Everywhere All The Time
Neil Postman and some thoughts on our current state of affairs
In our last post, we dove into The Global Village. We’ve talked about oral culture and electric culture and have begun to think about more implications of our current preferred communication methods.
We posed this question as we ended last week: How does our embrace of electric media as a culture have us run the risk of “amusing ourselves to death?”1
Before we continue, a quick word from Community on NBC from 10 years ago.
So, what did that commercial have to do with our exploration? Not much.
But it was effortless for me to interrupt our flow here and insert something else.
Instantaneous communication methods and technologies, especially those developed in the past 15 years, have the (perhaps intended?2) side effect of pulling us out of whatever “context” we are physically in and allowing us to be in “all” contexts, all at once.
Think of it this way, in a time before instantaneous communications, if I needed to be “reached,” someone or something would physically have to deliver a written or oral message to me by traveling through space and time. And I don’t mean a time machine; I mean they would have to get on a horse, on a train, in a car, on a boat, or in a plane and get from where they are to where I am. And all that takes time.
That time and effort is a value for both sender and receiver, which to this day makes us think twice before sending a frivolous message via those means. A physical intrusion into someone’s personal space to deliver a message, whether knocking on a door or tapping someone on the shoulder, still feels like the sort of thing that an intrusion should warrant.
Contrast that to the way we treat electronic communications. Postman notes:
We have become so accustomed to [televisions’] discontinuities that we are no longer struck dumb, as any sane person would be, by a newscaster who having just reported that a nuclear war is inevitable goes on to say that he will be right back after this word from Burger King; who says, in other words, "‘Now… this.”3
As a society, we are guilty of what McLuhan called “rear-view mirror” thinking. As Postman put’s it:
The assumption that a new medium is merely an extension or amplification of an older one; that an automobile, for example, is only a fast horse, or an electric light a powerful candle. To make such a mistake… is to misconstrue entirely how television redefines the meaning of public discourse. Television does not extend or amplify literate culture. It attacks it.4
So, how does electric communication media attack literate culture?
Before we continue, look at this cute cat picture!
It attacks it by constantly changing our context and causing breaks in our “line of thinking” as my insertion of a random YouTube video and a picture of my cat has done.
Postman lays out this logical progression about Television, the primary electric medium of his day (remember, Postman wrote this book in 1985):
Every technology has a bias towards certain types of uses. No technology is “neutral” in the sense that we can change it out without any effect on the “content” (messages, videos, whatever) the technology is carrying.
The printing press was biased towards carrying linguistic messages. You can use it for pictures, but history shows us what the printing press unleashed on the Western world.5 The Protestant Reformation, The Renaissance, The Age of Enlightenment, among other movements, were unleashed by the easily replicable messages made possible by movable type.
The television was (and is) biased towards visual communications. “American television is, indeed, a beautiful spectacle, a visual delight, pouring forth thousands of images on any given day.”6
Those visual messages are crafted not around linguistic-type messages but entertainment. Postman spends most of the first part of his book laying out the “typographic” background and culture of America before the invention of electric media, beginning with the telegraph. In contrast, he notes how television “offers viewers a variety of subject matter, requires minimal skills to comprehend it and is largely aimed at emotional gratification.”7
Television (and the electric mediums that have followed it) have “made entertainment itself the natural format for the representation of all experience”8 The constant context switching removes all semblance of seriousness from what we are engaging in. Flipping through channels and scrolling through feeds of bright and vivid imagery causes our minds to be engaged by the context (the bright and pretty visuals) and ignore that the content we are getting is much less weighty than in the literate age that preceded it.
This ability for us to “be” in multiple contexts at the same time has its perks. It has enabled an explosion of communication like we’ve never seen. But how we as a culture have thought of it so far may not be the most helpful way to use instantaneous communication as a society.
What if the human mind is not built to be everywhere all at once? What are we losing in this?
Postman notes:
Anyone who is even slightly familiar with the history of communications knows that every new technology for thinking involves a trade-off. It giveth and taketh away, although not quite in equal measure. Media change does not necessarily result in equilibrium. It sometimes creates more than it destroys. Sometimes, it is the other way around.9
So, how aware are we of these trade-offs?
How much time do we give to considering what benefits these media are really giving us?
What steps do we take to maximize the pros over the cons with a particular tool?
What are we losing here?
See you again next week as we continue this exploration.
Further Reading & Notes:
If you’re looking for some good zinger quotes from Amusing Ourselves to Death, you can check out some I found here.
Here’s a good summary of Postman’s overall message from an address he gave in 1998.
Postman goes on to note on page 29 of Amusing Ourselves to Death where that last block quote came from how literate culture “fostered the modern idea of individuality, but it destroyed the medieval sense of community and integration.” I hope to come back to this idea. Still, if we don’t, the way that individuality vs. community is thought of in the West and how we have dealt with it over time is super complex and pulls in a wide variety of other subjects but is super fascinating to me.
I made a passing reference to Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport towards the beginning. I will likely visit more of his thinking in later posts. Still, I have come to think of Cal Newport as one of the Neil Postman-type prophets of the dangers of electronic media of our time. Digital Minimalism is an efficient read that you might enjoy if you want to explore the impacts of technology on your day-to-day life.
See Digital Minimalism, Chapter 1
Amusing Ourselves to Death, 104-105
Amusing Ourselves to Death, 83-84
Postman makes a big caveat that he is really talking about the Western world here, and since that’s the world I still live in and have progressed in, I will keep my commentary to that world as well. This is to acknowledge that the ways different mediums and messages are used are culturally anchored as well. Still, for the sake of clarity, I am only focusing on our Western world. Additionally, many factors lead to many of these movements. Still, it’s undeniable that the printing press’s existence fueled the fire here.