This is the second installation of a three-part series originally published on reddit.
Part 1: Postman's Past: Boston and Typographic Culture
Part 3: Postman's Future: Silicon Valley and Internet Culture
This section is written in the present tense, but it is concerned with Postman's present, not ours. I've maintained it as-is because it strikes me as vital to understand what has stayed the same and what has continued to shift. "What has continued to shift" will, of course, be the question attacked in part 3.
Before laying out his case against television culture, Postman lays out a few caveats: First, that changes in media do not need to alter our mental structure or cognitive capacity for his argument to hold, only that they encourage distinct uses of intellect, favor distinct definitions of wisdom, and enable distinct kinds of content. He does not care to claim that TV makes people stupider, to put it bluntly. Second, that the change he is concerned with is a gradual one, with old epistemologies existing alongside new. Third, that he is concerned primarily with the public discourse. The book is not a screed against "rubbish programs, "theater for the masses" and pure entertainment, none of which he minds. Rather, he is focused distinctly on serious television. It is that for which he reserves his scorn (p.27)
1.
"We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.... We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the old world some weeks nearer to the new; but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad flapping American ear will be that Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough." -Henry David Thoreau, Walden (p.65)
Postman doesn't reserve his ire for television and television alone. First, as any good postman would, he sharply criticizes the telegraph, herald of what he calls "the Peek-a-Boo World", which "not only permit[s] but insist[s] upon a conversation between Maine and Texas. The true shift of the telegraph, he remarks, is the legitimacy it (alongside penny newspapers, which had a head start but, he grants, were at least local) granted to context-free information: information tied not to locality, decision-making, or action, but mere curiosity. Gone, he says, was the central position granted to the local and the timeless. Ushered in was the sea of information, from nowhere and to nowhere: the dreaded "news of the day."
How often, Postman asks in a time when people still cared for the morning news, does that news alter your daily plans, take actions you would otherwise not have, or provide new insight for your daily problems? We've had a spate of it recently between COVID-19 and the protests, an uncommonly active period, but most daily news, Postman points out, is inert: interesting for conversation, irrelevant for action. Only three more months of news before you spend a few minutes to cast a ballot. The "information-action ratio" in life shifted dramatically with the advent of the telegraph, and has never gone back. (p.68)
The other key shift he addresses is one to a world of "broken time and broken attention": Where a book is ideal for accumulation and organization of a unified set of ideas, telegraphs and their successors are fragmentary, impermanent, and lacking all continuity. Pay attention for a moment, then flit away and on to the next. Why did the crossword puzzle rise when it did? How better to answer the question of what to do with all the disconnected facts brought by the telegraph and accompanying photos?
The telegraph and its successors, Postman claims, struck blows against typographic culture, began to introduce the peek-a-boo world he dreads, self-contained, endlessly entertaining, asking nothing from us. But the world they called into existence, that of endless disconnected distractions, took until the advent of television to work its way to the heart of culture. Television, Postman contends, speaks first and foremost in the voice of entertainment, "transforming our culture into one vast arena for show business." (p.80)
Will we like it, he asks? Oh, very likely the transformation will be delightful. Just as Huxley envisioned.
2.
What, then, is the epistemology of television? Postman remarks that in his time, it had faded into perfect normalcy, part of the unquestioned background machinery of the world. He spends some time exploring quixotic uses of the television, perhaps as a light source or bookshelf, that could serve as supports for the literary tradition. "Rear-view mirror" thinking, in Marshall McLuhan's terms, the same sort that says a car is only a fast horse. But each technology carries an agenda of its own, distinct from those of the past, with inherent biases. The printing press could have been used exclusively for pictures, but had a bias towards language. And television? Entertainment. Pure entertainment.
Postman points to the news as an example, where beautiful and amiable newscasters flash scenes of "murder and mayhem" in between banter, commercials, and upbeat opening music. The signals are not ones of seriousness or education. Instead, even grim footage becomes part of an attention-grabbing milieu that, at the end, cheerfully invites you to tune in tomorrow. (p.88) More specifically, he hones in on an eighty-minute discussion on ABC, chosen as a pinnacle of "serious" television: A gathering of Henry Kissinger, Robert McNamara, Carl Sagan, and more, to discuss the possibility of global nuclear war. What did the discussion look like?
Each man had some five minutes to speak. Most focused on their own positions, with minimal attention to the others: Kissinger reminding of books he had written and negotiations he had conducted, McNamara mentioning his own arms reduction proposals, Sagan providing a measured argument in the center, but one with assumptions there was no time to examine, as the host pushed the "show" forward step by step. "I don't know" doesn't play well on TV, nor does the act of thinking or hesitance as a whole. It's a performing art. So each played their expected role, and at the end, the audience applauded, and Culture was achieved.
Given the context of the Lincoln-Douglas debates, it's no surprise he raises the 1984 presidential debate as well. Each candidate got five minutes to answer questions before facing a one-minute rebuttal. The tone, he says, was that of a boxing match: Who KO'd who? Who got off the best one-liner? Who put on the best show? Was the performance a success?
Postman pauses to note a few programs that buck the trend towards casualness, ones like "Meet the Press" or "The Open Mind" that aim for "intellectual decorum"... and are then carefully scheduled far away from flashy entertainment, since otherwise they simply will not be watched. Things other than sheer entertainment can fit on TV. But they are not its native forms, and the medium by its nature pushes against them.
3.
"Now... this."
Postman is fond of order, of meaning, of cohesion. As such, the words "Now... this" terrify him. What do they signify? A separation of everything from everything else. A woman was murdered. Now... this! An earthquake in Indonesia. Now... this! Consider these cute puppies. Now... this! Time for a toothpaste commercial. As he puts it, "the newscaster means that you have thought long enough on the previous matter (approximately forty-five seconds), that you must not be morbidly preoccupied with it, and that you must now give your attention to another fragment of news or a commercial.
The sensory intensity, Postman suggests, is part of the problem. Music is used to create a mood and provide a leitmotif. Pictures, he says, overwhelm words and short-circuit introspection, and events with clear visual documentation, as they are more fascinating than those without, gain center stage. Newscasters play a poised role: "marginally serious but staying well clear of authentic understanding" (p.104). The ever-present rhythm of commercials undercuts the seriousness of whichever messages come before.
Video Speed Controller is perhaps the best add-on I've ever taken the time to download, letting me steadily push my video content faster and faster on any webpage. The webcomic Schlock Mercenary finished recently after twenty years of daily, typically excellent, updates without a single late upload. If you're looking around a podcast to listen to, consider 99% Invisible, which does a brilliant job breaking down the hidden beauty of everyday objects.
Where was I? Ah, yes. Postman asks us to imagine how strange it would be if he paused in the middle of his book to talk about United Airlines or the Chase Manhattan Bank a few times each chapter, how it would make the whole enterprise seem unworthy of our attention. Some media (books, film) we expect to maintain a consistency of tone, a continuity of content. But the bizarre juxtapositions on television are part-and-parcel of the experience, again encouraging unseriousness and distraction.
Part of this is the preponderance of opinions without real information. Postman points out that the Iranian Hostage Crisis received more focus from television than almost any other. Surely, he says, Americans would know everything there is to know about it. So: How many know what language Iranians speak? The meaning or implication of the word "Ayatollah"? Any details of Iranian religious beliefs? A rough shape of their political history? Who the Shah was, where he came from? (p.107)
No? Isn't that odd, though, to have heard all about something without knowing the first thing about it? Disinformation, Postman says, all of it. Not false information. Misleading information. "Misplaced, irrelevant, fragmented, superficial." The illusion of knowledge with no backing substance. And then pollsters swoop along, collecting the opinions of the day, and cycling them back into the next story.
For one more example, he points to a 1985 New York Times article: "Reagan Misstatements Getting Less Attention". Some older than me might remember Reagan's mental decline in office, mangling statements or missing facts as he aged. The article points out that for a time, those got attention, but soon enough they became old news, just part of the backing fabric of how things are, and as the public lost interest the coverage drifted away. What is not amusing, not entertaining, becomes irrelevant.
The key here, Postman points out, is not necessarily television itself but the way it shapes everything else in its image. It is the paradigmatic medium of the time, defining the form for the rest, encouraging a shift further towards the same decontextualization and entertainment focus elsewhere. USA Today, full of bright colors and short stories, the third largest daily in the US. From the Editor-in-Chief, a few words: "We are not up to undertaking projects of the dimensions needed to win prizes. They don't get awards for the best investigative paragraph." (p.112)
Ever prophetic, Postman quips:
Mr. Quinn need not fret too long about being deprived of awards. As other newspapers join in the transformation, the time cannot be far off when awards will be given for the best investigative sentence.
Seems unlikely to me, but you never know.
4.
I almost feel like it would be trite to go into Postman's description of the ways television, and political ads in particular, shape political discourse. He points out that ads, in moving beyond propositions to images and emotions, moved beyond the sphere of truth. You can like or dislike a McDonald's ad. You cannot refute it. (p.128) He laments a campaign in which a thoroughly informed politician carefully articulated all his stances, drawing on all relevant facts, which his opponent relied on vague ads presenting image and image alone, and won, naturally, in a landslide. He laments the ways politicians need to become celebrities, in which "those who would be gods refashion themselves into images the viewers would have them be" (p.135), a refusal to remember.
He then goes into a description of the way we prepared to oppose censorship, crying out against all bannings of books from school curricula, and so got blindsided instead by a glut of distractions. "Television does not ban books," he adds, "it simply displaces them." (p.141) Censorship, he posits, is only necessary when tyrants must assume the public knows, or cares, about a difference between serious discourse and entertainment. Why censor, when all discourse is a jest?
I could linger on that, yes. But it commits the great sin of being unsurprising, and worse, it would take space I can instead use to ramble about education. It's an easy choice.
From Postman:
Education philosophers have assumed that becoming acculturated is difficult because it necessarily involves the imposition of restraints. They have argued that there must be a sequence to learning, that perseverance and a certain measure of perspiration are indispensable, that individual pleasures must frequently be submerged in the interests of group cohesion, and that learning to be critical and think conceptually and rigorously do not come easily to the young but are hard-fought victories. (p.146)
He describes television as a curriculum because of its power to control the time, attention, and cognitive habits of young people, a system designed to "influence, teach, train or cultivate the mind and character of youth." Entertaining. Compelling. Completely useless as a learning tool, despite all the best efforts of "Sesame Street", "The National Geographic", and beyond. He isolates three reasons, or as he puts it, three commandments:
Thou shalt have no prerequisites
No, or little, continuity can be assumed. Programs are designed as self-contained units, allowing people to enter and exit freely, without a requirement or assumption of background knowledge. Television is designed to be maximally inclusive of viewers.
Thou shalt avoid exposition like the ten plagues visited upon Egypt
What use does television have for arguments, hypotheses, discussions, reasons, refutations, and all the rest? Remember the old film adage: In late, out early. The more you bog things down with exposition, the less interesting your program will be. So television educators cut it in favor of the fun and fascinating.
Thou shalt induce no perplexity
This is not the study I want to include here, but it's brilliant and close enough. The study I want to include, but can't find for now, is one that described an experiment in which students were shown a couple of different explainers for a scientific concept. In one, the concept was covered, and it was left at that. In the other, the explainer went through examples of standard misconceptions as it explained.
The first rated much more popular with students, and they expressed confidence in their understanding of the topic before going forth and bombing a knowledge test. The second was unpopular. People reported feeling confused by it and not learning very much. And then the test came around, and they showed significantly better performance than the others.
That is the paradox of learning: what feels the best works worst. Postman points out that in television teaching, perplexity is a fast track to low ratings. In learning, it's vital.
As a case study, Postman examines a twenty-six-unit television series, funded by a $3.65 million grant from the Department of Education, titled Voyage of the Mimi and accompanied by a set of exercises to help students pick up academic themes of "map and navigational skills, whales and their environment, ecological systems and computer literacy." It was hailed, as many things have been, as the future of education. Research suggested, we were told, that "learning increases when information is presented in a dramatic setting."
It doesn't, if you were wondering. Postman cites a number of studies to make his point here: Jacoby et al noting that only 16% of students passed a comprehension quiz on one of two commercials they were shown, and only 3.5% passing two quizzes in a row; Stauffer et al finding that viewers recalled fewer than 25% of news stories shortly after watching; other research affirming that recall and comprehension are significantly better from print sources. All true. All damning.
More to the point, though, Postman asks: Why whales? How critical are navigational and map-reading skills to city students? Is the subject of whales and their environments worth an entire year's curriculum? Hardly likely. He posits that the project was a result not of asking "What is education good for?" but "What is television good for?" Whales make good TV. The end result is entertaining. It's flashy. It's big. It is a triumph of television, and a failure of education. The main thing students learn is that learning is a form of entertainment.
And so learning, as everything, gets conquered by mere entertainment when we attempt to harness television culture for productive ends.
I could go on. Postman does. I'm sure you get his point, though. Again and again, he paints a bleak picture of television- and entertainment-driven culture, a world driven to hunt for novelty and discard depth, minds trained to jump from one topic to the next, freely grabbing and dismissing, a world of banality calling for attention that absorbs attempted seriousness into itself rather than being broadly harnessable for higher, more serious ends. It's a compelling case, and one I find myself wanting to be thoroughly convinced by.
Here, I've mostly uncritically presented his case, and his vision of his own time and where it was leading. At least as interesting for a book of social commentary like this one, though, is the chance to peer back from the future and explore how we have and have not lived down to his vision.
That's what I'll tackle next.
Part 1: Postman's Past: Boston and Typographic Culture
Part 3: Postman's Future: Silicon Valley and Internet Culture