest enough to hear him, any good ecologist could inform you of the logic of your problem: a change in an environment is rarely only additive or linear. You seldom, if ever, have an old environment plus a new element, such as a printing press or an electric plug. What you have is a totally new environment requiring a whole new repertoire of survival strategies. In no case is this more certain than when the new elements are tech-nological. Then, in no case will the new environment be more radically different from the old than in political and social forms of life. When you plug something into a wall, someone is getting plugged into you. Which means you need new patterns of defense, perception, understanding, evaluation. You need a new kind of education. It was George Counts who observed that technology repealed the Bill of Rights. In the eighteenth century, a pamphlet could influence an entire nation. Today all the ideas of the Noam Chomskys, Paul Goodmans, Edgar Friedenbergs, I. F. Stones, and even the William Buckleys, cannot command as much attention as a 30-minute broadcast by Walter Cronkite.
Unless, of course, one of them were given a prime-time network program, in which case he would most likely come out more like Walter Cronkite than himself. Even Marshall McLuhan, who is leading the field in understanding media, is having his ideas transformed and truncated by the forms of the media to fit present media functions. (One requirement, for example, is that an idea or a man must be “sensational” in order to get a hearing; thus, McLuhan comes out not as a scholar studying media but as the “Apostle of the Electronic Age.”) We trust it is clear that we are not making the typical, whimpering academic attack on the media. We are not “against” the media. Any more, incidentally, than McLuhan is “for” the media. You cannot reverse technological change.
I’m curious what he’d think today, because he goes on to say:
Things that plug in are here to stay. But you can study media, with a view toward discovering what they are doing to you. As McLuhan has said, there is no inevitability so long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening. Very few of us have contemplated more rigorously what is happening through media change than Jacques Ellul, who has sounded some chilling alarms. Without mass media, Ellul insists, there can be no effective propaganda. With them, there is almost nothing but. “Only through concentration of a large number of media in a few hands can one attain a true orches-tration, a continuity, and an application of scientific methods of influencing individuals.” That such concentration is occurring daily, Ellul says, is an established fact, and its results may well be an almost total homogenization of thought among those the media reach. We cannot afford to ignore Norbert Wiener’s observation of a paradox that results from our increasing technological capability in electronic communication: as the number of messages increases, the amount of information carried decreases. We have more media to communicate fewer significant ideas.
Still another way of saying this is that, while there has been a tremendous increase in media, there has been, at the same time, a decrease in available and viable “democratic” channels of communication because the mass media are entirely one-way communication. For example, as a means of affecting public policy, the town meeting is dead. Significant community action (without violence) is increasingly rare. A small printing press in one’s home, as an instrument of social change, is absurd. Traditional forms of dissent and protest seem imprac-tical, e.g., letters to the editor, street-corner speeches, etc. No one can reach many people unless he has access to the mass media.
The Internet is that mass-media mechanism that allows people to carry on in a debate. Thing is, no one seems to use it for that. Or read what others are thinking. We still have the same smattering of columnists going on and shaping the discourse just like the 60s, 70s, and 80s when Postman originally wrote Amusing.
