Amusing Ourselves to Death (2 page)

Kaitlin switched her major to print journalism after reading the book. Andrea would recommend it to anyone concerned with media ethics. Mike said even those who won’t agree with the book’s arguments—as he did not—should still read it, to be provoked. Many students (“left wingers and right wingers both,” said the professor) were especially taken with my father’s “Now ... this” idea: the phenomenon whereby the reporting of a horrific event—a rape or a five-alarm fire or global warming—is followed immediately by the anchor’s cheerfully exclaiming “Now ... this,” which segues into a story about Janet Jackson’s exposed nipple or a commercial for lite beer, creating a sequencing of information so random, so disparate in scale and value, as to be incoherent, even psychotic.

Another teacher remarked that students love
how
the book is told—by a writer who’s at heart a storyteller. “They love that he refers to books and people they’ve heard of,” she said. Alison: “He doesn’t dumb it down—he makes allusions to great art and poetry.” Matt said that, ironically, “Postman proves you can be entertaining—and without a single picture.” Of her students’ impressions, one teacher said, “He speaks to them without jargon, in a way in which they feel respected. They feel he’s just having a conversation with them, but inspiring them to think at the same time.” Another professor noted that “kids come to the conclusion that TV is almost exclusively interested in presenting show business and sensationalism and in making money. Amazing as it seems, they had never realized that before.”

It no doubt appears to you that, after all my grand talk of objectivity, I’ve stacked the deck in favor of the book’s virtue. But that’s honestly the overwhelming reaction—at least among a slice of Generation Y, a population segment that one can imagine has as many reasons not to like the book as to like it. One professor said that in a typical class of twenty-five students who read the book, twenty-three will write papers that either praise, or are animated by, its ideas; two will say the book was a stupid waste of time. A 92 percent rating? There’s no one who expresses an idea—certainly no politician—who wouldn’t take that number.

Of course, students had criticisms of the book, too. Many didn’t appreciate the assault on television—a companion to them, a source of pleasure and comfort—and felt as if they had to defend their culture. Some considered TV their
parents’
culture, not theirs—they are of the Internet—so the book’s theses were less relevant. Some thought my father was anti-change, that he so exalted the virtues fostered by the written word and its culture, he was not open to acknowledging many of the positive social improvements TV had brought about, and what a democratic and leveling force it could be. Some disagreed with his assessment that TV is in complete charge: remote control, an abundance of channels, and VCRs and DVRs all enable you to “customize” your programming, even to skip commercials. A common critique was that he should have offered solutions; you can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube, after all, so what now?

And there was this: Yeah, what he said in 1985 had come startlingly true, we
had
amused ourselves to death ... so why read it?

One professor uses the book in conjunction with an experiment she calls an “e-media fast.” For twenty-four hours, each student must refrain from electronic media. When she announces the assignment, she told me, 90 percent of the students shrug, thinking it’s no big deal. But when they realize all the things they must give up for a whole day—cell phone, computer, Internet, TV, car radio, etc.—“they start to moan and groan.” She tells them they can still read books. She acknowledges it will be a tough day, though for roughly eight of the twenty-four hours they’ll be asleep. She says if they break the fast—if they answer the phone, say, or simply have to check e-mail—they must begin from scratch.

“The papers I get back are amazing,” says the professor. “They have titles like ‘The Worst Day of My Life’ or ‘The Best Experience I Ever Had,’ always extreme. ‘I thought I was going to die,’ they’ll write. ‘I went to turn on the TV but if I did I realized, my God, I’d have to start all over again.’ Each student has his or her own weakness—for some it’s TV, some the cell phone, some the Internet or their PDA. But no matter how much they hate abstaining, or how hard it is to hear the phone ring and not answer it, they take time to do things they haven’t done in years. They actually walk down the street to visit their friend. They have extended conversations. One wrote, ‘I thought to do things I hadn’t thought to do
ever.
’ The experience changes them. Some are so affected that they determine to fast on their own, one day a month. In that course I take them through the classics—from Plato and Aristotle through today—and years later, when former students write or call to say hello, the thing they remember is the media fast.”

Like the media fast,
Amusing Ourselves to Death
is a call to action. It is, in my father’s words, “an inquiry ... and a lamentation,” yes, but it aspires to greater things. It is an exhortation to do something. It’s a counterpunch to what my father thought daily TV news was: “inert, consisting of information that gives us something to talk about but cannot lead to any meaningful action.” Dad was a lover of history, a champion for collective memory and what we now quaintly refer to as “civilizing influences,” but he did not live in the past. His book urges us to claim a way to be more alert and engaged. His ideas are still here, he isn’t, and it’s time for the reins to be grabbed by those of a new generation, natives of this brave new world who understand it better.

 

 

Twenty years isn’t what it used to be. Where once it stood for a single generation, now it seems to stand for three. Everything moves faster. “Change changed,” my father wrote in another book.

A lot has changed since this book appeared. News consumption among the young is way down. Network news and entertainment divisions are far more entwined, despite protests (some genuine, some perhaps not) by the news divisions. When Jon Stewart, host of Comedy Central’s
The Daily Show,
went on CNN’s
Crossfire
to make this very point—that serious news and show business ought to be distinguishable, for the sake of public discourse and the republic—the hosts seemed incapable of even understanding the words coming out of his mouth. The sound bite is now more like a sound nibble, and it’s rare, even petulant, to hear someone challenge its absurd insubstantiality; “the question of how television affects us has receded into the background” (Dad’s words, not mine, from 1985). Fox News has established itself, and thrived. Corporate conglomeration is up, particularly among media companies. Our own media companies don’t provide truly gruesome war images as part of the daily news, but then they didn’t do so twenty years ago either (though forty years ago they did). The quality of graphics (i.e., the reality quotient) of computer and video games is way up. Communities exist that didn’t, thanks to the Internet, particularly peer-to-peer computing. A new kind of collaborative creativity abounds, thanks to the “open source” movement, which gave us the Linux operating system. However, other communities are collapsing: Far fewer people join clubs that meet regularly, fewer families eat dinner together, and people don’t have friends over or know their neighbors the way they used to. More school administrators and politicians and business executives hanker to wire schools for computers, as if that is the key to improving American education. The number of hours the average American watches TV has remained steady, at about four and a half hours a day, every day (by age sixty-five, a person will have spent twelve uninterrupted years in front of the TV). Childhood obesity is way up. Some things concern our children more than they used to, some not at all. Maybe there’s more hope than there was, maybe less. Maybe the amount is a constant.

Substantive as this book is, it was predicated on a “hook”: that one British writer (George Orwell) with a frightening vision of the future, a vision that many feared would come true, was mostly off-base, while another British writer (Aldous Huxley) with a frightening vision of the future, a vision less well-known and less feared, was scarily on target. My father argued his point, persuasively, but it was a point for another time—the Age of Television. New technologies and media are in the ascendancy. Fortunately—and this, more than anything, is what I think makes
Amusing Ourselves to Death
so emphatically relevant—my father asked such good questions that they can be asked of non-television things, of all sorts of transforming developments and events that have happened since 1985, and since his death, and of things still unformed, for generations to come (though “generations to come” may someday mean a span of three years). His questions can be asked about all technologies and media. What happens to us when we become infatuated with and then seduced by them? Do they free us or imprison us? Do they improve or degrade democracy? Do they make our leaders more accountable or less so? Our system more transparent or less so? Do they make us better citizens or better consumers? Are the trade-offs worth it? If they’re not worth it, yet we still can’t stop ourselves from embracing the next new thing because that’s just how we’re wired, then what strategies can we devise to maintain control? Dignity? Meaning? My father was not a curmudgeon about all this, as some thought. It was never optimism he lacked; it was certainty. “We must be careful in praising or condemning because the future may hold surprises for us,” he wrote. Nor did he fear TV across the board (as some thought). Junk television was fine.
“The A-Team
and
Cheers
are no threat to our public health,” he wrote.
“60 Minutes, Eyewitness News,
and
Sesame Street
are.”

A student of Dad’s, a teacher himself, says his own students are more responsive to
Amusing Ourselves to Death,
not less, than they were five or ten years ago. “When the book first came out, it was ahead of its time, and some people didn’t understand its reach,” he says. “It’s a twenty-first century book published in the twentieth century.” In 1986, soon after the book was published and had started to make ripples, Dad was on ABC’s
Nightline,
discussing with Ted Koppel the effect TV can have on society if we let it control us, rather than vice versa. As I recall, at one juncture, to illustrate his point that our brief attention span and our appetite for feel-good content can short-circuit any meaningful discourse, Dad said, “For example, Ted, we’re having an important discussion about the culture but in thirty seconds we’ll have to break for a commercial to sell cars or toothpaste.”

Mr. Koppel, one of the rare serious figures on network television, smiled wryly—or was it fatigue?

“Actually, Dr. Postman,” he said, “it’s more like ten seconds.”

There’s still time.

 

 

If you were alert back then, this refresher may be unnecessary, even laughable. If you were not alert then, this may just be laughable. But it also may help to clarify references in the book about things of that moment. In 1985:

The United States population is 240 million. The Cold War is still on, though Mikhail Gorbachev has just become the Soviet leader. Ronald Reagan is president. Other major political figures include Walter “Fritz” Mondale, Democratic presidential nominee the year before; Geraldine Ferraro, his vice-presidential running mate; and presidential hopefuls/Senators Gary Hart and John Glenn (the latter a former astronaut). Ed Koch is mayor of New York City. David Garth is a top media consultant for political candidates.

Top-rated TV shows include
Dynasty, Dallas
(though it has been several years since the drama of “Who Shot J.R.?” gripped the TV-watching nation),
The A-Team, Cheers,
and Hill
Street Blues.
Dan Rather, Tom Brokaw, and Peter Jennings are the nightly network news anchors.
The MacNeillLehrer NewsHour
is, as
The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer
years later will be, public television’s respected, low-rated evening news program. Televangelism is enjoying a heyday: leading practitioners include Jimmy Swaggart, Pat Robertson, Jim Bakker, Billy Graham, Jerry Falwell, Robert Schuller, and Oral Roberts. Howard Cosell has recently retired after many years as TV’s most recognizable sports voice. The show
Entertainment Tonight
and the cable network MTV, both born a few years earlier, are runaway successes. Two of the most successful TV commercial campaigns are American Express’s series about farflung tourists losing travelers’ checks and Wisk detergent’s spot about “ring around the collar” (about which my father wrote a provocative and funny essay called “The Parable of the Ring Around the Collar”).

The Mac computer is one year old,
USA Today
three,
People
magazine ten. Dr. Ruth Westheimer hosts a popular radio call-in show, offering sex advice with cheer and grandmotherly frankness. African Americans are known as blacks. Martina Navratilova is the world’s best female tennis player. Trivial Pursuit is a top-selling board game. Certain entertainers to whom my father refers—e.g., comedians Shecky Greene, Red Buttons, and Milton Berle, singer Dionne Warwick, TV talk-show host David Susskind—are past their prime, even then.

 

A.P.

We were keeping our eye on 1984. When the year came and the prophecy didn’t, thoughtful Americans sang softly in praise of themselves. The roots of liberal democracy had held. Wherever else the terror had happened, we, at least, had not been visited by Orwellian nightmares.

But we had forgotten that alongside Orwell’s dark vision, there was another—slightly older, slightly less well known, equally chilling: Aldous Huxley’s
Brave New World.
Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley’s vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.