4GY-arr -- WE RISE!

Friday, August 15, 2008
11:32 PM

The Present

We’re now facing an important choice point in our individual and collective lives. Most of us may take the “default” choice without ever realizing we’re making a decision. The option is whether we will be creatures of or living in our environment. The first is default, requiring no thinking. The second demands waking up and actively thinking.

Society

The late professor Neil Postman of New York University devoted considerable study to the effects of electronic media on culture and the mental capabilities; he asserted that the rise in popularity of television coincided with a decline in rational thinking, and consciousness of society.

Postman traced three phases in the development of what he called “culture’s conversation with itself”.

Phase one was an oral phase, people shared knowledge, ideas, and their history through discussion and story-telling.

Phase two, the rise of literate communication through the printed word, peaking during the nineteenth century.

Phase three began the inexorable transition to a pervasive “culture of amusement”, with the arrival of televisual entertainment.

Media

Postman contended that while print media as long served as a robust platform for the reasoned exchange of ideas, the televisual media – notably commercial TV – have proven themselves poorly suited for explaining complex concepts and for managing conversations about them.

Marshall McLuhan offered the familiar “The medium is the message”, Postman seconded his views with the idea “The medium is the metaphor”, seconding McLuhan’s views with the idea that every medium limits, controls, and distorts the information we try to push through it.

Just as a metaphor is a figure of speech that recodes a complex, abstract idea into a familiar concrete example, so television recodes complex information into its own unique and simplified way of presenting it.

Information

To quote the professor: Television is altering the meaning of "being informed" by creating a species of information that might properly be called disinformation. Disinformation does not mean false information.

It means misleading information - misplaced, irrelevant, fragmented or superficial information - information that creates the illusion of knowing something, but which in fact leads one away from knowing

The experience of watching television involves the passive acceptance of a steady flow of disconnected entertainment units – audiovisual packets condensed, simplified, and sweetened to fit the short attention-span limitations of the medium.

Content

Since the economic structure of the industry requires content be selected for commercial potential, intense competition for viewers has forced media producers to fight for attention by pandering ever more aggressively to a jaded public, with increasingly sexualized, violent, lurid and voyeuristic material.

More and more social commentators blame the pervasive media-based culture of amusement for coarsening of public taste, destruction of childhood innocence, commercial exploitation of children by cynical marketing methods, polarization of political discourse with mean-spirited, narrow-minded and antagonistic personal attacks exchanged by warring ideological camps.

Childhood

Television too could mean the rapid disappearance of childhood.

Previously adults revealed the secrets of adult life—secrets being the social, political, and sexual secrets that adults know but that are not considered appropriate for children to know—to the young in stages and in psychologically assimilable ways.

Now, television reveals all these secrets all at once, simultaneously to everyone in the culture, so that it becomes impossible to control the socialization of the young.

Slowly, the whole period that we call childhood becomes less distinct than it once was. For example, there was a time not so long ago, when alcoholism was strictly an adult affliction. There really were no child alcoholics, crime and sexual diseases. Now figures show that it is quite common.

Parents are not acting as the counter environment for the dominant media for the only living messages the generation sends to a future it would not see.

Brain Dead

As the least interactive of televisual modes of information, television diverts thre most mental energy from active cognition – for hours at a time. This “chewing gum of the mind”, according to the professor, is doomed to the status of a court jester, capable only for distracting and amusing us.

Scientific research has demonstrated clearly that the experience of watching television for more than two to three minutes induces a trance-like state nearly indistinguishable from hypnosis. Advertising messages, in this sense, are post-hypnotic suggestion and embedded directives.

In fact, Postman asked: Could television be making us a dumber society? Doesn’t it seem that our mental faculties such as critical thinking, comparative thinking, curiousity, imagination, judgment, logic also atrophy with disuse?

Trends

Increasingly, people are being used by technology, setting culture on a self-destructive path by changing definitions of family, privacy, intelligence, privacy, piety to suit it.

Education no longer teaches the sophistication and knowledge about technology that people need.

In the case of computer technology, there can be no disputing that the computer has increased the power of large-scale organizations like military establishments or airline companies or banks or tax collecting agencies.

And it is equally clear that the computer is now indispensable to high-level researchers in physics and other natural sciences.

But to what extent has computer technology been an advantage to the masses of people?

Winners and Losers

To steel workers, vegetable store owners, teachers, automobile mechanics, musicians, bakers, brick layers, dentists and most of the rest into whose lives the computer now intrudes?

These people have had their private matters made more accessible to powerful institutions. They are more easily tracked and controlled; they are subjected to more examinations, and are increasingly mystified by the decisions made about them. They are more often reduced to mere numerical objects.

They are being buried by junk mail. They are easy targets for advertising agencies and political organizations. The schools teach their children to operate computerized systems instead of teaching things that are more valuable to children.

In a word, almost nothing happens to the losers that they need, which is why they are losers.

It is to be expected that the winners will encourage the losers to be enthusiastic about computer technology.

That is the way of winners, and so they sometimes tell the losers that with personal computers the average person can balance a checkbook more neatly, keep better track of recipes, and make more logical shopping lists. They also tell them that they can vote at home, shop at home, get all the information they wish at home, and thus make community life unnecessary.

They tell them that their lives will be conducted more efficiently, discreetly neglecting to say from whose point of view or what might be the costs of such efficiency.

Should the losers grow skeptical, the winners dazzle them with the wondrous feats of computers, many of which have only marginal relevance to the quality of the losers' lives but which are nonetheless impressive.

Eventually, the losers succumb, in part because they believe that the specialized knowledge of the masters of a computer technology is a form of wisdom. The masters, of course, come to believe this as well. The result is that certain questions do not arise, such as, to whom will the computer give greater power and freedom, and whose power and freedom will be reduced?

The Deal

Postman asserts that anyone who has studied the history of technology knows that technological change is always a Faustian bargain: Technology giveth and technology taketh away, and not always in equal measure. A new technology sometimes creates more than it destroys. Sometimes, it destroys more than it creates. But it is never one-sided.

Quantity is not Quality

He declares: The tie between information and action has been severed. Information is now a commodity that can be bought and sold, or used as a form of entertainment, or worn like a garment to enhance one's status. It comes indiscriminately, directed at no one in particular, disconnected from usefulness; we are glutted with information, drowning in information, have no control over it, don't know what to do with it.

And there are two reasons we do not know what to do with it.

First, as I have said, we no longer have a coherent conception of ourselves, and our universe, and our relation to one another and our world. We no longer know, as the Middle Ages did, where we come from, and where we are going, or why. That is, we don't know what information is relevant, and what information is irrelevant to our lives.

Second, we have directed all of our energies and intelligence to inventing machinery that does nothing but increase the supply of information.

As a consequence, our defenses against information glut have broken down; our information immune system is inoperable. We don't know how to filter it out; we don't know how to reduce it; we don't know to use it. We suffer from a kind of cultural AIDS.

Culture

Noted historian David McCullough worries about “cultural amnesia”, the loss of a sense of shared history and culture by a people more entranced by provocative images before their eyes. More people devote their discretionary time and attention to synthetic reality rather than active thought, that comes with reading and discussion.

The shifting of the news business towards an entertainment model of design and production is virtually complete, with sheer competition forcing our media fixes to pander to our primitive fears and appetites. Allen Ginsberg, beat poet of the 1960s, remarked, “Whoever controls the images - the media - controls the culture.”

The web page, which may turn out as one of the most important inventions of modern time, is both a televisual and text-based medium.

Although people of all intellectual stripes can find the information suiting themselves, the downside of this migration of intellectual activity may exaggerate the impact of the culture of amusement, reinforcing a new polarization of society.

Solution

David Cullough declared, “Information isn’t learning, if information were learning, you could become educated by memorizing the World Almanac. Were you to memorize the World Almanac, you wouldn’t be educated. You’d be weird. I rise on this beautiful morning to sing again the old faith in books, reading for life, all your life.

Story

Once upon a time in the dead of winter in Dakota Territory, with the temperature well below zero, young Theodore Roosevelt took off in a makeshift boat, accompanied by two of his ranch hands, down-stream on the Little Missouri River in chase of a couple of thieves who had stolen his prize rowboat.

After days on the river, he caught up and got on the draw on them with his trusty Winchester, at which point they surrendered. Then, after finding a man with a team and a wagon, Roosevelt set off again to haul the thieves cross-country to justice.

He left the ranch hands behind to tend to the boat, and walked alone behind the wagon, his rifle at the ready. They were headed across the snow-covered wastes of the Bad Lands to the rail head at Dickinson, and Roosevelt walked the whole way, forty miles.

It was an astonishing feat, what might be called a defining moment in that eventful life. But what makes it especially memorable is that during that time, he managed to read all of Anna Karenina.

I often think of that when I hear people say they haven’t time to read.”

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