Amusing
Ourselves to Death
by
Neil Postman
PENGUIN
books
AMUSING
OURSELVES TO DEATH
Neil
Postman--critic, writer, educator, and communications theorist--is
chairman of the Department of Communication Arts at New York
University and founder of its program in Media Ecology. Educated at
the State University of New York and Columbia University, he is
holder of the Christian Lindback Award for Excellence in Teaching and
is also editor of Et Cetera, the journal of general semantics. His
books include Technopoly and How To Watch TV News (with Steve
Powers).
He is
married and has three children and lives in Flushing, New York.
Amusing
Ourselves to Death
Public
Discourse in the Age of Show Business
Nell Postman
PENGUIN
books
PENGUIN
books Published by the Penguin Group Penguin books USA Inc., 375
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First
published in the United States of America by Viking Penguin Inc. 1985
Published in Penguin books 1986
23 24 25 26
27 28 29 30
Copyright
stman, 1985 All rights reserved.
Grateful
acknowledgment is made to the New York Times Company for permission
to reprint from "Combining the books, Computers" by Edward
Fiske, which appeared in the August 7, 1984, issue of the New York
Times. Copyright the New York times Company.
A section of
this book was supported by a commission from the Annenberg Scholars
Program, Annenberg School of Communications, University of Southern
California.
Specifically,
portions of chapters six and seven formed part of a paper delivered
at the Scholars Conference, "Creating Meaning: Literacies of Our
Time," February 1984.
Library of
Congress Catalog Information Postman, Neill..
Amusing
ourselves to death.
Bibliography:
p.
Includes
index.
- Mass media -- Influence. I. Title.
P94.P63 1986
302.2'34 86-9513 ISBN 0 14 00.9438 5
Printed in
the United States of America Set in Linotron Meridien
Except in
the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the
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Contents
Foreword
Part I
the Medium
Is the Metaphor
Media as
Epistemology
Typographic
America
the
Typographic Mind
the
Peek-a-Boo World
Part II
the Age of
Show Business
"Now... This"
Shuffle Off
to Bethlehem
Reach Out
and Elect Someone
Teaching as
an Amusing Activity
the Huxleyan
Warning
Notes
Bibliography
Foreword
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.
What Orwell
feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that
there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who
wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of
information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we
would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the
truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be
drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a
captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture,
preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and
the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley re
marked in
Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists
who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny "failed to take into
account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions." In
1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In
Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In
short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared
that what we love will ruin us.
This book is
about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right.
Part I.
the Medium
Is the Metaphor
At different times in our historY, different
cities have been the focal point of a radiating American spirit. In
the late eighteenth centurY, for example, Boston was the center of a
political radicalism that ignited a shot heard round the world--a
shot that could not have been fired any other place but the suburbs
of Boston. At its report, all Americans, including Virginians,,
became Bostonians at heart. In the mid-nineteenth centurY, New York
became the symbol of the idea of a melting-pot America--or at least a
non-English one--as the wretched refuse from all over the world
disembarked at Ellis Island and spread over the land their strange
languages and even stranger ways. In the early twentieth centurY,
Chicago, the city of big shoulders and heavy winds, came to symbolize
the industrial energy and dynamism of America. If there is-a statue
of a hog butcher somewhere in Chicago, then it stands as a reminder
of the time when America was railroads, cattle, steel mills and
entrepreneurial adventures. If there is no such statue, there ought
to be, just as there is a statue of a Minute Man to recall the Age of
Boston, as the Statue of Liberty recalls the Age of New York.
Today, we
must look to the city of Las Vegas, Nevada, as a metaphor of our
national character and aspiration, its symbol a thirty-foot-high
cardboard picture of a slot machine and a chorus girl. For Las Vegas
is a city entirely devoted to the idea of entertainment, and as such
proclaims the spirit of a culture in which all public discourse
increasingly takes the form of entertainment. Our politics, religion,
news, athletics, education and
commerce have been transformed into congenial
adjuncts of show business, largely without protest or even much
popular notice. the result is that we are a people on the verge of
amusing ourselves to death. As I write, the President of the United
States is a former Hollywood movie actor. One of his principal
challengers in 1984 was once a featured player on television's most
glamorous show of the 1960s that is to say, an astronaut. Naturally,
a movie has been made about his extraterrestrial adventure. Former
nominee George McGovern has hosted the popular television show
"Saturday Night Live." So has a candidate of more recent
vintage, the Reverend Jesse Jackson. Meanwhile, former President
Richard Nixon, who once claimed he lost an election because he was
sabotaged by makeup men, has offered Senator Edward Kennedy advice on
how to make a serious run for the presidency: lose twenty pounds.
Although the Constitution makes no mention of it, it would appear
that fat people are now effectively excluded from running for high
political office. Probably bald people as well. Almost certainly
those whose looks are not significantly enhanced by the cosmetician's
art. Indeed, we may have reached the point where cosmetics has
replaced ideology as the field of expertise over which a politician
must have competent control. America's journalists, i.e., television
newscasters, have not missed the point. Most spend more time with
their hair dryers than with their scripts, with the result that they
comprise the most glamorous group of people this side of Las Vegas.
Although the Federal Communications Act makes no mention of it, those
without camera appeal are excluded from addressing the public about
what is called "the news of the day." Those with camera
appeal can command salaries exceeding one million dollars a year.
American businessmen discovered, long before the rest of us, that the
quality and usefulness of their goods are subordinate to the artifice
of their display; that, in fact, half the principles of
the Medium
Is the Metaphor
capitalism as praised by Adam Smith or condemned
by Karl Marx are irrelevant. Even the Japanese, who are said to make
better cars than the Americans, know that economics is less a science
than a performing art, as Toyota's yearly advertising budget
confirms. Not long ago, I saw
Billy Graham join with Shecky Green Red Buttons,
Dionne Warwick, Milton Berle and other theologians in a tribute to
George Burns, who was celebrating himself for surviving eighty years
in show business. the Reverend Graham exchanged one-liners with Burns
about making preparations for Eternity. Although the Bible makes no
mention of it, the Reverend Graham assured the audience that God
loves those who make people laugh. It was an honest mistake. He
merely mistook NBC for God. Dr. Ruth Westheimer is a psychologist who
has a popular radio program and a nightclub act in which she informs
her audiences about sex in all of its infinite variety and in
language once reserved for the bedroom and street corners. She is
almost as entertaining as the Reverend Billy Graham, and has been
quoted as saying, "I don't start out to be funny. But if it
comes out that way, I use it. If they call me an entertainer, I say
that's great. When a professor teaches with a sense of humor, people
walk away remembering." She did not say what they remember or of
what use their remembering is. But she has a point: It's great to be
an entertainer. Indeed, in America God favors all those who possess
both a talent and a format to amuse, whether they be preachers,
athletes, entrepreneurs, politicians, teachers or journalists. In
America, the least amusing people are its professional entertainers.
Culture watchers and worriers--those of the type who read books like
this one--will know that the examples above are not aberrations but,
in fact, clichs. There is no shortage of critics who have observed
and recorded the dissolution of public discourse in America and its
conversion into the arts of show business. But most of them, I
believe, have barely begun to tell the
story of the origin and. meaning of this descent
into a vast triviality. Those who have written vigorously on the
matter tell us, for example, that what is happening is the residue of
an exhausted capitalism; or, on the contrary, that it is the
tasteless fruit of the maturing of capitalism; or that it is the
neurotic aftermath of the Age of Freud; or the retribution of our
allowing God to perish; or that it all comes from the old stand-bys,
greed and ambition. I have attended carefully to these explanations,
and I do not say there is nothing to learn from them. Marxists,
Freudians, Levi-Straussians, even Creation Scientists are not to be
taken lightly. And, in any case, I should be very surprised if the
story I have to tell is anywhere near the whole truth. We are all, as
Huxley says someplace, Great Abbreviators, meaning that none of us
has the wit to know the whole truth, the time to tell it if we
believed we did, or an audience so gullible as to accept it. But you
will find an argument here that presumes a clearer grasp of the
matter than many that have come before. Its value, such as it is,
resides in the directness of its perspective, which has its origins
in observations made 2,300 years ago by Plato. It is an argument that
fixes its
attention on the forms of human conversation, and postulates that how
we are obliged to conduct such conversations will have the strongest
possible influence on what ideas we can conveniently express. And
what ideas are convenient to express inevitably become the important
content of a culture.
I use the
word "conversation" metaphorically to refer not only to
speech but to all techniques and technologies that permit people of a
particular culture to exchange messages. In this sense, all culture
is a conversation or, more precisely, a corporation of conversations,
conducted in a variety of symbolic modes. Our attention here is on
how forms of public discourse regulate and even dictate what kind of
content can issue from such fOrmS. To take a simple example of what
this means, consider the
primitive technology of smoke signals. While I do
not know exactly what content was once carried in the smoke signals
of American Indians, I can safely guess that it did not include
philosophical argument. Puffs of smoke are insufficiently complex to
express ideas on the nature of existence, and even if they were not,
a Cherokee philosopher would run short of either wood or blankets
long before he reached his second axiom. You cannot use smoke to do
philosophy. Its form excludes the content. To take an example closer
to home: As I suggested earlier, it is implausible to imagine that
anyone like our twenty-seventh President, the multi-chinned,
three-hundred-pound William Howard Taft, could be put forward as a
presidential candidate in today's world. the shape of a man's body is
largely irrelevant to the shape of his ideas when he is addressing a
public in writing or on the radio or, for that matter, in smoke
signals. But it is quite relevant on television. the grossness of a
three-hundred-pound image, even a talking one, would easily Overwhelm
any logical or spiritual subtleties conveyed by speech. For on
television, discourse is conducted largely through visual imagery,
which is to say that television gives us a conversation in images,
not words. the emergence of the image-manager in the political arena
and the concomitant decline of the speech writer attest to the fact
that television demands a different kind of content from other media.
You cannot do political philosophy on television. Its form works
against the content. To give still another example, one of more
complexity: the information, the content, or, if you will, the
"stuff" that makes up what is called "the news of the
day" did not exist--could not exist--in a world that lacked the
media to give it expression. I do not mean that things like fires,
wars, murders and love affairs did not, ever and always, happen in
places all over the world. I mean that lacking a technology to
advertise them, people could not attend to them, could not
include them
in their daily business. Such information simply could not exist as
part of the
content of culture. This idea--that there is a content called "the
news of the day"--was entirely created by the telegraph (and
since amplified by newer media), which made it possible to move
decontextualized information over vast spaces at incredible speed.
the news of the day is a figment of our technological imagination. It
is, quite precisely, a media event. We attend to fragments of events
from all over the world because we have multiple media whose forms
are well suited to fragmented conversation. Cultures without
speed-of-light media-let us say, cultures in which smoke signals are
the most efficient space-conquering tool available--do not have news
of the day. Without a medium to create its form, the news of the day
does not exist. To say it, then, as plainly as I can, this book is an
inquiry into and a lamentation about the most significant American
cultural fact of the second half of the twentieth century: the
decline of the Age of Typography and the ascendancy of the Age of
Television. This change-over has dramatically and irreversibly
shifted the content and meaning of public discourse, since two media
so vastly different cannot accommodate the same ideas. As the
influence of print wanes, the content of politics, religion,
education, and anything else that comprises public business must
change and be recast in terms that are most suitable to television.
If all of this sounds suspiciously like Marshall McLuhan's aphorism,
the medium is the message, I will not disavow the association
(although it is fashionable to do so among respectable scholars who,
were it not for McLuhan, would today be mute). I met McLuhan thirty
years ago when I was a graduate student and he an unknown English
professor. I believed then, as I believe now, that he spoke in the
tradition of Orwell and Huxley--that is, as a prophesier, and I have
remained steadfast to his teaching that the clearest way to see
through a culture is to attend to its tools for conversation. I might
add that my interest in this point of view was first stirred by a
prophet far more
formidable than McLuhan, more ancient than Plato.
In studying the Bible as a young man, I found intimations of the idea
that forms of media favor particular kinds of content and therefore
are capable of taking command of a culture. I refer specifically to
the Decalogue, the Second Commandment of which prohibits the
Israelites from making concrete images of anything. "Thou shalt
not make unto thee any graven image, any likeness of any thing that
is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in
the water beneath the earth." I wondered then, as so many others
have, as to why the God of these people would have
included
instructions on how they were to symbolize, or not symbolize, their
experience. It is a strange injunction to include as part of an
ethical system unless its author assumed a connection between forms
of human communication and the quality of a culture. We may hazard a
guess that a people who are being asked to embrace an abstract,
universal deity would be rendered unfit to do so by the habit of
drawing pictures or making statues or depicting their ideas in any
concrete, icono-graphic forms. the God of the Jews was to exist in
the Word and through the Word, an unprecedented conception requiring
the highest order of abstract thinking. Iconography thus became
blasphemy so that a new kind of God could enter a culture. People
like ourselves who are in the process of converting their culture
from word-centered to image-centered might profit by reflecting on
this Mosaic injunction. But even if I am wrong in these conjectures,
it is, I believe, a wise and particularly relevant supposition that
the media of communication available to a culture are a dominant
influence on the formation of the culture's intellectual and social
preoccupations. Speech, of course, is the primal and indispensable
medium. It made us human, keeps us human, and in fact defines what
human means. This is not to say that if there were no other means of
communication all humans would find it equally convenient to speak
about the same things in the same way. We know enough about language
to understand that variations in the
structures of languages will result in variations
in what may be called "world view." How people think about
time and space, and about things and processes, will be greatly
influenced by the grammatical features of their language. We dare not
suppose therefore that all human minds are unanimous in understanding
how the world is put together. But how much more divergence there is
in world view among different cultures can be imagined when we
consider the great number and variety of tools for conversation that
go beyond speech. For although culture is a creation of speech, it is
recreated anew by every medium of communication--from painting to
hieroglyphs to the alphabet to television. Each medium, like language
itself, makes possible a unique mode of discourse by providing a new
orientation for thought, for expression, for sensibility. Which, of
course, is what McLuhan meant in saying the medium is the message.
His aphorism, however, is in need of amendment because, as it stands,
it may lead one to confuse a message with a metaphor. A message
denotes a specific, concrete statement about the world. But the forms
of our media, including the symbols through which they permit
conversation, do not make such statements. They are rather like
metaphors, working by unobtrusive but powerful implication to enforce
their special definitions of reality. Whether we are experiencing the
world through the lens of speech or the printed word or
the
television camera, our media-metaphors classify the world for us,
sequence it, frame it, enlarge it, reduce it, color it, argue a case
for what the world is like. As Ernst Cassirer remarked:
Physical
reality seems to recede in proportion as man's symbolic activity
advances. Instead of dealing with the things themselves man is in a
sense constantly conversing with himself. He has so enveloped himself
in linguistic forms, in artistic images, in mythical symbols or
religious rites that he cannot see or know anything except by the
interposition of [an] artificial medium.
What is peculiar about such interpositions of
media is that their role in directing what we will see or know is so
rarely noticed. A person who reads a book or who watches television
or who glances at his watch is not usually interested in how his mind
is organized and controlled by these events, still less in what idea
of the world is suggested by a book, television, or a watch. But
there are men and women who have noticed these things, especially in
our own times. Lewis Mumford, for example, has been one of our great
noticers. He is not the sort of a man who looks at a clock merely to
see what time it is. Not that he lacks interest in the content of
clocks, which is of concern to everyone from moment to moment, but he
is far more interested in how a clock creates the idea of "moment
to moment." He attends to the philosophy of clocks, to clocks as
metaphor, about which our education has had little to say and clock
makers nothing at all. "the clock," Mumford has concluded,
"is a piece of power machinery whose 'product' is seconds and
minutes." In manufacturing such a product, the clock has the
effect of disassociating time from human events and thus nourishes
the belief in an independent world of mathematically measurable
sequences. Moment to moment, it turns out, is not God's conception,
or nature's. It is man conversing with himself about and through a
piece of machinery he created. In Mumford's great book Technics and
Civilization, he shows how, beginning in the fourteenth century, the
clock made us into time-keepers, and then time-savers, and now
time-servers. In the process, we have learned irreverence toward the
sun and the seasons, for in a world made up of seconds and minutes,
the authority of nature is superseded. Indeed, as Mumford points out,
with the invention of the clock, Eternity ceased to serve as the
measure and focus of human events. And thus, though few would have
imagined the connection, the inexorable ticking of the clock may have
had more to do with the weakening of God's supremacy than all the
treatises produced by the phi-
losophers of the Enlightenment; that is to' say,
the clock introduced a new form of conversation between man and God,
in which God appears to
have been
the loser. Perhaps Moses should have included another
Commandment:
Thou shalt not make mechanical representations of time.
That the
alphabet introduced a new form of conversation between man and
man is by
now a commonplace among scholars. To be able to see one's
utterances
rather than only to hear them is no small matter, though our
education,
once again, has had little to say about this. Nonetheless,
it is clear that phonetic writing created a new
conception of knowledge,
as well as a
new sense of intelligence, of audience and of posterity,
all of which
Plato recognized at an early stage in the development of
texts. "No
man of intelligence," he wrote in his Seventh Letter, "will
venture to
express his philosophical views in language, especially not
in language
that is unchangeable, which is true of that which is set
down in written characters." This
notwithstanding, he wrote voluminously
and understood better than anyone else that the
setting down of views in
written
characters would be the beginning of philosophy, not its end.
Philosophy cannot exist without criticism, and
writing makes it possible
and
convenient to subject thought to a continuous and concentrated
scrutiny. Writing
freezes speech and in so doing gives birth to the
grammarian,
the logician, the rhetorician, the historian, the
scientist--all those who must hold language
before them so that they can
see what it
means, where it errs, and where it is leading. Plato knew
all of this,
which means that he knew that writing would bring about a
perceptual
revolution: a shift from the ear to the eye as an organ of
language
processing. Indeed, there is a legend that to encourage such a
shift Plato
insisted that his students study geometry before entering
his
Academy. If true, it was a sound idea, for as the great literary
critic
Northrop Frye has remarked, "the written word is far more
powerful
than simply a reminder: it re-creates the past in the present,
and gives
us, not the
familiar remembered thing, but the glittering intensity of the
summoned-up hallucination." 3 All that Plato surmised about the
consequences of writing is now well understood by anthropologists,
especially those who have studied cultures in which speech is the
only source of complex conversation. Anthropologists know that the
written word, as Northrop Frye meant to suggest, is not merely an
echo of a speaking voice. It is another kind of voice altogether, a
conjurer's trick of the first order. It must certainly have appeared
that way to those who invented it, and that is why we should not be
surprised that the Egyptian god Thoth, who is alleged to have brought
writing to the King Thamus, was also the god of magic. People like
ourselves may see nothing wondrous in writing, but our
anthropologists know how strange and magical it appears to a purely
oral people--a conversation with no one and yet with everyone. What
could be stranger than the silence one
encounters
when addressing a question to a text? What could be more
metaphysically puzzling than addressing an unseen audience, as every
writer of books must do? And correcting oneself because one knows
that an unknown reader will disapprove or misunderstand? I bring all
of this up because what my book is about is how our own tribe is
undergoing a vast and trembling shift from the magic of writing to
the magic of electronics. What I mean to point out here is that the
introduction into a culture of a technique such as writing or a clock
is not merely an extension of man's power to bind time but a
transformation of his way of thinking--and, of course, of the content
of his culture. And that is what I mean to say by calling a medium a
metaphor. We are told in school, quite correctly, that a metaphor
suggests what a thing is like by comparing it to something else. And
by the power of its suggestion, it so fixes a conception in our minds
that we cannot imagine the one thing without the other: Light is a
wave; language, a tree; God, a wise and venerable man; the mind, a
dark cavern illuminated by knowledge. And if these
metaphors no longer serve us, we must, in the
nature of the matter, find others that will. Light is a particle;
language, a river; God (as Bertrand Russell proclaimed), a
differential equation; the mind, a garden that yearns to be
cultivated. But our media-metaphors are not so explicit or so vivid
as these, and they are far more complex. In understanding their
metaphorical function, we must take into account the symbolic forms
of their information, the source of their information, the quantity
and speed of their information, the context in which their
information is experienced. Thus, it takes some digging to get at
them, to grasp, for example, that a clock recreates time as an
independent, mathematically precise sequence; that writing recreates
the mind as a tablet on which experience is written; that the
telegraph recreates news as a commodity. And yet, such digging
becomes easier if we start from the assumption that in every tool we
create, an idea is embedded that goes beyond the function of the
thing itself. It has been pointed out, for example, that the
invention of eyeglasses in the twelfth century not only made it
possible to improve defective vision but suggested the idea that
human beings need not accept as final either the endowments of nature
or the ravages of time. Eyeglasses refuted the belief that anatomy is
destiny by putting forward the idea that our bodies as well as our
minds are improvable. I do not think it goes too far to say that
there is a link between the invention of eyeglasses in the twelfth
century and gene-splitting research in the twentieth. Even such an
instrument as the microscope, hardly a tool of everyday use, had
embedded within it a quite astonishing idea, not about biology but
about psychology. By revealing a world hitherto hidden from view, the
microscope
suggested a possibility about the structure of the mind. If things
are not what they seem, if microbes lurk, unseen, on and under our
skin, if the invisible controls the visible, then is it not possible
that ids and egos and superegos also lurk somewhere unseen? What else
is psychoanalysis but a microscope of
the mind?
Where do our notions of mind come from if not from metaphors
generated by our tools? What does it mean to say that someone has an
IQ of 126? There are no numbers in people's heads. Intelligence does
not have quantity or magnitude, except as we believe that it does.
And why do we believe that it does? Because we have tools that imply
that this is what the mind is like. Indeed, our tools for thought
suggest to us what our bodies are like, as when someone refers to her
"biological clock," or when we talk of our "genetic
codes," or when we read someone's face like a book, or when our
facial expressions telegraph our intentions. When Galileo remarked
that the language of nature is written in mathematics, he meant it
only as a metaphor. Nature itself does not speak. Neither do our
minds or our bodies or, more to the point of this book, our bodies
politic. Our conversations about nature and about ourselves are
conducted in whatever "languages" we find it possible and
convenient to employ. We do not see nature or intelligence or human
motivation or ideology as "it" is but only as our languages
are. And our languages are our media. Our media are our metaphors.
Our metaphors create the content of our culture.
Media as
Epistemology
It is my intention in this book to show that a
great media-metaphor shift has taken place in America, with the
result that the content of much of our public discourse has become
dangerous nonsense. With this in view, my task in the chapters ahead
is straightforward. I must, first, demonstrate how, under the
governance of the printing press, discourse in America was different
from what it is now--generally coherent, serious and rational; and
then how, under the governance of television, it has become shriveled
and absurd. But to avoid the possibility that my analysis will be
interpreted as standard-brand academic whimpering, a kind of elitist
complaint against "junk" on television, I must first
explain that my focus is on epistemology, not on aesthetics or
literary criticism. Indeed, I appreciate junk as much as the next
fellow, and I know full well that the printing press has generated
enough of it to fill the Grand Canyon to overflowing. Television is
not old enough to have matched printing's output of junk.
And so, I
raise no objection to television's junk. the
best things on
television
are its junk, and no one and nothing is seriously threatened by it.
Besides, we do not measure a culture by its output of undisguised
trivialities but by what it claims as significant. Therein is our
problem, for television is at its most trivial and, therefore, most
dangerous when its aspirations are high, when it presents itself as a
carrier of important cultural conversations. the irony here is that
this is what intellectuals and critics are constantly urging
television to do. the trouble
with such people is that they do not take
television seriously enough. For, like the printing press, television
is nothing less than a philosophy of rhetoric. To talk seriously
about television, one must therefore talk of epistemology. All other
commentary is in itself trivial. Epistemology is a complex and
usually opaque subject concerned with the origins and nature of
knowledge. the part of its subject matter that is relevant here is
the interest it takes in definitions of truth and the sources from
which such definitions come. In particular, I want to show that
definitions of truth are derived, at least in part, from the
character of the media of communication through which information is
conveyed. I want to discuss how media are implicated in our
epistemologies. In the hope of simplifying what I mean by the title
of this chapter, media as epistemology, I find it helpful to borrow a
word from Northrop Frye, who has made use of a principle he calls
resonance. "Through resonance," he writes, "a
particular statement in a particular context acquires a universal
significance." Frye offers as an opening example the phrase "the
grapes of wrath," which first appears in Isaiah in the context
of a celebration of a prospective massacre of Edomites. But the
phrase, Frye continues, "has long ago flown away from this
context into many new contexts, contexts that give dignity to the
human situation instead of merely reflecting its bigotries." 2
Having said this, Frye extends the idea of resonance so that it goes
beyond phrases and sentences. A character in a play or story--Hamlet,
for example, or Lewis Carroll's Alice--may have resonance. Objects
may have resonance, and so may countries: "the smallest details
of the geography of two tiny chopped-up countries, Greece and Israel,
have imposed themselves on our consciousness until they have become
part of the map of our own imaginative world, whether we have ever
seen these countries or not." 3 In addressing the question of
the source of resonance, Frye concludes that metaphor is the
generative force--that is, the
power of a
phrase, a book, a character, or a history to unify and invest with
meaning a variety of attitudes or experiences. Thus, Athens becomes a
metaphor of intellectual excellence, wherever we find it; Hamlet, a
metaphor of brooding indecisiveness; Alice's wanderings, a
metaphor of
a search for order in a world of semantic nonsense.
I now depart
from Frye (who, I am certain, would raise no objection) but I take
his word along with me. Every medium of communication, I am claiming,
has resonance, for resonance is metaphor writ large. Whatever the
original and limited context of its use may have been, a medium has
the power to fly far beyond that context into new and unexpected
ones. Because of the way it directs us to organize our minds and
integrate our experience of the world, it imposes itself on our
consciousness and social institutions in myriad forms. It sometimes
has the power to become implicated in our concepts of piety, or
goodness, or beauty. And it is always implicated in the ways we
define and regulate our ideas of truth.
To explain how this happens--how the bias of a
medium sits heavy, felt but unseen, over a culture--I offer three
cases of truth-telling.
the first is
drawn from a tribe in western Africa that has no writing system but
whose rich oral tradition has given form to its ideas of civil law.4
When a dispute arises, the complainants come before the chief of the
tribe and state their grievances. With no written law to guide him,
the task of the chief is to search through his vast repertoire of
proverbs and sayings to find one that suits the situation and is
equally satisfying to both complainants. That accomplished, all
parties are agreed that justice has been done, that the truth has
been served. You will recognize, of course, that this was largely the
method of Jesus and other Biblical figures who, living in an
essentially oral culture, drew upon all of the resources of speech,
including mnemonic devices, formulaic expressions and parables, as a
means of discovering and revealing truth. As Walter Ong points out,
in
oral
cultures proverbs and sayings are not occasional devices: "They
are incessant. They form the substance of thought itself. Thought in
any extended form is impossible without them, for it consists in
them."
To people
like ourselves any reliance on proverbs and sayings is reserved
largely for resolving disputes among or with children. "Possession
is nine-tenths of the law."
"First
come, first served."
"Haste
makes waste." These are forms of speech we pull out in small
crises with our young but would think ridiculous to produce in a
courtroom where "serious" matters are to be decided. Can
you imagine a
bailiff
asking a jury if it has reached a decision and receiving the reply
that "to err is human but to forgive is divine"? Or even
better, "Let us render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's and to
God that which is God's"? For the briefest moment, the judge
might be charmed but if a "serious" language form is not
immediately forthcoming, the jury may end up with a longer sentence
than most guilty defendants.
Judges,
lawyers and defendants do not regard proverbs or sayings as a
relevant response to legal disputes. In this, they are separated from
the tribal chief by a media-metaphor. For in a print-based courtroom,
where law books, briefs, citations and other written materials define
and organize the method of finding the truth, the oral tradition has
lost much of its resonance--but not all of it. Testimony is expected
to be given orally, on the assumption that the spoken, not the
written, word is a truer reflection of the state of mind of a
witness. Indeed, in many courtrooms jurors are not permitted to take
notes, nor are they given written copies of the judge's explanation
of the law. Jurors are expected to hear the truth, or its opposite,
not to read it. Thus, we may say that there is a clash of resonances
in our concept of legal truth. On the one hand, there is a residual
belief in the power of speech, and speech alone, to carry the truth;
on the other hand, there is a much stronger belief in the
authenticity of writing and, in particular, printing. This second
belief
has little
tolerance for poetry, proverbs, sayings, parables or any other
expressions of oral wisdom. the law is what legislators and judges
have written. In our culture, lawyers do not have to be wise; they
need to be well briefed.
A similar
paradox exists in universities, and with roughly the same
distribution of resonances; that is to say, there are a few residual
traditions based on the notion that speech is the primary carrier of
truth. But for the most part, university conceptions of truth are
tightly bound to the structure and logic of the printed word. To
exemplify this point, I draw here on a personal experience that
occurred during a still widely practiced medieval ritual known as a
"doctoral oral." I use the word medieval literally, for in
the Middle Ages students were always examined orally, and the
tradition is carried forward in the assumption that a candidate must
be able to talk competently about his written work. But, of course,
the written work matters most.
In the case I have in mind, the issue of what is
a legitimate form of truth-telling was raised to a level of
consciousness rarely achieved.
the
candidate had included in his thesis a footnote, intended as
documentation of a quotation, which read: "Told to the
investigator at the Roosevelt Hotel on January 18, 1981, in the
presence of Arthur Lingeman and Jerrold Gross." This citation
drew the attention of no fewer than four of the five oral examiners,
all of whom observed that it was hardly suitable as a form of
documentation and that it ought to be replaced by a citation from a
book or article. "You are not a journalist," one professor
remarked. "You are supposed to be a scholar." Perhaps
because the candidate knew of no published statement of what he was
told at the Roosevelt Hotel, he defended himself vigorously on the
grounds that there were witnesses to what he was told, that they were
available to attest to the accuracy of the quotation, and that the
form in which an idea is conveyed is irrelevant to its truth. Carried
away on the wings of his eloquence, the candidate argued further that
there were more than three hundred references to published works in
his thesis and
that it was
extremely unlikely that any of them would be checked for accuracy by
the examiners, by which he meant to raise the question, Why do you
assume the accuracy of a print-referenced citation but not a
speech-referenced one?
the answer
he received took the following line: You are mistaken in believing
that the form in which an idea is conveyed is irrelevant to its
truth. In the academic world, the published word is invested with
greater prestige and authenticity than the spoken word. What people
say is assumed to be more casually uttered than what they write. the
written word is assumed to have been reflected upon and revised by
its author, reviewed by authorities and editors. It is easier to
verify or refute, and it is invested with an impersonal and objective
character, which is why, no doubt, you have referred to yourself in
your thesis as "the investigator" and not by your name;
that is to say, the written word is, by its nature, addressed to the
world, not an individual. the written word endures, the spoken word
disappears; and that is why writing is closer to the truth than
speaking. Moreover, we are sure you would prefer that this commission
produce a written statement that you have passed your examination
(should you do so) than for us merely to tell you that you have, and
leave it at that. Our written statement would represent the "truth."
Our oral agreement would be only a rumor.
the candidate wisely said no more on the matter
except to indicate that he would make whatever changes the commission
suggested and that he profoundly wished that should he pass the
"oral," a written document would attest to that fact. He
did pass, and in time the proper words
were
written.
A third
example of the influence of media on our epistemol-ogies can be drawn
from the trial of the great Socrates. At the opening of Socrates'
defense, addressing a jury of five hundred, he apologizes for not
having a well-prepared speech. He tells his Athenian brothers that he
will falter, begs that they not interrupt him on that account, asks
that they regard him as they
would a stranger from another city, and promises
that he will tell them the truth, without adornment or eloquence.
Beginning this way was, of course, characteristic of Socrates, but it
was not characteristic of the age in which he lived. For, as Socrates
knew full well, his Athenian brothers did not regard the principles
of rhetoric and the expression of truth to be independent of each
other. People like ourselves find great appeal in Socrates' plea
because we are accustomed to thinking of rhetoric as an ornament of
speech--most often pretentious, superficial and unnecessary. But to
the people who invented it, the Sophists of fifth-century B.c. Greece
and their heirs, rhetoric was not merely an opportunity for dramatic
performance but a near indispensable means of organizing evidence and
proofs, and therefore of communicating truth. It was not only a key
element in the education of Athenians (far more important than
philosophy) but a preeminent art form. To the Greeks, rhetoric was a
form of spoken writing. Though it always implied oral performance,
its power to reveal the truth resided in the written word's power to
display arguments in orderly progression. Although Plato himself
disputed this conception of truth (as we might guess from Socrates'
plea), his contemporaries believed that rhetoric was the proper means
through which "right opinion" was to be both discovered and
articulated. To disdain rhetorical rules, to speak one's thoughts in
a random manner, without proper emphasis or appropriate passion, was
considered demeaning to the audience's intelligence and suggestive of
falsehood. Thus, we can assume that many of the 280 jurors who cast a
guilty ballot against Socrates did so because his manner was not
consistent with truthful matter, as they understood the connection.
the point I am leading to by this and the previous examples is that
the concept of truth is intimately linked to the biases of forms of
expression. Truth does not, and never has, come unadorned. It must
appear in its proper clothing or it is not acknowledged, which is a
way of saying that the "truth" is a kind
of cultural
prejudice. Each culture conceives of it as being most authentically
expressed in certain symbolic forms that another culture may regard
as trivial or irrelevant. Indeed, to the Greeks of
Aristotle's
time, and for two thousand years afterward, scientific truth was best
discovered and expressed by deducing the nature of things from a set
of self-evident premises, which accounts for Aristotle's believing
that women have fewer teeth than men, and that babies are healthier
if conceived when the wind is in the north. Aristotle was twice
married but so far as we know, it did not occur to him to ask either
of his wives if he could count her teeth. And as for his obstetric
opinions, we are safe in assuming he used no questionnaires and hid
behind no curtains. Such acts would have seemed to him both vulgar
and unnecessary, for that was not the way to ascertain the truth of
things. the language of deductive logic provided a surer road. We
must not be too hasty in mocking Aristotle's prejudices. We have
enough of our own, as for example, the equation we moderns make of
truth and quantification. In this prejudice, we come astonishingly
close to the mystical beliefs of Pythagoras and his followers who
attempted to submit all of life to the sovereignty of numbers. Many
of our psychologists, sociologists, economists and other latter-day
cabalists will have numbers to tell them the truth or they will have
nothing. Can you imagine, for example, a modern economist
articulating truths about our standard of living by reciting a poem?
Or by telling what happened to him during a late-night walk through
East St. Louis? Or by offering a series of proverbs and parables,
beginning with the saying about a rich man, a camel, and the eye of a
needle? the first would be regarded as irrelevant, the second merely
anecdotal, the last childish. Yet these forms of language are
certainly capable of expressing truths about economic relationships,
as well as any other relationships, and indeed have been employed by
various peoples. But to the modern mind, resonating with different
media-metaphors, the truth in economics is believed to be best
discovered and expressed in numbers. Perhaps it is. I will not argue
the point. I mean only to call attention to the fact that there is a
certain measure of arbitrariness in the forms that truth-telling may
take. We must remember that Galileo merely said that the language of
nature is written in mathematics. He did not say everything is. And
even the truth about nature need not be expressed in mathematics. For
most of human history, the language of nature has been the language
of myth and ritual. These forms, one might add, had the virtues of
leaving nature unthreatened and of encouraging the belief that human
beings are part of it. It hardly befits a people who stand ready to
blow up the planet to praise themselves too vigorously for having
found the true way to talk about nature.
In saying this, I am not making a case for
epistemological relativism. Some ways of truth-telling are better
than others, and therefore have a healthier influence on the cultures
that adopt them. Indeed, I hope to
persuade you
that the decline of a print-based epistemology and the accompanying
rise of a television-based epistemology has had grave consequences
for public life, that we are getting sillier by the minute. And that
is why it is necessary for me to drive hard the point that the weight
assigned to any form of truth-telling is a function of the influence
of media of communication. "Seeing is believing" has always
had a preeminent status as an epistemological axiom, but "saying
is believing,"
"reading
is believing,"
"counting
is believing,"
"deducing is believing," and "feeling
is believing" are others that have risen or fallen in importance
as cultures have undergone media change. As a culture moves from
orality to writing to printing to televising, its ideas of truth move
with it. Every philosophy is the philosophy of a stage of life,
Nietzsche remarked. To which we might add that every epistemology is
the epistemology of a stage of media development. Truth, like time
itself, is a product of a conversation man has with himself about and
through the techniques of communication he has invented.
Since
intelligence is primarily defined as one's capacity to
grasp the
truth of things, it follows that what a culture means by intelligence
is derived from the character of its important forms of
communication. In a purely oral culture, intelligence is often
associated with aphoristic ingenuity, that is, the power to invent
compact sayings of wide applicability. the wise Solomon, we are told
in First Kings, knew three thousand proverbs. In a print culture,
people with such a talent are thought to be quaint at best, more
likely pompous bores. In a purely oral culture, a high value is
always placed on the power to memorize, for where there are no
written words, the human mind must function as a mobile library. To
forget how something is to be said or done is a danger to the
community and a' gross form of stupidity. In a print culture, the
memorization of a poem, a menu, a law or most anything else is merely
charming. It is almost always functionally irrelevant and certainly
not considered a sign of high intelligence.
Although the general character of
print-intelligence would be known to anyone who would be reading this
book, you may arrive at a reasonably detailed definition of it by
simply considering what is demanded of you as you read this book. You
are required, first of all, to remain more
or less
immobile for a fairly long time. If you cannot do this (with this or
any other book), our culture may label you as anything from
hyperkinetic to undisciplined; in any case, as suffering from some
sort of intellectual deficiency. the printing press makes rather
stringent demands on our bodies as well as our minds. Controlling
your body is, however, only a minimal requirement. You must also have
learned to pay no attention to the shapes of the letters on the page.
You must see through them, so to speak, so that you can go directly
to the meanings of the words they form. If you are preoccupied with
the shapes of the letters, you will be an intolerably inefficient
reader, likely to be thought stupid. If you have learned how to get
to meanings without aesthetic distraction, you are required to assume
an attitude of detachment and objectivity. This includes your
bringing to the task what
Bertrand
Russell called an "immunity to eloquence," meaning that you
are able to distinguish between the sensuous pleasure, or charm, or
ingratiating tone (if such there be) of the words, and the logic of
their argument. But at the same time, you must be able to tell from
the tone of the language what is the author's attitude toward the
subject and toward the reader. You must, in other words, know the
difference between a joke and an argument. And in judging the quality
of an argument, you must be able to do several things at once,
including delaying a verdict until the entire argument is finished,
holding in mind questions until you have determined where, when or if
the text answers them, and bringing to bear on the text all of your
relevant experience as a counterargument to what is being proposed.
You must also be able to withhold those parts of your knowledge and
experience which, in fact, do not have a bearing on the argument. And
in preparing yourself to do all of this, you must have divested
yourself of the belief that words are magical and, above all, have
learned to negotiate the world of abstractions, for there are very
few phrases and sentences in this book that require you to call forth
concrete images. In a print-culture, we are apt to say of people who
are not intelligent that we must "draw them pictures" so
that they may understand. Intelligence implies that one can dwell
comfortably without pictures, in a field of concepts and
generalizations. To be able to do all of these things, and more,
constitutes a primary definition of intelligence in a culture whose
notions of truth are organized around the printed word. In the next
two chapters I want to show that in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries, America was such a place, perhaps the most print-oriented
culture ever to have existed. In subsequent chapters, I want to show
that in the twentieth century, our notions of truth and our ideas of
intelligence have changed as a result of new media displacing the
old.
But I do not
wish to oversimplify the matter more than is necessary. In
particular, I want to conclude by making three
points that
may serve as a defense against certain counterargu-ments that careful
readers may have already formed. the first is that at no point do I
care to claim that changes in media bring about changes in the
structure of people's minds or changes in their cognitive capacities.
There are some who make this claim, or come close to it (for example,
Jerome Bruner, Jack Goody, Walter Ong, Marshall McLuhan, Julian
Jaynes, and Eric Havelock). 7 I am inclined to think they are right,
but my argument does not require it. Therefore, I will not burden
myself with arguing the possibility, for example, that oral people
are less developed intellectually, in some Piagetian sense, than
writing people, or that "television" people are less
developed intellectually than either. My argument is limited to
saying that a major new medium changes the structure of discourse; it
does so by encouraging certain uses of the intellect, by favoring
certain definitions of intelligence and wisdom, and by demanding a
certain kind of content--in a phrase, by creating new forms of
truth-telling. I will say once again that I am no relativist in this
matter, and that I believe the epistemology created by television not
only is inferior to a print-based epistemology but is dangerous and
absurdist. the second point is that the epistemological shift I have
intimated, and will describe in detail, has not yet included (and
perhaps never will include) everyone and everything. While some old
media do, in fact, disappear (e.g., pictographic writing and
illuminated manuscripts) and with them, the institutions and
cognitive habits they favored, other forms of conversation will
always remain. Speech, for example, and writing. Thus the
epistemology of new forms such as television does not have an
entirely unchallenged influence. I find it useful to think of the
situation in this way: Changes in the symbolic environment are like
changes in the natural environment; they are both gradual and
additive at first, and then, all at once, a critical mass is
achieved, as the physicists say. A river that has slowly been
polluted suddenly becomes
toxic; most
of the fish perish; swimming becomes a danger to health. But even
then, the river may look the same and one may still take a boat ride
on it. In other words, even when life has been taken from it, the
river does not disappear, nor do all of its uses, but its value has
been seriously diminished and its degraded condition will have
harmful effects throughout the landscape. It is this way with our
symbolic environment. We have reached, I believe, a critical mass in
that electronic media have decisively and irreversibly changed the
character of our symbolic environment. We are now a culture whose
information,
ideas and
epistemology are given form by television, not by the printed
word. To be
sure, there are still readers and there are many books
published,
but the uses of print and reading are not the same as they
once were;
not even in schools, the last institutions where print was
thought to
be invincible. They delude themselves who believe that
television
and print coexist, for coexistence implies parity. There
is
no parity
here. Print is now merely a residual epistemology, and it
will remain so, aided to some extent by the
computer, and newspapers and
magazines
that are made to look like television screens. Like
the fish
who survive
a toxic river and the boatmen who sail on it, there still
dwell among
us those whose sense of things is largely influenced by
older and
clearer waters. the third point is that in the analogy I have
drawn above,
the river refers largely to what we call public
discourse--our
political, religious, informational and commercial forms
of
conversation. I am arguing that a television-based epistemology
pollutes public communication and its surrounding
landscape, not that it
pollutes
everything. In the first place, I am constantly reminded of
television's
value as a source of comfort and pleasure to the elderly,
the infirm
and, indeed, all people who find themselves alone in motel
rooms. I
am also aware of television's potential for creating a theater
for the
masses (a subject which in my opinion has not been taken
seriously
enough). There
are also claims that whatever power television
might have
to-
undermine
rational discourse, its emotional power is so great that it could
arouse sentiment against the Vietnam War or against more virulent
forms of racism. These and other beneficial possibilities are not to
be taken lightly. But there is still another reason why I should not
like to be understood as making a total assault on television. Anyone
who is even slightly familiar with the history of communications
knows that every new technology for thinking involves a tradeoff. 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.
We must be careful in praising or condemning because the future may
hold surprises for us. the invention of the printing press itself is
a paradigmatic example. Typography fostered the modern idea of
individuality, but it destroyed the medieval sense of community and
integration. Typography created prose but made poetry into an exotic
and elitist form of expression. Typography made modern science
possible but transformed religious sensibility into mere
superstition. Typography assisted in the growth of the nation-state
but thereby made patriotism into a sordid if not lethal emotion.
Obviously, my point of view is that the four-hundred-year imperial
dominance of typography was of far greater
benefit than deficit. Most of our modern ideas
about the uses of the intellect were formed by the printed word, as
were our ideas about education, knowledge, truth and information. I
will try to demonstrate that as typography moves to the periphery of
our culture and television takes its place at the center, the
seriousness, clarity and, above all, value of public discourse
dangerously declines. On what benefits may come from other
directions, one must keep an open mind.
Typographic
America
In the
Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, there appears a remarkable
quotation attributed to Michael Welfare, one of the founders of a
religious sect known as the Dunkers and a longtime acquaintance of
Franklin. the statement had its origins in Welfare's complaint to
Franklin that zealots of other religious persuasions were spreading
lies about the Dunkers, accusing them of abominable principles to
which, in fact, they were utter strangers. Franklin suggested that
such abuse might be diminished if the Dunkers published the articles
of their belief and the rules of their discipline. Welfare replied
that this course of action had been discussed among his
co-religionists but had been rejected. He then explained their
reasoning in the following words:
When we were first drawn together as a society,
it had pleased God to enlighten our minds so far as to see that some
doctrines, which we once esteemed truths, were errors, and that
others, which we had esteemed errors, were real truths. From time to
time He has been pleased to afford us farther light, and our
principles have been improving, and our errors diminishing. Now we
are not sure that we are arrived at the end of this progression, and
at the perfection of spiritual or theological knowledge; and we fear
that, if we should feel ourselves as if bound and confined by it, and
perhaps be unwilling to receive further improvement, and our
successors still more so, as conceiving what we their elders and
founders had done, to be something sacred, never to be departed from.
Franklin
describes this sentiment as a singular instance in the history of
mankind of modesty in a sect. Modesty is certainly the word for it,
but the statement is extraordinary for other reasons, too. We have
here a criticism of the epistemology of the written word worthy of
Plato. Moses himself might be interested although he could hardly
approve. the Dunkers came close here to formulating a commandment
about religious discourse: Thou shalt not write down thy principles,
still less print them, lest thou shall be entrapped by them for all
time. We may, in any case, consider it a significant loss that we
have no record of the
deliberations of the Dunkers. It would certainly
shed light on the premise of this book, i.e., that the form in which
ideas are expressed affects what those ideas will be. But more
important, their deliberations were in all likelihood a singular
instance in Colonial America of a distrust of the printed word. For
the Americans among whom Franklin lived were as committed to the
printed word as any group of people who have ever lived. Whatever
else may be said of those immigrants who came to settle in New
England, it is a paramount fact that they and their heirs were
dedicated and skillful readers whose religious sensibilities,
political ideas and social life were embedded in the medium of
typography. We know that on the Mayflower itself several books were
included as cargo, most importantly, the Bible and Captain John
Smith's Description of New England. (For immigrants headed toward a
largely uncharted land, we may suppose that the latter book was as
carefully read as the former.) We know, too, that in the very first
days of colonization each minister was given ten pounds with which to
start a religious library. And although literacy rates are
notoriously difficult to assess, there is sufficient evidence (mostly
drawn from signatures) that between 1640 and 1700, the literacy rate
for men in Massachusetts and Connecticut was somewhere between 89
percent and 95 percent, quite probably the highest concentration of
literate males to be found anywhere in the world at that time.2 (the
literacy rate for
women in those colonies is estimated to have run
as high as 62 percent in the years 1681-1697.3) It is to be
understood that the Bible was the central reading matter in all
households, for these people were Protestants who shared Luther's
belief that printing was "God's highest and ex-tremest act of
Grace, whereby the business of the Gospel is driven forward." Of
course, the business of the Gospel may be driven forward in books
other than the Bible, as for example in the famous Bay Psalm Book,
printed in 1640 and generally regarded as America's first best
seller. But it is not to be assumed that these people confined their
reading to religious matters. Probate records indicate that 60
percent of the estates in Middlesex County between the years 1654 and
1699 contained books, all but 8 percent of them including more than
the Bible? In fact, between 1682 and 1685, Boston's leading
bookseller imported 3,421 books from one English dealer, most of
these nonreligious books. the meaning of this fact may be appreciated
when one adds that these books were intended for consumption by
approximately 75,000 people then living in the northern colonies. the
modern equivalent would be ten million books. Aside from the fact
that the religion of these Calvinist Puritans demanded that they be
literate, three other factors account for the colonists'
preoccupation with the printed word. Since the male literacy rate in
seventeenth-century England did not exceed 40
percent, we
may assume, first of all, that the migrants to New England came from
more literate areas of England or from more literate segments of the
population, or both.6 In other words, they came here as readers and
were certain to believe that reading was as important in the New
World as it was in the Old. Second, from 1650 onward almost all New
England towns passed laws requiring the maintenance of a "reading
and writing" school, the large communities being required to
maintain a grammar school, as well. In all such laws, reference is
made to Satan, whose evil designs, it was supposed, could be
thwarted at
every turn by education. But there were other reasons why education
was required, as suggested by the following ditty, popular in the
seventeenth century:
From public
schools shall general knowledge flow, For 'tis the people's sacred
right to know.
These people, in other words, had more than the
subjection of Satan on their minds. Beginning in the sixteenth
century, a great epistemological shift had taken place in which
knowledge of every kind was transferred to, and made manifest
through, the printed page. "More than any other device,"
Lewis Mumford wrote of this shift, "the printed book released
people from the domination of the immediate and the local;... print
made a greater impression than actual events .... To
exist was to
exist in print: the rest of the world tended gradually to become more
shadowy. Learning became book-learning." 9 In light of this, we
may assume that the schooling of the young was understood by the
colonists not only as a moral duty but as an intellectual imperative.
(the England from which they came was an island of schools. By 1660,
for example, there were schools in England, one school approximately
every twelve miles. And it is clear that growth in literacy was
closely connected to schooling. Where schooling was not required (as
in Rhode Island) or weak school laws prevailed (as in New Hampshire),
literacy rates increased more slowly than elsewhere. Finally, these
displaced Englishmen did not need to print their own books or even
nurture their own writers. They imported, whole, a sophisticated
literary tradition from their Motherland. In 1736, booksellers
advertised the availability of the Spectator, the Tatler, and
Steele's Guardian. In 1738, advertisements appeared for Locke's Essay
Concerning Human Understanding, Pope's Homer, Swift's A Tale of a Tub
and Dryden's
Fables. 1 1
Timothy Dwight, president of Yale University, described the
American
situation succinctly:
books of
almost every kind, on almost every subject, are already written to
our hands. Our situation in this respect is singular. As we speak the
same language with the people of Great Britain, and have usually been
at peace with that country; our commerce with it brings to us,
regularly, not a small part of the books with which it is deluged. In
every art, science, and path of literature, we obtain those, which to
a great extent supply our wants.
de-
One
significant implication of this situation is that no literary
aristocracy emerged in Colonial America. Reading was not regarded as
an elitist activity, and printed matter was spread evenly among all
kinds of people. A thriving, classless reading culture developed
because, as Daniel Boorstin writes, "It was diffuse. Its center
was everywhere because it was nowhere. Every man was close to what
[printed matter] talked about. Everyone could speak the same
language. It was the product of a busy, mobile, public society."
3 By 1772, Jacob Duch could write: "the poorest labourer upon
the shore of the Delaware thinks himself entitled to deliver his
sentiment in matters of religion or politics with as much freedom as
the gentleman or scholar .... Such is
the
prevailing taste for books of every kind, that almost every man is a
reader." 14 Where such a keen taste for books prevailed among
the general population, we need not be surprised that Thomas Paine's
Common Sense, published on January 10, 1776, sold more than 100,000
copies by March of the same year.5 In 1985, a book would have to sell
eight million copies (in two months) to match the proportion of the
population Paine's book attracted. If we go beyond March, 1776, a
more awesome set of figures is given by Howard Fast: "No one
knows just how many copies were actually printed. the most
conservative sources place the figure at something over 300,000
copies. Others place it just
under half a million. Taking a figure of 400,000
in a population of 3,000,000, a book published today would have to
sell 24,000,000 copies to do as well." 16 the only communication
event that could produce such collective attention in today's America
is the Superbowl. It is worth pausing here for a moment to say
something of Thomas Paine, for in an important way he is a measure of
the high and wide level of literacy that existed in his time. In
particular, I want to note that in spite of his lowly origins, no
question has ever been raised, as it has with Shakespeare, about
whether or not Paine was, in fact, the author of the works attributed
to him. It is true that we know more of Paine's life than
Shakespeare's (although not more of Paine's early periods), but it
is also true
that Paine had less formal schooling than Shakespeare, and came from
the lowest laboring class before he arrived in America. In spite of
these disadvantages, Paine wrote political philosophy and polemics
the equal in lucidity and vitality (although not quantity) of
Voltaire's, Rousseau's, and contemporary English philosophers',
including Edmund Burke. Yet no one asked the question, How could an
unschooled stay-maker from England's impoverished class produce such
stunning prose? From time to time Paine's lack of education was
pointed out by his enemies (and he, himself, felt inferior because of
this deficiency), but it was never doubted that such powers of
written expression could originate from a common man. It is also
worth mentioning that the full title of Paine's most widely read book
is Common Sense, Written by an Englishman. the tagline is important
here because, as noted earlier, Americans did not write many books in
the Colonial period, which Benjamin Franklin tried to explain by
claiming that Americans were too busy doing other things. Perhaps so.
But Americans were not too busy to make use of the printing press,
even if not for books they themselves had written. the first printing
press in America was established in 1638 as an adjunct of Harvard
University, which was two years old at the time.
7 Presses were established shortly thereafter in Boston and
Philadelphia without resistance by the Crown, a curious fact since at
this time presses were not permitted in Liverpool and Birmingham,
among other English cities. the earliest use of the press was for the
printing of newsletters, mostly done on cheap paper. It may well be
that the development of an American literature was retarded not by
the industry of the people or the availability of English literature
but by the scarcity of quality paper. As late as Revolutionary days,
George Washington was forced to write to his generals on unsightly
scraps of paper, and his dispatches were not enclosed in envelopes,
paper being too scarce for such use. Yet by the late seventeenth
century, there was a beginning to a native literature that turned out
to have as much to do with the typographic bias of American culture
as books. I refer, of course, to the newspaper, at which Americans
first tried their hand on September 25, 1690, in Boston, when
Benjamin Harris printed the first edition of a three-page paper he
called Publick Occurrences Both Foreign and Domestick. Before he came
to America, Harris had played a role in "exposing" a
nonexistent conspiracy of Catholics to slaughter Protestants and burn
London. His London newspaper, Domestick Intelligence, revealed the
"Popish plot," with the result that Catholics were harshly
persecuted.2 Harris, no stranger to mendacity, indicated in his
prospectus for Publick Occurrences that a newspaper was necessary to
combat the spirit of lying which then prevailed in Boston and, I am
told, still does. He concluded his prospectus
with the following sentence: "It is supposed that none will
dislike this Proposal but such as intend to be guilty of so
villainous a crime." Harris was right about who would dislike
his proposal. the second issue of Publick Occurrences never appeared.
the Governor and Council suppressed it, complaining that Harris had
printed "reflections of a very high nature,"21 by which
they meant that they had no intention of admitting any impediments to
whatever villainy they wished to pursue. Thus, in the New World began
the struggle for freedom of information which, in the Old, had begun
a century before. Harris' abortive effort inspired other attempts at
newspaper publication: for example, the Boston News-Letter, published
in 1704, generally regarded as the first continuously published
American newspaper. This was followed by the Boston Gazette (in 1719)
and the New-England Courant (in 1721 ), whose editor, James Franklin,
was the older brother of Benjamin. By 1730, there were seven
newspapers published regularly in four colonies, and by 1800 there
were more than
- In 1770, the New York Gazette congratulated itself and other papers by writing (in part):
'Tis truth
(with deference to the college) Newspapers are the spring of
Knowledge, the general source throughout the nation, Of every modern
conversation.
At the end of the eighteenth century, the
Reverend Samuel Miller boasted that the United States had more than
two-thirds the number of newspapers available in England, and yet had
only half the population of England.
In 1786,
Benjamin Franklin observed that Americans were so busy reading
newspapers and pamphlets that they scarcely had time for books. (One
book they apparently always had time for was Noah Webster's American
Spelling Book, for it sold more than 24 million copies between 1783
and 1843.)24 Franklin's reference to pamphlets ought not to go
unnoticed. the proliferation of newspapers in all the Colonies was
accompanied by the rapid diffusion of pamphlets and broadsides.
Alexis de Tocque-ville took note of this fact in his Democracy in
America, published in 1835: "In America," he wrote,
"parties do not write books to combat each other's opinions, but
pamphlets, which are circulated for a day with incredible rapidity
and then expire." 25 And
38
Typegraphic America
he referred to both newspapers and pamphlets when
he observed, "the invention of firearms equalized the vassal and
the noble on the field of battle; the art of printing opened the same
resources to the minds of all classes; the post brought knowledge
alike to the door of the cottage
and to the
gate of the palace." 26 At the time Tocqueville was making his
observations of America, printing had already spread to all the
regions of the country. the South had lagged behind the North not
only in the formation of schools (almost all of which were private
rather than public) but in its uses of the printing press. Virginia,
for example, did not get its first regularly published newspaper, the
Virginia Gazette, until 1736. But toward the end of the eighteenth
century, the movement of ideas via the printed word was relatively
rapid, and something approximating a national conversation emerged.
For example, the Federalist Papers, an out-pouring of eighty-five
essays written by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay
(all under the name of Publius) originally appeared in a New York
newspaper during 1787 and 1788 but were read almost as widely in the
South as the North. As America moved into the nineteenth century, it
did so as a fully print-based culture in all of its regions. Between
1825 and 1850, the number of subscription libraries trebled.27 What
were called "mechanics' and apprentices' libraries"--that
is, libraries intended for the working class--also emerged as a force
for literacy. In 1829, the New York Apprentices' Library housed ten
thousand volumes, of which 1,600 apprentices drew books. By 1857, the
same library served three-quarters of a million people?8 Aided by
Congress' lowering of the postal rates in 1851, the penny newspaper,
the periodical, the Sunday school tract, and the cheaply bound book
were abundantly available. Between 1836 and 1890, 107 million copies
of the McGuffey Reader were distributed to the schools.29 And
although the reading of novels was not considered an altogether
reputable use of time, Americans devoured them. Of Walter Scott's
novels, published
between 1814
and 1832, Samuel Goodrich wrote: "the appearance of a new novel
from his pen caused a greater sensation in the United States than did
some of the battles of Napoleon. ?. . Everybody read these works;
everybody--the refined and the simple." 3o Publishers were so
anxious to make prospective best sellers available, they would
sometimes dispatch messengers to incoming packet boats and "within
a single day set up, printed and bound in paper covers the most
recent novel of Bulwer or Dickens." 3 There being no
international copy-right laws, "pirated" editions abounded,
with no complaint from the public, or much from authors, who were
lionized. When Charles Dickens visited America in 1842, his reception
equaled the adulation we offer today to television stars,
quarterbacks, and Michael Jackson. "I can give you no conception
of my welcome," Dickens wrote to a friend. "There never was
a King or Emperor upon earth so cheered and followed by the crowds,
and entertained at splendid balls and dinners and waited upon by
public bodies of all kinds .... If I go out in a carriage, the crowd
surrounds
it and escorts me home; if I go to the theater,
the whole house... rises as one man and the timbers ring again."
32 A native daughter, Harriet Beecher Stowe, was not offered the same
kind of adoring attention--and, of course, in the South, had her
carriage been surrounded, it would not have been for the purpose of
escorting her home--but her Uncle Tom's Cabin sold 305,000 copies in
its first year, the equivalent of four million in today's America.
Alexis de Tocqueville was not the only foreign visitor to be
impressed by the Americans' immersion in printed matter. During the
nineteenth century, scores of Englishmen came to America to see for
themselves what had become of the Colonies. All were impressed with
the high level of literacy and in particular its extension to all
classes.33 In addition, they were astounded by the near universality
of lecture halls in which stylized oral performance provided a
continuous reinforcement of the print tradition. Many of these
lecture halls originated as a result of the Lyceum Movement, a form
of adult education. Usually associated with the efforts of Josiah
Holbrook, a New England farmer, the Lyceum Movement had as its
purpose the diffusion of knowledge, the promotion of common schools,
the creation of libraries and, especially, the establishment of
lecture halls. By 1835, there were more than three thousand Lyceums
in fifteen states.3' Most of these were located east of the
Alleghenies, but by 1840, they were to be found at the edges of the
frontier, as far west as Iowa and Minnesota. Alfred Bunn, an
Englishman on an extensive tour through America, reported in 1853
that "practically every village had its lecture hall." 35
He added: "It is a matter of wonderment... to witness the
youthful workmen, the overtired artisan, the worn-out factory girl...
rushing... after the toil of the day is over, into the hot atmosphere
of a crowded lecture room." 36 Bunn's countryman J. F.
- Johnston attended lectures at this time at the Smithsonian Institution and "found the lecture halls jammed with capacity audiences of 1200 and 1500 people." 57 Among the lecturers these audiences could hear were the leading intellectuals, writers and humorists (who were also writers) of their time, including Henry Ward Beecher, Horace Greeley, Louis Agassiz and Ralph Waldo Emerson (whose fee for a lecture was fifty dollars).38 In his autobiography, Mark Twain devotes two chapters to his experiences as a lecturer on the Lyceum circuit. "I began as a lecturer in 1866 in California and Nevada," he wrote. "[I] lectured in New York once and in the Mississippi Valley a few times; in 1868 [I] made the whole Western circuit; and in the two or three following seasons added the Eastern circuit to my route." 39 Apparently, Emerson was underpaid since Twain remarks that some lecturers charged as much as $250 when they spoke in towns and $400 when they spoke in cities (which is almost as much, in today's terms, as the going price for a lecture by a retired television newscaster). the point all this is
leading to
is that from its beginning until
well into
the nineteenth century, America was as dominated by the printed word
and an oratory based on the printed word as any society we know of.
This situation was only in part a legacy of the Protestant tradition.
As Richard Hofstadter reminds us, America was founded by
intellectuals, a rare occurrence in the history of modern nations.
"the Founding Fathers," he writes, "were sages,
scientists, men of broad cultivation, many of them apt in classical
learning, who used their wide reading in history, politics, and law
to solve the exigent problems of their time." A society shaped
by such men does not easily move in contrary directions. We might
even say that America was founded by intellectuals, from which it has
taken us two centuries and a communications revolution to recover.
Hofstadter has written convincingly of our efforts to "recover,"
that is to say, of the anti-intellectual strain in American public
life, but he concedes that his focus distorts the general picture. It
is akin to writing a history of American business by concentrating on
the history of bankruptcies. the influence of the printed word in
every arena of public discourse was insistent and powerful not merely
because of the quantity of printed matter but because of its
monopoly. This point cannot be stressed enough, especially for those
who are reluctant to acknowledge profound differences in the media
environments of then and now. One sometimes hears it said, for
example, that there is more printed matter available today than ever
before, which is undoubtedly true. But from the seventeenth century
to the late nineteenth century, printed matter was virtually all that
was available. There were no movies to see, radio to hear,
photographic displays to look at, records to play. There was no
television. Public business was channeled into and expressed through
print, which became the model, the metaphor and the measure of all
discourse. the resonances of the lineal, analytical structure of
print, and in particular, of expository prose, could be felt
everywhere. For example, in how people talked. Tocqueville remarks on
this in Democracy in
America. "An American," he wrote,
"cannot converse, but he can discuss, and his talk falls into a
dissertation. He speaks to you as if he was addressing a meeting; and
if he should chance to become warm in the discussion, he will say
'Gentlemen' to the person with whom he is conversing." 42 This
odd practice is less a reflection of an American's obstinacy than of
his modeling his conversational style on the structure of the printed
word. Since the printed word is impersonal and is addressed to an
invisible audience, what Tocqueville is describing here is a kind of
printed orality, which was observable in diverse forms of
oral
discourse. On the pulpit, for example, sermons were usually written
speeches delivered in a stately, impersonal tone consisting "largely
of an impassioned, coldly analytical cataloguing of the attributes of
the Deity as revealed to man through Nature and Nature's Laws."43
And even when the Great Awakening came--a revivalist movement that
challenged the analytical, dispassionate spirit of Deism--its highly
emotional preachers used an oratory that could be transformed easily
to the printed page. the most charismatic of these men was the
Reverend George Whitefield, who beginning in 1739 preached all over
America to large crowds. In Philadelphia, he addressed an audience of
ten thousand people, whom he deeply stirred and alarmed by assuring
them of eternal hellfire if they refused to accept Christ. Benjamin
Franklin witnessed one of Whitefield's performances and responded by
offering to become his publisher. In due time, Whitefield's journals
and sermons were published by B. Franklin of Philadelphia.
But obviously I do not mean to say that print
merely influenced the form of public discourse. That does not say
much unless one connects it to the more important idea that form will
determine the nature of content. For those readers who may believe
that this idea is too "McLuhanesque" for their taste, I
offer Karl Marx from the German Ideology. "Is the Iliad
possible," he asks rhetorically, "when the printing press
and even printing machines exist? Is it not inevitable that with the
emergence of the press, the singing and the telling and the muse
cease; that is, the conditions necessary for epic poetry
disappear?"45 Marx understood well that the press was not merely
a machine but a structure for discourse, which both rules out and
insists upon certain kinds of content and, inevitably, a certain kind
of audience. He did not, himself, fully explore the matter, and
others have taken up the task. I too must try my hand at it--to
explore how the press worked as a metaphor and an epistemology to
create a serious and rational public conversation, from which we have
now been so dramatically separated.
the
Typographic Mind
the first of the seven famous debates between
Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas took place on August 21, 1858,
in Ottowa, Illinois. Their arrangement provided that Douglas would
speak first, for one hour; Lincoln would take an hour and a half to
reply; Douglas, a half hour to rebut Lincoln's reply. This debate was
considerably shorter than those to which the two men were accustomed.
In fact, they had tangled several times before, and all of their
encounters had been much lengthier and more exhausting. For example,
on October 16, 1854, in Peoria, Illinois, Douglas delivered a
three-hour address to which Lincoln, by agreement,
was to
respond. When Lincoln's turn came, he reminded the audience that it
was already 5 p.m., that he would probably require as much time as
Douglas and that Douglas was still scheduled for a rebuttal. He
proposed, therefore, that the audience go home, have dinner, and
return refreshed for four more hours of talk. the audience amiably
agreed, and matters proceeded as Lincoln had outlined. What kind of
audience was this? Who were these people who could so cheerfully
accommodate themselves to seven hours of oratory? It should be noted,
by the way, that Lincoln and Douglas Were not presidential
candidates; at the time of their encounter in Peoria they were not
even candidates for the United States Senate. But their audiences
were not especially concerned with their official status. These were
people who regarded such events as essential to their political
education, who took them to be an integral part of their social
lives, and who
were quite accustomed to extended oratorical
performances. Typically at county or state fairs, programs included
many speakers, most of whom were allotted three hours for their
arguments. And since it was preferred that speakers not go
unanswered, their opponents were allotted an equal length of time.
(One might add that the speakers were not always men. At one fair
lasting several days in Springfield, "Each evening a woman
[lectured] in the courtroom on 'Woman's Influence in the Great
Progressive Movements of the Day." "2) Moreover, these
people did not rely on fairs or special events to get their fill of
oratory. the tradition of the "stump" speaker was widely
practiced, especially in the western states. By the stump of a felled
tree or some equivalent open space, a speaker would gather an
audience, and, as the saying had it, "take the stump" for
two or three hours. Although audiences were mostly respectful and
attentive, they were not quiet or unemotional. Throughout the
Lincoln-Douglas debates, for example, people shouted encouragement to
the speakers ("You tell 'em, Abe!") or voiced terse
expressions of scorn ("Answer that one, if you can").
Applause was frequent, usually reserved for a humorous or elegant
phrase or a cogent point. At the first debate in Ottowa, Douglas
responded to lengthy applause with a remarkable and revealing
statement. "My friends," he said, "silence will be
more acceptable to me in the discussion of these questions than
applause. I desire to address myself to your judgment, your
understanding, and your consciences, and not to your passions or your
enthusiasms." 3 As to the conscience of the audience, or even
its judgment, it is difficult to say very much. But as to its
understanding, a great deal can be assumed. For one thing, its
attention span would obviously have been extraordinary by current
standards. Is there any audience of Americans today who could endure
seven hours of talk? or five? or three? Especially without pictures
of any kind?
Second,
these audiences must have had an equally extraordinary capacity to
comprehend lengthy and complex sentences aurally. In
Douglas'
Ottowa speech he included in his one-hour address three long, legally
phrased resolutions of the Abolition platform. Lincoln, in his reply,
read even longer passages from a published speech he had delivered on
a previous occasion. For all of Lincoln's celebrated economy of
style, his sentence structure in the debates was intricate and
subtle, as was Douglas'. In the second debate, at Freeport, Illinois,
Lincoln rose to answer Douglas in the following words:
It will
readily occur to you that I cannot, in half an hour, notice all the
things that so able a man as Judge Douglas can say in an hour and a
half; and I hope, therefore, if there be anything that he has said
upon which you would like to hear something from me, but which I omit
to comment upon, you will bear in mind that it would be expecting an
impossibility for me to cover his whole ground.
It is hard to imagine the present occupant of the
White House being capable of constructing such clauses in similar
circumstances. And if he were, he would surely do so at the risk of
burdening the comprehension or concentration of his audience. People
of a television culture need "plain language" both aurally
and visually, and will even go so far as to require it in some
circumstances by law. the Gettysburg Address would probably have been
largely incomprehensible to a 1985 audience. the Lincoln-Douglas
audience apparently had a considerable grasp of the issues being
debated, including knowledge of historical events and complex
political matters. At Ottowa, Douglas put seven interrogatives to
Lincoln, all of which would have been rhetorically pointless unless
the audience was familiar with the Dred Scott decision, the quarrel
between Douglas and President Buchanan, the disaffection of some
Democrats, the Abolition platform, and Lincoln's famous "House
divided" speech at Cooper Union. Further, in answering Douglas'
questions in a later debate, Lincoln made a subtle distinction
between what he was, or was not, "pledged" to uphold and
what he actually believed, which he surely would not have attempted
unless he assumed the audience could grasp his point. Finally, while
both speakers employed some of the more simple-minded weapons of
argumentative language (e.g., name-calling and bombastic
generalities), they consistently drew upon more complex rhetorical
resources--sarcasm, irony, paradox, elaborated metaphors, fine
distinctions and the exposure of contradiction, none of which would
have advanced their respective causes unless the audience was fully
aware of the means being employed. It would be false, however, to
give the impression that these 1858 audiences were models of
intellectual
propriety. All
of the Lincoln-Douglas debates were conducted amid a
carnival-like
atmosphere. Bands played (although not during the
debates),
hawkers sold their wares, children romped, liquor was
available.
These were important social events as well as rhetorical
performances,
but this did not trivialize them. As
I have indicated,
these
audiences were made up of people whose intellectual lives and
public
business were fully integrated into their social world. As
Winthrop
Hudson has pointed out, even Methodist camp meetings combined
picnics with
opportunities to listen to oratory. Indeed, most of the
camp grounds
originally established for religious
inspiration--Chautauqua,
New York; Ocean Grove, New Jersey; Bayview,
Michigan;
Junaluska, North Carolina--were eventually transformed into
conference
centers, serving educational and intellectual functions. In
other words,
the use of language as a means of complex argument was an
important,
pleasurable and common form of discourse in almost every
public
arena. To understand the audience to whom Lincoln and Douglas
directed
their memorable language, we must remember that these people
were the
grandsons and granddaughters of the Enlightenment (American
version). They
were the progeny of Franklin, Jefferson, Madison and Tom
Paine, the
inheritors of
the Empire
of Reason, as Henry Steele Commager has called eighteenth-century
America. It is true that among their number were frontiersmen, some
of whom were barely literate, and immigrants to whom English was
still strange. It is also true that by 1858, the photograph and
telegraph had been invented, the advance guard of a new epistemology
that would put an end to the Empire of Reason. But this would not
become evident until the twentieth century. At the time of the
Lincoln-Douglas debates, America was in the middle years of its most
glorious literary outpouring. In 1858, Edwin Markham was six years
old; Mark Twain was twenty-three; Emily Dickinson, twenty-eight;
Whitman and James Russell Lowell, thirty-nine; Thoreau, forty-one;
Melville, forty-five; Whittier and Longfellow, fifty-one; Hawthorne
and Emerson, fifty-four and fifty-five; Poe had died nine years
before. I choose the Lincoln-Douglas debates as a starting point for
this chapter not only because they were the preeminent example of
political discourse in the mid-nineteenth century but also because
they illustrate the power of typography to control the character of
that discourse. Both the speakers and their audience were habituated
to a kind of oratory that may be described as literary. For all of
the hoopla and socializing surrounding the event, the speakers had
little to offer, and audiences little to expect, but language. And
the language that was offered was clearly modeled on the style of the
written word. To anyone who has read what Lincoln and Douglas said,
this is obvious from beginning to
end. the
debates opened, in fact, with Douglas making the following
introduction, highly characteristic of everything that was said
afterward:
Ladies and
Gentlemen: I appear before you today for the purpose of discussing
the leading political topics which now agitate the public mind. By an
arrangement between Mr. Lincoln and myself, we are present here today
for the purpose of having a joint discussion, as the representatives
of the two great political parties of the
State and
Union, upon the principles in issue between those parties, and this
vast concourse of people shows the deep feeling which pervades the
public mind in regard to the questions dividing us.
This language is pure print. That the occasion
required it to be spoken aloud cannot obscure that fact. And that the
audience was able to process it through the ear is remarkable only to
people whose culture no longer resonates powerfully with the printed
word. Not only did Lincoln and Douglas write all their speeches in
advance, but they also planned their rebuttals in writing. Even the
spontaneous interactions between the speakers were expressed in a
sentence structure, sentence length and rhetorical organization which
took their form from writing. To be sure, there were elements of pure
orality in their presentations. After all, neither speaker was
indifferent to the moods of the audiences. Nonetheless, the resonance
of typography was ever-present. Here was argument and
counterargument, claim and counterclaim, criticism of relevant texts,
the most careful scrutiny of the previously uttered sentences of
one's opponent. In short, the Lincoln-Douglas debates may be
described as expository prose lifted whole from the printed page.
That is the meaning of Douglas' reproach to the audience. He claimed
that his appeal was to understanding and not to passion, as if the
audience were to be silent, reflective readers, and his language the
text which they must ponder. Which brings us, of course, to the
questions, What are the implications for public discourse of a
written, or typographic, metaphor? What is the character of its
content? What does it demand of the public? What uses of the mind
does it favor? One must begin, I think, by pointing to the obvious
fact that the written word, and an oratory based upon it, has a
content: a semantic, paraphrasable, propositional content. This may
sound odd, but since I shall be arguing soon enough that much of our
discourse today has only a marginal propositional content, I must
stress the point here. Whenever language is the principal medium of
communication--especially language controlled by the rigors of
print--an idea, a fact, a claim is the inevitable result. the idea
may be banal, the fact irrelevant, the
claim false,
but there is no escape from meaning when language is the instrument
guiding one's thought. Though one may accomplish it from time to
time, it is very hard to say nothing when employing a written English
sentence. What else is exposition good for? Words have very little to
recommend them except as carriers of meaning. the shapes of written
words are not especially interesting to look at. Even the sounds of
sentences of spoken words are rarely engaging except when composed by
those with extraordinary poetic gifts. If a sentence refuses to issue
forth a fact, a request, a question, an assertion, an explanation, it
is nonsense, a mere grammatical shell. As a consequence a
language-centered discourse such as was characteristic of
eighteenth-and nineteenth-century America tends to be both
content-laden and serious, all the more so when it takes its form
from print. It is serious because meaning demands to be understood. A
written sentence calls upon its author to say something, upon its
reader to know the import of what is said. And when an author and
reader are struggling with semantic meaning, they are engaged in the
most serious challenge to the intellect. This is especially the case
with the act of reading, for authors are not always trustworthy. They
lie, they become confused, they over-generalize, they abuse logic
and, sometimes, common sense. the reader must come armed, in a
serious state of intellectual readiness. This is not easy because he
comes to the text alone. In reading, one's responses are isolated,
one's intellect thrown back on its own resources. To be confronted by
the cold abstractions of printed sentences is to look upon language
bare, without the assistance of either beauty or community. Thus,
reading is by its nature a serious business. It is also, of course,
an essentially rational activity.
From Erasmus in the sixteenth century to
Elizabeth Eiseno stein in the twentieth, almost every scholar who has
grappled with the question of what reading does to one's habits of
mind has concluded that the process encourages rationality; that the
sequential, propositional character of the written word fosters what
Walter Ong calls the "analytic management of knowledge." To
engage the written word means to follow a line of thought, which
requires considerable powers of classifying, inference-making and
reasoning. It means to uncover lies, confusions, and
overgeneralizations, to detect abuses of logic and common sense. It
also means to weigh ideas, to compare and contrast assertions, to
connect one generalization to another. To accomplish this, one must
achieve a certain distance from the words themselves, which is, in
fact, encouraged by the isolated and impersonal text. That is why a
good reader does not cheer an apt sentence or pause to applaud even
an inspired paragraph. Analytic thought is too busy for that, and too
detached. I do not mean to imply that prior to the written word
analytic
thought was
not possible. I am referring here not to the potentialities of the
individual mind but to the predispositions of a cultural mind-set. In
a culture dominated by print, public discourse tends to be
characterized by a coherent, orderly arrangement of facts and ideas.
the public for whom it is intended is generally competent to manage
such discourse. In a print culture, writers make mistakes when they
lie, contradict themselves, fail to support their generalizations,
try to enforce illogical connections. In a print culture, readers
make mistakes when they don't notice, or even worse, don't care. In
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, print put forward a
definition of intelligence that gave priority to the objective,
rational use of the mind and at the same time encouraged forms of
public discourse with serious, logically ordered content. It is no
accident that the Age of Reason was coexistent with the growth of a
print culture, first in Europe and then in America. the spread of
typography kindled the hope that the world and
its manifold mysteries could at least be
comprehended, predicted, controlled. It is in the eighteenth century
that the scientific method preeminent example of the analytic
management of knowledge--begins its refashioning of the world. It is
in the eighteenth century that capitalism is demonstrated to be a
rational and liberal system of economic life, that religious
superstition comes under furious attack, that the divine right of
kings is shown to be a mere prejudice, that the idea of continuous
progress takes hold, and that the necessity of universal literacy
through education becomes apparent. Perhaps the most optimistic
expression of everything that typography implied is contained in the
following paragraph from John Stuart Mill's autobiography:
So complete
was my father's reliance on the influence of mankind, wherever
[literacy] is allowed to reach them, that he felt as if all would be
gained if the whole population were taught to read, if all sorts of
opinions were allowed to be addressed to them by word and in writing,
and if, by means of the suffrage, they could nominate a legislature
to give effect to the opinion they adopted.
This was, of course, a hope never quite realized.
At no point in the history of England or America (or anyplace else)
has the dominion of reason been so total as the elder Mill imagined
typography would allow. Nonetheless, it is not difficult to
demonstrate that in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, American
public discourse, being rooted in the bias of the printed word, was
serious, inclined toward rational argument and presentation, and,
therefore, made up of meaningful content. Let us take religious
discourse as an illustration of this point. In the
eighteenth
century believers were as much influenced by the rationalist
tradition as anyone else. the New World offered freedom of religion
to all, which implied that no force other than reason itself could be
employed to bring light to the unbeliever. "Here Deism will have
its full chance," said Ezra Stiles
in one of
his famous sermons in 1783. "Nor need libertines [any] more to
complain of being overcome by any weapons but the gentle, the
powerful ones of argument and truth." Leaving aside the
libertines, we know that the Deists were certainly given their full
chance. It is quite probable, in fact, that the first four presidents
of the United States were Deists. Jefferson, certainly, did not
believe in the divinity of Jesus Christ and, while he was President,
wrote a version of the Four Gospels from which he removed all
references to "fantastic" events, retaining only the
ethical content of Jesus' teaching. Legend has it that when Jefferson
was elected President, old women hid their Bibles and shed tears.
What they might have done had Tom Paine become President or been
offered some high post in the government is hard to imagine. In the
Age of Reason, Paine attacked the Bible and all subsequent Christian
theology. Of Jesus Christ, Paine allowed that he was a virtuous and
amiable man but charged that the stories of his divinity were absurd
and profane, which, in the way of the rationalist, he tried to prove
by a close textual analysis of the Bible. "All national
institutions of churches," he wrote, "whether Jewish,
Christian or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions,
set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and
profit." 9 Because of the Age of Reason, Paine lost his standing
among the pantheon of Founding Fathers (and to this day is treated
ambiguously in American history textbooks). But Ezra Stiles did not
say that libertines and Deists would be loved: only that with reason
as their jury, they would have their say in an open court. As indeed
they did. Assisted by the initial enthusiasms evoked by the French
Revolution, the Deist attack on churches as enemies of progress and
on religious superstition as enemy of rationality became a popular
movement.s fought back, of course, and when Deism ceased to attract
interest, they fought among themselves. Toward the mid-eighteenth
century, Theodore Frelinghuysen and William Tennent led a revivalist
movement among Presbyterians. They were followed by the
three great
figures associated with religious "awakenings" in
America--Jonathan Edwards, George Whitefield, and, later in the
nineteenth century, Charles Finney. These men were spectacularly
successful preachers, whose appeal reached regions of consciousness
far beyond where reason rules. Of Whitefield, it was said that by
merely
pronouncing
the word "Mesopotamia," he evoked tears in his audience.
Perhaps that is why Henry Coswell remarked in 1839 that "religious
mania is said to be the prevailing form of insanity in the United
States." Yet it is essential to bear in mind that quarrels over
doctrine between the revivalist movements of the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries and the established churches fiercely opposed to
them were argued in pamphlets and books in largely rational,
logically ordered language. It would be a serious mistake to think of
Billy Graham or any other television revivalist as a latter-day
Jonathan Edwards or Charles Finney. Edwards was one of the most
brilliant and creative minds ever produced by America. His
contribution to aesthetic theory was almost as important as his
contribution to theology. His interests were mostly academic; he
spent long hours each day in his study. He did not speak to his
audiences extemporaneously. He read his sermons, which were tightly
knit and closely reasoned expositions of theological doctrine.
Audiences may have been moved emotionally by Edwards' language, but
they were, first and foremost, required to understand it. Indeed
Edwards' fame was largely a result of a book, Faithful Narrative of
the Surprising Work of God in the Conversion of Many Hundred Souls in
Northampton, published in 1737. A later book, A Treatise Concerning
Religious Affections, published in 1746, is considered to be among
the most remarkable psychological studies ever produced in America.
Unlike the principal figures in today's "great awakening"--Oral
Roberts, Jerry Falwell, Jimmy Swaggart, et all.--yesterday's leaders
of revivalist movements in America were men of learning, faith in
reason, and generous expository gifts. Their
disputes with the religious establishments were
as much about theology and the nature of consciousness as they were
about religious inspiration. Finhey, for example, was no "backcountry
rustic," as he was sometimes characterized by his doctrinal
opponents. 3 He had been trained as a lawyer, wrote an important book
on systematic theology, and ended his career as a professor at and
then president of Oberlin College. the doctrinal disputes among
religionists not only were argued in carefully drawn exposition in
the eighteenth century, but in the nineteenth century Were settled by
the extraordinary expedient of founding colleges. It is sometimes
forgotten that the churches in America laid the foundation of our
system of higher education. Harvard, of course, was established
early--in 1636--for the purpose of providing learned ministers to the
Congregational Church. And, sixty-five years later, when
Congregationalists quarreled among themselves over doctrine, Yale
College was founded to correct the lax influences of Harvard (and, to
this day, claims it has the same burden). the strong intellectual
strain of the Congregationalists was matched by other denominations,
certainly in
their passion for starting colleges. the Presbyterians founded, among
other schools, the University of Tennessee in 1784, Washington and
Jefferson in 1802 and Lafayette in 1826. the Baptists founded, among
others, Colgate (1817), George Washington (1821), Furman (1826),
Denison (1832) and Wake Forest (1834). the Episcopalians founded
Hobart (1822), Trinity (1823) and Kenyon (1824). the Methodists
founded eight colleges between 1830 and 1851, including Wesleyan,
Emory, and Depauw. In addition to Harvard and Yale, the
Congregationalists founded Williams (1793), Middlebury (1800),
Amherst ( 1821 ) and Oberlin (1833). If this preoccupation with
literacy and learning be a "form of insanity," as Coswell
said of religious life in America, then let there be more of it. In
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, religious thought and
institutions in America were dominated
by an austere, learned, and intellectual form of
discourse that is largely absent from religious life today. No
clearer example of the difference between earlier and modern forms of
public discourse can be found than in the contrast between the
theological arguments of Jonathan Edwards and those of, say, Jerry
Falwell, or Billy Graham, or Oral Roberts. the formidable content to
Edwards' theology must inevitably engage the intellect; if there is
such a content to the theology of the television evangelicals, they
have not yet made it known. the differences between the character of
discourse in a print-based culture and the character of discourse in
a television-based culture are also evident if one looks at the legal
system. In a print-based culture, lawyers tended to be well educated,
devoted to reason, and capable of impressive expositional argument.
It is a matter frequently overlooked in histories of America that in
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the legal profession
represented "a sort of privileged body in the scale of
intellect," as Tocqueville remarked. Folk heroes were made of
some of those lawyers, like Sergeant Prentiss of Alabama, or "Honest"
Abe Lincoln of Illinois, whose craftiness in manipulating juries was
highly theatrical, not unlike television's version of a trial lawyer.
But the great figures of American juris-prudence-John Marshall,
Joseph Story, James Kent, David Hoffman, William Wirt and Daniel
Webster--were models of intellectual elegance and devotion to
rationality and scholarship. They believed that democracy, for all of
its obvious virtues, posed the danger of releasing an undisciplined
individualism. Their aspiration was to save civilization in America
by "creating a rationality for the law." 4 As a consequence
of this exalted view, they believed that law must not be merely a
learned profession but a liberal one. the famous law professor Job
Tyson argued that a lawyer must be familiar with the works of Seneca,
Cicero, and Plato.5 George Sharswood, perhaps envisioning the
degraded state of legal education in the twentieth century, remarked
in
1854 that to
read law exclusively will damage the
mind,
"shackle it to the technicalities with which it has become so
familiar,
and disable it from taking enlarged and comprehensive views
even of
topics falling within its compass." 16 the insistence on a
liberal,
rational and articulate legal mind was reinforced by the fact
that America
had a written constitution, as did all of its component
states, and
that law did not grow by chance but was explicitly
formulated. A
lawyer needed to be a writing and reading man par
excellence,
for reason was the principal authority upon which legal
questions
were to be decided. John Marshall was, of course, the great
"paragon
of reason, as vivid a symbol to the American imagination as
Natty
Bumppod. He
was the preeminent example of Typographic
Man--detached,
analytical, devoted to logic, abhorring contradiction.
It was said
of him that he never used analogy as a principal support of his
arguments. Rather, he introduced most of his decisions with the
phrase "It is admitted .... "Once one admitted his
premises, one was
usually forced to accept his conclusion. To an
extent difficult to imagine today, earlier Americans were familiar
not only with the great legal issues of their time but even with the
language famous lawyers had used to argue their cases. This was
especially true of Daniel Webster, and it was only natural that
Stephen Vincent Bent in his famous short story would have chosen
Daniel Webster to contend with the Devil. How could the Devil triumph
over a man whose language, described by Supreme Court Justice Joseph
Story, had the following characteristics?
?. his clearness and downright simplicity of
statement, his vast comprehensiveness of topics, his fertility in
illustrations drawn from practical sources; his keen analysis, and
suggestion of difficulties; his power of disentangling a complicated
proposition, and resolving it in elements so plain as to reach the
most common minds; his vigor in generalizations, planting his own
arguments behind the whole battery of his opponents; his wariness and
caution not to betray himself by heat into untenable positions, or to
spread his forces over useless ground.
I quote this
in full because it is the best nineteenth-century description I know
of the character of discourse expected of one whose mind is formed by
the printed word. It is exactly the ideal and model James Mill had in
mind in prophesying about the wonders of typography. And if the model
was somewhat unreachable, it stood nonetheless as an ideal to which
every lawyer aspired. Such an ideal went far beyond the legal
profession or the ministry in its influence. Even in the everyday
world of commerce, the resonances of rational, typographic discourse
were to be found. If we may take advertising to
be the voice of commerce, then its history tells very clearly that in
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries those with products to sell
took their customers to be not unlike Daniel Webster: they assumed
that potential buyers were literate, rational, analytical. Indeed,
the history of newspaper advertising in America may be considered,
all by itself, as a metaphor of the descent of the typographic mind,
beginning, as it does, with reason, and ending, as it does, with
entertainment. In Frank Presbrey's classic study the History and
Development of Advertising, he discusses the decline of typography,
dating its demise in the late 1860's and early 1870's. He refers to
the period before then as the "dark ages" of typographical
display. the dark ages to which he refers began in 1704 when the
first paid advertisements appeared in an American newspaper, the
Boston News-Letter. These were three in number, occupying altogether
four inches of single-column space. One of them offered a reward for
the capture of a thief; another offered a reward for the return of an
anvil that was "taken up" by some unknown party. the third
actually offered something for sale, and, in fact, is not unlike real
estate advertisements one might see in today's New York Times:
At Oysterbay, on Long Island in the Province of
N. York. There is a very good Fulling-Mill, to be Let or Sold, as
also a Plantation, having on it a large new Brick house, and another
good house by it for a Kitchen & workhouse, with a Barn, Stable a
young Orchard and 20 acres clear land. the Mill is to be Let with or
without the Plantation; Enquire of Mr. William Bradford Printer in N.
York, and know further.
For more
than a century and a half afterward, advertisements took this form
with minor alterations. For example, sixty-four years after Mr.
Bradford advertised an estate in Oyster Bay, the legendary Paul
Revere placed the following advertisement in the Boston Gazette:
Whereas many
persons are so unfortunate as to lose their Fore-Teeth by Accident,
and otherways, to their great Detriment, not only in Looks, but
Speaking both in Public and Private:--This is to inform all such,
that they may have them re-placed with false Ones, that look as well
as the Natural, and Answers the End of Speaking to all Intents, by
PauL REVERE, Goldsmith, near the Head of Dr. Clarke's Wharf, Boston.
Revere went on to explain in another paragraph
that those whose false teeth had been fitted by John Baker, and who
had suffered the indignity of having them loosen, might come to
Revere to have them tightened. He indicated that he had learned how
to do this from John Baker himself. Not until almost a hundred years
after Revere's announcement were there
any serious
attempts by advertisers to overcome the lineal, typographic form
demanded by publishers.22 And not until the end of the nineteenth
century did advertising move fully into its modern mode of discourse.
As late as 1890, advertising, still understood to consist of words,
was regarded as an essentially serious and rational enterprise whose
purpose was to convey information and make claims in propositional
form. Advertising was, as Stephen Douglas said in
another context, intended to appeal to understanding, not to
passions. This is not to say that during the period of typographic
display, the claims that were put forward were true. Words cannot
guarantee their truth content. Rather, they assemble a context in
which the question, Is this true or false? is relevant. In the 1890's
that context was shattered, first by the massive intrusion of
illustrations and photographs, then by the nonpropositional use of
language. For example, in the 1890's advertisers adopted the
technique of using slogans. Presbrey contends that modern advertising
can be said to begin with the use of two such slogans: "You
press the button; we do the rest" and "See that hump."
At about the same time, jingles started to be used, and in 1892,
Procter and Gamble invited the public to submit rhymes to advertise
Ivory Soap. In 1896, HoO employed, for the first time, a picture of a
baby in a high chair, the bowl of cereal before him, his spoon in
hand, his face ecstatic. By the turn of the century, advertisers no
longer assumed rationality on the part of their potential customers.
Advertising became one part depth psychology, one part aesthetic
theory. Reason had to move itself to other arenas. To understand the
role that the printed word played in pro-riding an earlier America
with its assumptions about intelligence, truth and the nature of
discourse, one must keep in view that the act of reading in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had an entirely different quality
to it than the act of reading does today. For one thing, as I have
said, the printed word had a monopoly on both attention and
intellect, there being no other means, besides the oral tradition, to
have access to public knowledge. Public figures were known largely by
their written words, for example, not by their looks or even their
oratory. It is quite likely that most of the first fifteen presidents
of the United States would not have been recognized had they passed
the average citizen in the street. This would have been the case as
well of the great lawyers, ministers and scientists of that era. To
think about
those men was to think about what they had written, to judge them by
their public positions, their arguments, their knowledge as codified
in the printed word. You may get some sense of how we are separated
from this kind of consciousness by thinking about any of our recent
presidents; or even preachers, lawyers and scientists who are or
who have recently been public figures. Think of
Richard Nixon or Jimmy Carter or Billy Graham, or even Albert
Einstein, and what will come to your mind is an image, a picture of a
face, most likely a face on a television screen (in Einstein's case,
a photograph of a face). Of words, almost nothing will come to mind.
This is the difference between thinking in a word-centered culture
and thinking in an image-centered culture. It is also the difference
between living in a culture that provides little opportunity for
leisure, and one that provides much. the farm boy following the plow
with book in hand, the mother reading aloud to her family on a Sunday
afternoon, the merchant reading announcements of the latest clipper
arrivals --these were different kinds of readers from those of today.
There would have been little casual reading, for there was not a
great deal of time for that. Reading would have had a sacred element
in it, or if not that, would have at least occurred as a daily or
weekly ritual invested with special meaning. For we must also
remember that this was a culture without electricity. It would not
have been easy to read by either candlelight or, later, gaslight.
Doubtless, much reading was done between dawn and the start of the
day's business. What reading would have been done was done seriously,
intensely, and with steadfast purpose. the modern idea of testing a
reader's "comprehension," as distinct from something else a
reader may be doing, would have seemed an absurdity in 1790 or 1830
or 1860. What else was reading but comprehending? As far as we know,
there did not exist such a thing as a "reading problem,"
except, of course, for those who could not attend school. To attend
school meant to learn to read, for without that capacity,
one could
not participate in the culture's conversations. But most people could
read and did participate. To these people, reading was both their
connection to and their model of the world. the printed page revealed
the world, line by line, page by page, to be a serious, coherent
place, capable of management by reason, and of improvement by logical
and relevant criticism.
Almost
anywhere one looks in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, then,
one finds the resonances of the printed word and, in particular, its
inextricable relationship to all forms of public expression. It may
be true, as Charles Beard wrote, that the primary motivation of the
writers of the United States Constitution was the protection of their
economic interests. But it is also true that they assumed that
participation in public life required the capacity to negotiate the
printed word. To them, mature citizenship was not conceivable without
sophisticated literacy, which is why the voting age in most states
was set at twenty-one, and why Jefferson saw in universal education
America's
best hope. And that is also why, as Allan Nevins and Henry Steele
Commager have pointed out, the voting restrictions against those who
owned no property were frequently overlooked, but not one's inability
to read.
It may be
true, as Frederick Jackson Turner wrote, that the spirit that fired
the American mind was the fact of an ever-expanding frontier. But it
is also true, as Paul Anderson has written, that "it is no. mere
figure of speech to say that farm boys followed the plow with book in
hand, be it Shakespeare, Emerson, or Thoreau." 23 For it was not
only a frontier mentality that led Kansas to be the first state to
permit women to vote in school elections, or Wyoming the first state
to grant complete equality in the franchise. Women were probably more
adept readers than men, and even in the frontier states the principal
means of public discourse issued from the printed word. Those who
could read had, inevitably, to become part of the conversation.
It may also
be true, as Perry Miller has suggested, that the religious fervor of
Americans provided much of their energy; or, as earlier historians
told it, that America was created by an idea whose time had come. I
quarrel with none of these explanations. I merely observe that the
America they try to explain was dominated by a public discourse which
took its form from the products of the printing press. For two
centuries, America declared its intentions, expressed its ideology,
designed its laws, sold its products, created its literature and
addressed its deities with black squiggles on white Paper. It did its
talking in typography, and with that as the main feature of its
symbolic environment rose to prominence in world civilization.
the name I
give to that period of time during which the American mind submitted
itself to the sovereignty of the printing press is the Age of
Exposition. Exposition is a mode of thought, a method of learning,
and a means of expression. Almost all of the characteristics we
associate with mature discourse were amplified by typography, which
has the strongest possible bias toward exposition: a sophisticated
ability to think conceptually, deductively and sequentially; a high
valuation of reason and order; an abhorrence of contradiction; a
large capacity for detachment and objectivity; and a tolerance for
delayed response. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, for
reasons I am most anxious to explain, the Age of Exposition began to
pass, and the early signs of its replacement could be discerned. Its
replacement was to be the Age of Show Business.
the
Peek-a-Boo World
Toward the middle years of the nineteenth
century, two ideas came together whose convergence provided
twentieth-century America with a new metaphor of public discourse.
Their partnership overwhelmed the Age of Exposition, and laid the
foundation for the Age of Show Business. One of the ideas was quite
new, the other as old as the cave paintings of Altamira. We shall
come to the old idea presently. the new idea was that transportation
and communication could be disengaged from each other, that space was
not an inevitable constraint on the movement of information.
Americans of the 1800's were very much concerned with the problem of
"conquering" space. By the mid-nineteenth century, the
frontier extended to the Pacific Ocean, and a rudimentary railroad
system, begun in the 1830s had started to move people and merchandise
across the continent. But until the 1840's, information could move
only as fast as a human being could carry it; to be precise, only as
fast as a train could travel, which, to be even more precise, meant
about thirty-five miles per hour. In the face of such a limitation,
the development of America as a national community was retarded. In
the 1840's, America was still a composite of regions, each conversing
in its own ways, addressing its own interests. A continentwide
conversation was not yet possible. the solution to these problems, as
every school child used to know, was electricity. To no one's
surprise, it was an American who found a practical way to put
electricity in the service of
communication and, in doing so, eliminated the
problem of space once and for all. I refer, of course, to Samuel
Finley Breese Morse, America's first true "spaceman." His
telegraph erased state lines, collapsed regions, and, by wrapping the
continent in an information grid, created the possibility of a
unified American discourse. But at a considerable cost. For
telegraphy did something that Morse did not foresee when he
prophesied that telegraphy would make "one neighborhood of the
whole country." It destroyed the prevailing definition of
information, and in doing so gave a new meaning to public discourse.
Among the few who understood this consequence was Henry David
Thoreau, who remarked in Walden that "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." Thoreau, as it turned out, was precisely
correct. He grasped that the telegraph would create its own
definition of discourse; that it would not only permit but insist
upon a conversation between Maine and Texas; and that it would
require the content of that conversation to be different from what
Typographic
Man was accustomed to. the telegraph made a three-pronged attack on
typography's definition of discourse, introducing on a large scale
irrelevance, impotence, and incoherence. These demons of discourse
were aroused by the fact that telegraphy gave a form of legitimacy to
the idea of context-free information; that is, to the idea that the
value of information need not be tied to any function it might serve
in social and political decision-making and action, but may attach
merely to its novelty, interest, and curiosity. the telegraph made
information into a commodity, a "thing" that could be
bought and sold irrespective of its uses or meaning.
But it did
not do so alone. the potential of the telegraph to transform
information into a commodity might never have been realized, except
for the partnership between the telegraph and the press. the penny
newspaper, emerging slightly before telegraphy, in the 1830's, had
already begun the process of elevating irrelevance to the status of
news. Such papers as Benjamin Day's New York Sun and James Bennett's
New York Herald turned away from the tradition of news as reasoned
(if biased) political opinion and urgent commercial information and
filled their pages with accounts of sensational events, mostly
concerning crime and sex. While such "human interest news"
played little role in shaping the decisions and actions of readers,
it was at least local--about places and people within their
experience-and it was not always tied to the moment. the
human-interest stories of the penny newspapers had a timeless
quality; their power to engage lay not so much in their currency as
in their transcendence. Nor did all newspapers occupy themselves with
such content. For the most part, the information they provided was
not only local but largely functional--tied to the problems and
decisions readers had to address in order to manage their personal
and community affairs. the telegraph changed all that, and with
astonishing speed. Within months of Morse's first public
demonstration, the local and the timeless had lost their central
position in newspapers, eclipsed by the dazzle of distance and speed.
In fact, the first known use of the telegraph by a newspaper occurred
one day after Morse gave his historic demonstration of telegraphy's
workability. Using the same Washington-to-Baltimore line Morse had
constructed, the Baltimore Patriot gave its readers information about
action taken by the House of Representatives on the Oregon issue. the
paper concluded its report by noting: "... we are thus enabled
to give our readers information from Washington up to two o'clock.
This is indeed the annihilation of space." 2 For a brief time,
practical problems (mostly involving the
scarcity of
telegraph lines) preserved something of the old definition
of news as functional information. But the
foresighted among the nation's publishers were quick to see where the
future lay, and committed their full resources to the wiring of the
continent. William Swain, the owner of the Philadelphia Public
Ledger, not only invested heavily in the Magnetic Telegraph Company,
the first commercial telegraph corporation, but became its president
in 1850. It was not long until the fortunes of newspapers came to
depend not on the quality or utility of the news they provided, but
on how much, from what distances, and at what speed. James Bennett of
the New York Herald boasted that in the first week of 1848, his paper
contained 79,000 words of telegraphic content 3--of what relevance to
his readers, he didn't say. Only four years after Morse opened the
nation's first telegraph line on May 24, 1844, the Associated Press
was founded, and news from nowhere, addressed to no one in
particular, began to crisscross the nation. Wars, crimes, crashes,
fires, floods--much of it the social and political equivalent of
Adelaide's whooping cough--became the content of what people called
"the news of the day." As Thoreau implied, telegraphy made
relevance irrelevant. the abundant flow of information had very
little or nothing to do with those to whom it was addressed; that is,
with any social or intellectual context in which their lives were
embedded. Coleridge's famous line about water everywhere without a
drop to drink may serve as a metaphor of a decontextualized
information environment: In a sea of information, there was very
little of it to use. A man in Maine and a man in Texas could
converse, but not about anything either of them knew or cared very
much about. the telegraph may have made the country into "one
neighborhood," but it was a peculiar one, populated by strangers
who knew nothing but the most superficial facts about each other.
Since we live today in just such a neighborhood (now some-
times called
a "global village"), you may get a sense of what is meant
by context-free information by asking yourself the following
question: How often does it occur that information provided you on
morning radio or television, or in the morning newspaper, causes you
to alter your plans for the day, or to take some action you would not
otherwise have taken, or provides insight into some problem you are
required to solve? For most of us, news of the weather will sometimes
have such consequences; for investors, news of the stock market;
perhaps an occasional story about a crime will do it, if by chance
the crime occurred near where you live or involved someone you know.
But most of our daily news is inert, consisting of information that
gives us something to talk about but cannot lead to any meaningful
action. This fact is the principal legacy of the telegraph: By
generating an abundance of irrelevant information, it dramatically
altered what may be called the "information-action ratio."
In both oral
and typographic cultures, information derives its importance from the
possibilities of action. Of course, in any communication environment,
input (what one is informed about) always exceeds output (the
possibilities of action based on information). But the situation
created by telegraphy, and then exacerbated by later technologies,
made the relationship between information and action both abstract
and remote. For the first time in human history, people were faced
with the problem of information glut, which means that simultaneously
they were faced with the problem of a diminished social and political
potency.
You may get
a sense of what this means by asking yourself another series of
questions: What steps do you plan to take to reduce the conflict in
the Middle East? Or the rates of inflation, crime and unemployment?
What are your plans for preserving the environment or reducing the
risk of nuclear war? What do you plan to do about NATO, OPEC, the
CIA, affirmative action, and the monstrous treatment of the Baha'is
in Iran? I shall take
the liberty
of answering for you: You plan to do nothing about them. You may, of
course, cast a ballot for someone who claims to have some plans, as
well as the power to act. But this you can do only once every two or
four years by giving one hour of your time, hardly a satisfying means
of expressing the broad range of opinions you hold. Voting, we might
even say, is the next to last refuge of the politically impotent. the
last refuge is, of course, giving your opinion to a pollster, who
will get a version of it through a desiccated question, and then will
submerge it in a Niagara of similar opinions, and convert them
into--what else?--another piece of news. Thus, we have here a great
loop of impotence: the news elicits from you a variety of opinions
about which you can do nothing except to offer them as more news,
about which you can do nothing.
Prior to the
age of telegraphy, the information-action ratio was sufficiently
close so that most people had a sense of being able to control some
of the contingencies in their lives. What people knew about had
action-value. In the information world created by telegraphy, this
sense of potency was lost, precisely because the whole world became
the context for news. Everything became everyone's business. For the
first time, we were sent information which answered no question we
had asked, and which, in any case, did not permit the right of reply.
We may say
then that the contribution of the telegraph to public
discourse
was to dignify irrelevance and amplify impotence. But this was not
all: Telegraphy also made public discourse essentially incoherent. It
brought into being a world of broken time and broken attention, to
use Lewis Mumford's phrase. the principal strength of the telegraph
was its capacity to move information, not collect it, explain it or
analyze it. In this respect, telegraphy was the exact opposite of
typography. books, for example, are an excellent container for the
accumulation, quiet scrutiny and organized analysis of information
and ideas. It takes time to write a book, and to read one; time to
discuss its contents and to make judgments about their merit,
including the form of their presentation. A book
is an attempt to make thought permanent and to contribute to the
great conversation conducted by authors of the past. Therefore,
civilized people everywhere consider the burning of a book a vile
form of anti-intellectualism. But the telegraph demands that we burn
its contents. the value of telegraphy is undermined by applying the
tests of permanence, continuity or coherence. the telegraph is suited
only to the flashing of messages, each to be quickly replaced by a
more up-to-date message. Facts push other facts into and then out of
consciousness at speeds that neither permit nor require evaluation.
the telegraph introduced a kind of public conversation whose form had
startling characteristics: Its language was the language of
headlines--sensational, fragmented, impersonal. News took the form of
slogans, to be noted with excitement, to be forgotten with dispatch.
Its language was also entirely discontinuous. One message had no
connection to that which preceded or followed it. Each "headline"
stood alone as its own context. the receiver of the news had to
provide a meaning if he could. the sender was under no obligation to
do so. And because of all this, the world as depicted by the
telegraph began to appear unmanageable, even undecipherable. the
line-by-line, sequential, continuous form of the printed page slowly
began to lose its resonance as a metaphor of how knowledge was to be
acquired and how the world was to be understood. "Knowing"
the facts took on a new meaning, for it did not imply that one
understood implications, background, or connections. Telegraphic
discourse permitted no time for historical perspectives and gave no
priority to the qualitative. To the telegraph, intelligence meant
knowing of lots of things, not knowing about them. Thus, to the
reverent question posed by Morse--What hath God wrought?--a
disturbing answer came back: a neighborhood of strangers and
pointless quantity; a world of fragments and discontinuities. God, of
course, had nothing to do with it.
And yet, for all of the power of the telegraph,
had it stood alone as a new metaphor for discourse, it is likely that
print culture would have
withstood its assault; would, at least, have held
its ground. As it happened, at almost exactly the same time Morse was
reconceiving the meaning of information, Louis Daguerre was
reconceiving the meaning of nature; one might even say, of reality
itself. As Daguerre remarked in 1838 in a notice designed to attract
investors, "the daguerreotype is not merely an instrument which
serves to draw nature... [it] gives her the power to reproduce
herself." 4 Of course both the need and the power to draw nature
have always implied reproducing nature, refashioning it to make it
comprehensible and manageable. the earliest cave paintings were quite
possibly visual projections of a hunt that had not yet taken place,
wish fulfillments of an anticipated subjection of nature. Reproducing
nature, in other words, is a very old idea. But Daguerre did not have
this meaning of "reproduce" in mind. He meant to announce
that the photograph would invest everyone with the power to duplicate
nature as often and wherever one liked. He meant to say he had
invented the world's first "cloning" device, that the
photograph was to visual experience what the printing press was to
the written word. In point of fact, the daguerreotype was not quite
capable of achieving such an equation. It was not until William Henry
Fox Talbot, an English mathematician and linguist, invented the
process of preparing a negative from which any number of positives
could be made that the mass printing and publication of photographs
became possible. the name "photography" was given to this
process by the famous astronomer Sir John F. W. Herschel. It is an
odd name since it literally means "writing with light."
Perhaps Herschel meant the name to be taken ironically, since it must
have been clear from the beginning that photography and writing (in
fact, language in any form) do not inhabit the same universe of
discourse. Nonetheless, ever since the process was named it has been
the custom
to speak of photography as a "language." the metaphor is
risky because it tends to obscure the fundamental differences between
the two modes of conversation. To begin with, photography is a
language that speaks only in particularities. Its vocabulary of
images is limited to concrete representation. Unlike words and
sentences, the photograph does not present to us an idea or concept
about the world, except as we use language itself to convert the
image to idea. By itself, a photograph cannot deal with the unseen,
the remote, the internal, the abstract. It does not speak of "man,"
only of a man; not of "tree," only of a tree. You cannot
produce a photograph of "nature," any more than a
photograph of "the sea." You can only photograph a
particular fragment of the here-and-now--a cliff of a certain
terrain, in a certain condition of light; a wave at a moment in time,
from a particular point of view. And just as "nature" and
"the sea" cannot be photographed, such larger abstractions
as truth, honor, love, falsehood
cannot be
talked about in the lexicon of pictures. For "showing of"
and "talking about" are two very different kinds of
processes. "Pictures," Gavriel Salomon has written, "need
to be recognized, words need to be understood." 6 By this he
means that the photograph presents the world as object; language, the
world as idea. For even the simplest act of naming a thing is an act
of thinking--of comparing one thing with others, selecting certain
features in common, ignoring what is different, and making an
imaginary category. There is no such thing in nature as "man"
or "tree." the universe offers no such categories or
simplifications; only flux and infinite variety. the photograph
documents and celebrates the particularities of this infinite
variety. Language makes them comprehensible.
the
photograph also lacks a syntax, which deprives it of a capacity to
argue with the world. As an "objective" slice of
space-time, the photograph testifies that someone was there or
something happened. Its testimony is powerful but it offers no
opinions--no "should-have-beens" or "might-have-beens."
Photography is preeminently a world of fact, not
of dispute about facts or of conclusions to be drawn from them. But
this is not to say photography lacks an epistemological bias. As
Susan Sontag has observed, a photograph implies "that we know
about the world if we accept it as the camera records it." ?
But, as she further observes, all understanding begins with our not
accepting the world as it appears. Language, of course, is the medium
we use to challenge, dispute, and cross-examine what comes into view,
what is on the surface. the words "true" and "false"
come from the universe of language, and no other. When applied to a
photograph, the question, Is it true? means only, Is this a
reproduction of a real slice of space-time? If the answer is "Yes,"
there are no grounds for argument, for it makes no sense to disagree
with an unfaked photograph. the photograph itself makes no arguable
propositions, makes no extended and unambiguous commentary. It offers
no assertions to refute, so it is not refutable.
the way in
which the photograph records experience is also different from the
way of language. Language makes sense only when it is presented as a
sequence of propositions. Meaning is distorted when a word or
sentence is, as we say, taken out of context; when a reader or
listener is deprived of what was said before, and after. But there is
no such thing as a photograph taken out of context, for a photograph
does not require one. In fact, the point of photography is to isolate
images from context, so as to make them visible in a different way.
In a world of photographic images, his. Sontag writes, "all
borders...
seem
arbitrary. Anything can be separated, can be made discontinuous, from
anything else: All that is necessary is to frame the subject
differently." 8 She is remarking on the capacity of photographs
to perform a peculiar kind of dismembering of reality, a wrenching of
moments out of their contexts, and a juxtaposing of events and things
that have no logical or historical connection with each other. Like
telegraphy, photography recreates the world as a series of
idiosyncratic events. There is no
beginning,
middle, or end in a world of photographs, as there is none implied by
telegraphy. the world is atomized. There is only a present and it
need not be part of any story that can be told. That the image and
the word have different functions, work at different levels of
abstraction, and require different modes of response will not come as
a new idea to anyone. Painting is at least three times as old as
writing, and the place of imagery in the repertoire of communication
instruments was quite well understood in the nineteenth century. What
was new in the mid-nineteenth century was the sudden and massive
intrusion of the photograph and other iconographs into the symbolic
environment. This event is what Daniel Boorstin in his pioneering
book the Image calls "the graphic revolution." By this
phrase, Boorstin means to call attention to the fierce assault on
language made by forms of mechanically reproduced imagery that spread
unchecked throughout American culture--photo-graphs, prints, posters,
drawings, advertisements. I choose the word "assault"
deliberately here, to amplify the point implied in Boorstin's
"graphic revolution." the new imagery, with photography at
its forefront, did not merely function as a supplement to language,
but bid to replace it as our dominant means for construing,
understanding, and testing reality. What Boorstin implies about the
graphic revolution, I wish to make explicit here: the new focus on
the image undermined traditional definitions of information, of news,
and, to a large extent, of reality itself. First in billboards,
posters, and advertisements, and later in such "news"
magazines and papers as Life, Look, the New York Daily Mirror and
Daily News, the picture forced exposition into the background, and in
some instances obliterated it altogether. By the end of the
nineteenth century, advertisers and newspapermen had discovered that
a picture was not only worth a thousand words, but, where sales were
concerned, was better. For countless Americans, seeing, not reading,
became the basis for believing.
In a peculiar way, the photograph was the perfect
complement to the flood of telegraphic news from nowhere that
threatened to submerge readers in a sea of facts from unknown places
about strangers with
unknown
faces. For the photograph gave a concrete reality to the
strange-sounding datelines, and attached faces to the unknown names.
Thus it provided the illusion, at least, that "the news"
had a connection to something within one's sensory experience. It
created an apparent context for the "news of the day." And
the "news of the day" created a context for the photograph.
But the sense of context created by the partnership of photograph and
headline was, of course, entirely illusory. You may get a better
sense of what I mean here if you imagine a stranger's informing you
that the illyx is a subspecies of vero miform plant with articulated
leaves that flowers biannually on the island of Aldononjes. And if
you wonder aloud, "Yes, but what has that to do with anything?"
imagine that your informant replies, "But here is a photograph I
want you to see," and hands you a picture labeled Illyx on
Aldononjes. "Ah, yes," you might murmur, "now I see."
It is true enough that the photograph provides a context for the
sentence you have been given, and that the sentence provides a
context of sorts for the photograph, and you may even believe for a
day or so that you have learned something. But if the event is
entirely self-contained, devoid of any relationship to your past
knowledge or future plans, if that is the beginning and end of your
encounter with the stranger, then the appearance of context provided
by the conjunction of sentence and image is illusory, and so is the
impression of meaning attached to it. You will, in fact, have
"learned" nothing (except perhaps to avoid strangers with
photographs), and the illyx will fade from your mental landscape as
though it had never been. At best you are left with an amusing bit of
trivia, good for trading in cocktail party chatter or solving a
crossword puzzle, but nothing more. It may be of some interest to
note, in this connection, that the
crossword puzzle became a popular form of
diversion in America at just that point when the telegraph and the
photograph had achieved the transformation of news from functional
information to decontextualized fact. This coincidence suggests that
the new technologies had turned the age-old problem of information on
its head: Where people once sought information to manage the real
contexts of their lives, now they had to invent contexts in which
otherwise useless information might be put to some apparent use. the
crossword puzzle is one such pseudo-context; the cocktail party is
another; the radio quiz shows of the 1930's and 1940's and the modern
television game show are still others; and the ultimate, perhaps, is
the wildly successful "Trivial Pursuit." In one form or
another, each of these supplies an answer to the question, "What
am I to do with all these disconnected facts?" And in one form
or another, the answer is the same: Why not use them for diversion?
for entertainment? to amuse yourself, in a game? In the Image,
Boorstin calls the major
creation of
the graphic revolution the "pseudo-event," by which he
means an event specifically staged to be reported--like the press
conference, say. I mean to suggest here that a more significant
legacy of the telegraph and the photograph may be the pseudo-context.
A pseudo-context is a structure invented to give fragmented and
irrelevant information a seeming use. But the use the pseudo-context
provides is not action, or problem-solving, or change. It is the only
use left for information with no genuine connection to our lives. And
that, of course, is to amuse. the pseudo-context is the last refuge,
so to say, of a culture overwhelmed by irrelevance, incoherence, and
impotence. Of course, photography and telegraphy did not strike down
at one blow the vast edifice that was typographic culture. the habits
of exposition, as I have tried to show, had a long history, and they
held powerful sway over the minds of turn-of-the-century Americans.
In fact, the early decades of the twentieth century were marked by a
great outpouring of brilliant language and
literature.
In the pages of magazines like the American Mercury and the New
Yorker, in the novels and stories of Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Steinbeck,
and Hemingway, and even in the columns of the newspaper giants--the
Herald Tribune, the Times-- prose thrilled with a vibrancy and
intensity that delighted ear and eye. But this was exposition's
nightingale song, most brilliant and sweet as the singer nears the
moment of death. It told, for the Age of Exposition, not of new
beginnings, but of an end. Beneath its dying melody, a new note had
been sounded, and photography and telegraphy set the key. Theirs was
a "language" that denied interconnectedness, proceeded
without context, argued the irrelevance of history, explained
nothing, and offered fascination in place of complexity and
coherence. Theirs was a duet of image and instancy, and together they
played the tune of a new kind of public discourse in America. Each of
the media that entered the electronic conversation in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries followed the lead of the
teleaph and the photograph, and amplified their biases. Some, such as
film, were by their nature inclined to do so. Others, whose bias was
rather toward the amplification of rational speech--like radio--were
overwhelmed by the thrust of the new epistemology and came in the end
to support it. Together, this ensemble of electronic techniques
called into being a new world--a peek-a-boo world, where now this
event, now that, pops into view for a moment, then vanishes again. It
is a world without much coherence or sense; a world that does not ask
us, indeed, does not permit us to do anything; a world that is, like
the child's game of peek-a-boo, entirely self-contained. But like
peek-a-boo, it is also endlessly entertaining. Of course, there is
nothing wrong with playing
peek-a-boo.
And there is nothing wrong with entertainment. As some psychiatrist
once put it, we all build castles in the air. the problems come when
we try to live in them. the communications media of the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with telegraphy and
photography at their center, called the peek-a-boo world into
existence, but we did not come to live there until television.
Television gave the epistemological biases of the telegraph and the
photograph their most potent expression, raising the interplay of
image and instancy to an exquisite and dangerous perfection. And it
brought them into the home. We are by now well into a second
generation of children for whom television has been their first and
most accessible teacher and, for many, their most reliable companion
and friend. To put it plainly, television is the command center of
the new epistemology. There is no audience so young that it is barred
from television. There is no poverty so abject that it must forgo
television. There is no education so exalted that it is not modified
by television. And most important of all, there is no subject of
public interest--politics, news, education, religion, science,
sports--that does not find its way to television. Which means that
all public understanding of these subjects is shaped by the biases of
television.
Television
is the command center in subtler ways as well. Our use of other
media, for example, is largely orchestrated by television. Through it
we learn what telephone system to use, what movies to see, what
books, records and magazines to buy, what radio programs to listen
to. Television arranges our communications environment for us in ways
that no other medium has the power to do.
As a small,
ironic example of this point, consider this: In the past few years,
we have been learning that the computer is the technology of the
future. We are told that our children will fail in school and be left
behind in life if they are not "computer literate." We are
told that we cannot run our businesses, or compile our shopping
lists, or keep our checkbooks tidy unless we own a computer. Perhaps
some of this is true. But the most important fact about computers and
what they mean to our lives is that we learn about all of this from
television. Television has achieved the status of "meta-medium"--an
instrument
that directs
not only our knowledge of the world, but our knowledge of ways of
knowing as well.
At the same time, television has achieved the
status of "myth," as Roland Barthes uses the word. He means
by myth a way of understanding the world that is not problematic,
that we are not fully conscious of,
that seems,
in a word, natural. A myth is a way of thinking so deeply embedded in
our consciousness that it is invisible. This is now the way of
television. We are no longer fascinated or perplexed by its
machinery. We do not tell stories of its wonders. We do not confine
our television sets to special rooms. We do not doubt the reality of
what we see on television, are largely unaware of the special angle
of vision it affords. Even the question of how television affects us
has receded into the background. the question itself may strike some
of us as strange, as if one were to ask how having ears and eyes
affects us. Twenty years ago, the question, Does television shape
culture or merely reflect it? held considerable interest for many
scholars and social critics. the question has largely disappeared as
television has gradually become our culture. This means, among other
things, that we rarely talk about television, only about what is on
television--that is, about its content. Its ecology, which includes
not only its physical characteristics and symbolic code but the
conditions in which we normally attend to it, is taken for granted,
accepted as natural.
Television
has become, so to speak, the background radiation of the social and
intellectual universe, the all-but-imperceptible residue of the
electronic big bang of a century past, so familiar and so thoroughly
integrated with American culture that we no longer hear its faint
hissing in the background or see the flickering gray light. This, in
turn, means that its epistemology goes largely unnoticed. And the
peek-a-boo world it has constructed around us no longer seems even
strange.
There is no
more disturbing consequence of the electronic and graphic revolution
than this: that the world as given to us through television seems
natural, not bizarre. For the loss of the
sense of the
strange is a sign of adjustment, and the extent to which we have
adjusted is a measure of the extent to which we have been changed.
Our culture's adjustment to the epistemology of television is by now
all but complete; we have so thoroughly accepted its definitions of
truth, knowledge, and reality that irrelevance seems to us to be
filled with import, and incoherence seems eminently sane. And if some
of our institutions seem not to fit the template of the times, why it
is they, and not the template, that seem to us disordered and
strange.
It is my
object in the rest of this book to make the epistemology of
television visible again. I will try to demonstrate by concrete
example that television's way of knowing is uncompromisingly hostile
to typography's way of knowing; that television's conversations
promote
incoherence
and triviality; that the phrase "serious television" is a
contradiction in terms; and that television speaks in only one
persistent voice--the voice of entertainment. Beyond that, I will try
to demonstrate that to enter the great television conversation, one
American cultural institution after another is learning to speak its
terms. Television, in other words, is transforming our culture into
one vast arena for show business. It is entirely possible, of course,
that in the end we shall find that delightful, and decide we like it
just fine. That is exactly what Aldous Huxley feared was coming,
fifty years ago.
Parr II.
the Age of
Show Business
A dedicated graduate student i know returned to
his small apartment the night before a major examination only to
discover that his solitary lamp was broken beyond repair. After a
whiff of panic, he was able to restore both his equanimity and his
chances for a satisfactory grade by turning on the television set,
turning off the sound, and with his back to the set, using its light
to read important passages on which he was to be tested. This is one
use of television--as a source of illuminating the printed page. But
the television screen is more than a light source. It is also a
smooth, nearly flat surface on which the printed word may be
displayed. We have all stayed at hotels in which the TV set has had a
special channel for describing the day's events in letters rolled
endlessly across the screen. This is another use of television-as an
electronic bulletin board. Many television sets are also large and
sturdy enough to bear the weight of a small library. the top of an
old-fashioned RCA console can handle as many as thirty books, and I
know one woman who has securely placed her entire collection of
Dickens, Flaubert, and Turgenev on the top of a 21-inch Westinghouse.
Here is still another use of television--as bookcase. I bring forward
these quixotic uses of television to ridicule the hope harbored by
some that television can be used to support the literate tradition.
Such a hope represents exactly what Marshall McLuhan used to call
"rear-view mirror" thinking: 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
in the matter at hand is to misconstrue entirely how television
redefines the meaning of public discourse. Television does not extend
or amplify literate culture. It attacks it. If television is a
continuation of anything, it is of a tradition begun by the telegraph
and photograph in the mid-nineteenth century, not
by the printing press in the fifteenth. What is television? What
kinds of conversations does it permit? What are the intellectual
tendencies it encourages? What sort of culture does it produce? These
are the questions to be addressed in the rest of this book, and to
approach them with a minimum of confusion, I must begin by making a
distinction between a technology and a medium. We might say that a
technology is to a medium as the brain is to the mind. Like the
brain, a technology is a physical apparatus. Like the mind, a medium
is a use to which a physical apparatus is put. A technology becomes a
medium as it employs a particular symbolic code, as it finds its
place in a particular social setting, as it insinuates itself into
economic and political contexts. A technology, in other words, is
merely a machine. A medium is the social and intellectual environment
a machine creates. Of course, like the brain itself, every technology
has an inherent b ias. It has within its physical form a
predisposition toward being used in certain ways and not others. Only
those who know nothing of the history of technology believe that a
technology is entirely neutral. There is an old joke that mocks that
naive belief. Thomas Edison, it goes, would have revealed his
discovery of the electric light much sooner than he did except for
the fact that every time he turned it on, he held it to his mouth and
said, "Hello? Hello?" Not very likely. Each technology has
an agenda of its own. It is, as I have suggested, a metaphor waiting
to unfold. the printing press, for example, had a clear bias toward
being used as a
the Ae of
Show Business
linguistic medium. It is conceivable to use it
exclusively for the reproduction of pictures. And, one imagines, the
Roman Catholic Church would not have objected to its being so used in
the sixteenth century. Had that been the case, the Protestant
Reformation might not have occurred, for as Luther contended, with
the word of God on every family's kitchen table, Christians do not
require the Papacy to interpret it for them. But in fact there never
was much chance that the press would be used solely, or even very
much, for the duplication of icons. From its beginning in the
fifteenth century, the press was perceived as an extraordinary
opportunity for the display and mass distribution of written
language. Everything about its technical possibilities led in that
direction. One might even say it was invented for that purpose. the
technology of television has a bias, as well. It is conceivable to
use television as a lamp, a surface for texts, a bookcase, even as
radio. But it has not been so used and will not be so used, at least
in America. Thus, in answering the question, What is television?, we
must understand as a first point that we are not talking
about television as a technology but television
as a medium. There are many places in the world where television,
though the same technology as it is in America, is an entirely
different medium from that which we know. I refer to places where the
majority of people do not have television sets, and those who do have
only one; where only one station is available; where television does
not operate around the clock; where most programs have as their
purpose the direct furtherance of government ideology and policy;
where commercials are unknown, and "talking heads" are the
principal image; where television is mostly used as if it were radio.
For these reasons and more television will not have the same meaning
or power as it does in America, which is to say, it is possible for a
technology to be so used that its potentialities are prevented from
developing and its social consequences kept to a minimum.
But in
America, this has not been the case. Television has found in liberal
democracy and a relatively free market economy a nurturing climate in
which its full potentialities as a technology of images could be
exploited. One result of this has been that American television
programs are in demand all over the world. the total estimate of U.S.
television program exports is approximately 100,000 to 200,000 hours,
equally divided among Latin America, Asia and Europe. Over the years,
programs like "Gunsmoke,"
"Bonanza,"
"Mission:
Impossible," "Star Trek,"
"Kojak," and more recently, "Dallas"
and "Dynasty" have been as popular in England, Japan,
Israel and Norway as in Omaha, Nebraska. I have heard (but not
verified) that some years ago the Lapps postponed for several days
their annual and, one supposes, essential migratory journey so that
they could find out who shot J.R. All of this has occurred
simultaneously with the decline of America's moral and political
prestige, worldwide. American television programs are in demand not
because America is loved but because American television is loved.
We need not be detained too long in figuring out
why. In watching American television, one is reminded of George
Bernard Shaw's remark on his first seeing the glittering neon signs
of Broadway and 42nd Street at night. It must be beautiful, he said,
if you cannot read. American television is, indeed, a beautiful
spectacle, a visual delight, pouring forth thousands of images on any
given day. the average length of a shot on network television is only
3.5 seconds, so that the eye never rests, always has something new to
see. Moreover, television offers
viewers a
variety of subject matter, requires minimal skills to comprehend it,
and is largely aimed at emotional gratification. Even commercials,
which some regard as an annoyance, are exquisitely crafted, always
pleasing to the eye and accompanied by exciting music. There is no
question but that the best photography in the world is presently seen
on television commercials. American
television,
in other words, is devoted entirely to supplying its audience with
entertainment.
Of course,
to say that television is entertaining is merely banal. Such a fact
is hardly threatening to a culture, not even worth writing a book
about. It may even be a reason for rejoicing. Life, as we like to
say, is not a highway strewn with flowers. the sight of a few
blossoms here and there may make our journey a trifle more endurable.
the Lapps undoubtedly thought so. We may surmise that the ninety
million Americans who watch television every night also think so. But
what I am claiming here is not that television is entertaining but
that it has made entertainment itself the natural format for the
representation of all experience. Our television set keeps us in
constant communion with the world, but it does so with a face whose
smiling countenance is unalterable. the problem is not that
television presents us with entertaining subject matter but that all
subject matter is presented as entertaining, which is another issue
altogether.
To say it still another way: Entertainment is the
supra-ideology of all discourse on television. No matter what is
depicted or from what point of view, the overarching presumption is
that it is there for our amusement and pleasure. That is why even on
news shows which provide us daily with fragments of tragedy and
barbarism, we are urged by the newscasters to "join them
tomorrow." What for? One would think that several minutes of
murder and mayhem would suffice as material for a month of sleepless
nights. We accept the newscasters' invitation because we know that
the "news" is not to be taken seriously, that it is all in
fun, so to say. Everything about a news show tells us this--the good
looks and amiability of the cast, their pleasant banter, the exciting
music that opens and closes the show, the vivid film footage, the
attractive commercials--all these and more suggest that what we have
just seen is no cause for weeping. A news show, to put it plainly, is
a format for entertainment, not for education, reflection or
catharsis. And we must not judge too harshly those who have framed it
in this way. They are not assembling the news to be read, or
broadcasting it to be heard. They are televising the news to be seen.
They must follow where their medium leads. There is no conspiracy
here, no lack of
intelligence,
only a straightforward recognition that "good television"
has little to do with what is "good" about exposition or
other forms of verbal communication but everything to do with what
the pictorial images look like. I should like to illustrate this
point by offering the case of the eighty-minute discussion provided
by the ABC network on November 20, 1983, following its controversial
movie the Day After. Though the memory of this telecast has receded
for most, I choose this case because, clearly, here was television
taking its most "serious" and "responsible"
stance. Everything that made up this broadcast recommended it as a
critical test of television's capacity to depart from an
entertainment mode and rise to the level of public instruction. In
the first place, the subject was the possibility of a nuclear
holocaust. Second, the film itself had been attacked by several
influential bodies politic, including the Reverend Jerry Falwell's
Moral Majority. Thus, it was important that the network display
television's value and serious intentions as a medium of information
and coherent discourse. Third, on the program itself no musical theme
was used as background-a significant point since almost all
television programs are embedded in music, which helps to tell the
audience what emotions are to be called forth. This is a standard
theatrical device, and its absence on television is always ominous.
Fourth, there were no commercials during the discussion, thus
elevating the tone of the event to the state of reverence usually
reserved for the funerals of assassinated Presidents. And finally,
the participants included Henry Kissinger, Robert McNamara, and Elie
Wiesel, each of whom is a symbol of sorts of serious discourse.
Although Kissinger, somewhat later, made an appearance on the hit
show "Dynasty," he was then and still is a
paradigm of
intellectual sobriety; and Wiesel, practically a walking
metaphor of
social conscience. Indeed,
the other members of the
cast--Carl Sagan, William Buckley and General
Brent Scowcroft--are, each
in his way,
men of intellectual bearing who are not expected to
participate
in trivial public matters. the program began with Ted
Koppel, master of ceremonies, so to speak,
indicating that what followed
was not
intended to be a debate but a discussion. And
so those who are
interested
in philosophies of discourse had an excellent opportunity to
observe what
serious television means by the word "discussion." Here is
what it
means: Each of six men was given approximately five minutes to
say
something about the subject. There was, however, no agreement on
exactly what
the subject was, and no one felt obliged to respond to
anything
anyone else said. In fact, it would have been difficult to do
so, since
the participants were called upon seriatim, as if they were
finalists in
a beauty contest, each being given his share of minutes in
front of the
camera. Thus, if Mr. Wiesel,
who was called upon last,
had a
response to Mr. Buckley, who was called upon first, there would
have been
four commentaries in between, occupying about twenty minutes,
so that the
audience (if not Mr. Wiesel himself) would have had
difficulty
remembering the argument which prompted his response. In
fact, the
participants--most of whom were no strangers to
television--largely
avoided addressing each other's points. They
used
their
initial minutes and then their subsequent ones to intimate their
position or
give an impression. Dr. Kissinger, for example, seemed
intent on
making viewers feel sorry that he was no longer their
Secretary of
State by reminding everyone of books he had once written,
proposals he
had once made, and negotiations he had once conducted. Mr.
McNamara
informed the audience that he had eaten lunch in Germany that
very
afternoon, and went on to say that he had at least fifteen
proposals to
reduce nuclear arms. One would have thought that the
discussion
would turn on this
issue, but
the others seemed about as interested in it as they were in what he
had for lunch in Germany. (Later, he took the initiative to mention
three of his proposals but they were not discussed.) Elie Wiesel, in
a series of quasi-parables and paradoxes, stressed the tragic nature
of the human condition, but because he did not have the time to
provide a context for his remarks, he seemed quixotic and confused,
conveying an impression of an itinerant rabbi who has wandered into a
coven of Gentiles.
In other
words, this was no discussion as we normally use the word. Even when
the "discussion" period began, there were no arguments or
counterarguments, no scrutiny of assumptions, no explanations, no
elaborations, no definitions. Carl Sagan made, in my opinion, the
most coherent statement--a four-minute rationale for a nuclear
freeze--but it contained at least two questionable assumptions and
was not carefully examined. Apparently, no one wanted to take time
from his own few minutes to call attention to someone else's. Mr.
Koppel, for his part, felt obliged to keep the "show"
moving, and though he occasionally pursued what he discerned as a
line of thought, he was more concerned to give each man his fair
allotment of time.
But it is not time constraints alone that produce
such fragmented and discontinuous language. When a television show is
in process, it is very nearly impermissible to say, "Let me
think about that" or "I don't know" or "What do
you mean when you say... ?" or "From what sources does your
information come?" This type of discourse not only slows down
the tempo of the show but creates the impression of uncertainty or
lack of finish. It tends to reveal people in the act of thinking,
which is
as
disconcerting and boring on television as it is on a Las Vegas stage.
Thinking does not play well on television, a fact that television
directors discovered long ago. There is not much to see in it. It is,
in a phrase, not a performing art. But television demands a
performing art, and so what the ABC network gave us was a picture of
men of sophisticated verbal skills and political
understanding
being brought to heel by a medium that requires them to fashion
performances rather than ideas. Which accounts for why the eighty
minutes were very entertaining, in the way of a Samuel Beckett play:
the intimations of gravity hung heavy, the meaning passeth all
understanding. the performances, of course, were highly professional.
Sagan abjured the turtle-neck sweater in which he starred when he did
"Cosmos." He even had his hair cut for the event. His part
was that of the logical scientist speaking in behalf of the planet.
It is to be doubted that Paul Newman could have done better in the
role, although Leonard Nimoy might have. Scowcroft was suitably
military in his bearing--terse and distant, the unbreakable defender
of national security. Kissinger, as always, was superb in the part of
the knowing world statesman, weary of the sheer responsibility of
keeping disaster at bay. Koppel played to perfection the part of a
moderator, pretending, as it were, that he was sorting out ideas
while, in fact, he was merely directing the performances. At the end,
one could only applaud those performances, which is what a good
television program always aims to achieve; that is to say, applause,
not reflection.
I do not say
categorically that it is impossible to use television as a carrier of
coherent language or thought in process. William Buckley's own
program, "Firing Line," occasionally shows people in the
act of thinking but who also happen to have television cameras
pointed at them. There are other programs, such as "Meet the
Press" or "the Open Mind," which clearly strive to
maintain a sense of intellectual decorum and typographic tradition,
but they are scheduled so that they do not compete with programs of
great visual interest, since otherwise, they will not be watched.
After all, it is not unheard of that a format will occasionally go
against the bias of its medium. For example, the most popular radio
program of the early 1940's featured a ventriloquist, and in those
days, I heard more than once the feet of a tap dancer on the "Major
Bowes' Amateur Hour." (Indeed, if I am not mistaken, he even
once featured a pantomimist.) But
ventriloquism, dancing and mime do not play well
on radio, just as sustained, complex talk does not play well on
television. It can be made to play tolerably well if only one camera
is used and the visual image
is kept
constant--as when the President gives a speech. But this is not
television at its best, and it is not television that most people
will choose to watch. the single most important fact about television
is that people watch it, which is why it is called "television."
And what they watch, and like to watch, are moving pictures--millions
of them, of short duration and dynamic variety. It is in the nature
of the medium that it must suppress the content of ideas in order to
accommodate the requirements of visual interest; that is to say, to
accommodate the values of show business.
Film,
records and radio (now that it is an adjunct of the music industry)
are, of course, equally devoted to entertaining the culture, and
their effects in altering the style of American discourse are not
insignificant. But television is different because it encompasses all
forms of discourse. No one goes to a movie to find out about
government policy or the latest scientific advances. No one buys a
record to find out the baseball scores or the weather or the latest
murder. No one turns on radio anymore for soap operas or a
presidential address (if a television set is at hand). But everyone
goes to television for all these things and more, which is why
television resonates so powerfully throughout the culture. Television
is our culture's principal mode of knowing about itself.
Therefore--and this is the critical point--how television stages the
world becomes the model for how the world is properly to be staged.
It is not merely that on the television screen entertainment is the
metaphor for all discourse. It is that off the screen the same
metaphor prevails. As typography once dictated the style of
conducting politics, religion, business, education, law and other
important social matters, television now takes command. In
courtrooms, classrooms, operating rooms, board rooms, churches and
even airplanes, Americans no longer talk to each other, they
entertain each other. They do
not exchange
ideas; they exchange images. They do not argue with propositions;
they argue with good looks, celebrities and commercials. For the
message of television as metaphor is not only that all the world is a
stage but that the stage is located in Las Vegas, Nevada.
In Chicago, for example, the Reverend Greg
Sakowicz, a Roman Catholic priest, mixes his religious teaching with
rock 'n' roll music. According to the Associated Press, the Reverend
Sakowicz is both an associate pastor at the Church of the Holy Spirit
in Schaumberg (a suburb of Chicago) and a disc jockey at WKQX. On his
show, "the Journey Inward," Father Sakowicz chats in soft
tones about such topics as family relationships or commitment, and
interposes his sermons with "the sound
of
Billboard's Top 10." He says that his preaching is not done "in
a churchy way," and adds, "You don't have to be boring in
order to be holy."
Meanwhile in
New York City at St. Patrick's Cathedral, Father John J. O'Connor put
on a New York Yankee baseball cap as he mugged his way through his
installation as Archbishop of the New York Archdiocese. He got off
some excellent gags, at least one of which was specifically directed
at Mayor Edward Koch, who was a member of his audience; that is to
say, he was a congregant. At his next public performance, the new
archbishop donned a New York Mets baseball cap. These events were, of
course, televised, and were vastly entertaining, largely because
Archbishop (now Cardinal) O'Connor has gone Father Sakowicz one
better: Whereas the latter believes that you don't have to be boring
to be holy, the former apparently believes you don't have to be holy
at all.
In Phoenix,
Arizona, Dr. Edward Dietrich performed triple bypass surgery on
Bernard Schuler. the operation was successful, which was nice for Mr.
Schuler. It was also on television, which was nice for America. the
operation was carried by at least fifty television stations in the
United States, and also by the British Broadcasting Corporation. A
two-man panel of narrators (a
play-by-play
and color man, so to speak) kept viewers informed about what they
were seeing. It was not clear as to why this event was televised, but
it resulted in transforming both Dr. Dietrich and Mr. Schuler's chest
into celebrities. Perhaps because he has seen too many doctor shows
on television, Mr. Schuler was uncommonly confident about the outcome
of his surgery. "There is no way in hell they are going to lose
me on live TV," he said.2 As reported with great enthusiasm by
both WCBS-TV and WNBC-TV in 1984, the Philadelphia public schools
have embarked on an experiment in which children will have their
curriculum sung to them. Wearing Walkman equipment, students were
shown listening to rock music whose lyrics were about the eight parts
of speech. Mr. Jocko Henderson, who thought of this idea, is planning
to delight students further by subjecting mathematics and history, as
well as English, to the rigors of a rock music format. In fact, this
is not Mr. Henderson's idea at all. It was pioneered by the
Children's Television Workshop, whose television show "Sesame
Street" is an expensive illustration of the idea that education
is indistinguishable from entertainment. Nonetheless, Mr. Henderson
has a point in his favor. Whereas "Sesame Street" merely
attempts to make learning to read a form of light entertainment, the
Philadelphia experiment aims to make the classroom itself into a rock
concert. In New Bedford, Massachusetts, a
rape trial
was televised, to the delight of audiences who could barely tell the
difference between the trial and their favorite midday soap opera. In
Florida, trials of varying degrees of seriousness, including murder,
are regularly televised and are considered to be more entertaining
than most fictional courtroom dramas. All of this is done in the
interests of "public education." For the same high purpose,
plans are afoot, it is rumored, to televise confessionals. To be
called "Secrets of the Confessional Box," the program will,
of course, carry the warning that some of its material may be
offensive to children and therefore parental guidance is suggested.
On a United
Airlines flight from Chicago to Vancouver, a stewardess announces
that its passengers will play a game. the passenger with the most
credit cards will win a bottle of champagne. A man from Boston with
twelve credit cards wins. A second game requires the passengers to
guess the collective age of the cabin crew. A man from Chicago
guesses 128, and wins another bottle of wine. During the second game,
the air turns choppy and the Fasten Seat Belt sign goes on. Very few
people notice, least of all the cabin crew, who keep up a steady flow
of gags on the intercom. When the plane reaches its destination,
everyone seems to agree that it's fun to fly from Chicago to
Vancouver. On February 7, 1985, the New York Times reported that
Professor Charles Pine of Rutgers University (Newark campus) was
named Professor of the Year by the Council for the Support and
Advancement of Education. In explaining why he has such a great
impact on his students, Professor Pine said: "I have some
gimmicks I use all the time. If you reach the end of the blackboard,
I keep writing on the wall. It always gets a laugh. the way I show
what a glass molecule does is to run over to one wall and bounce off
it, and run over to the other wall." His students are, perhaps,
too young to recall that James Cagney used this "molecule move"
to great effect in Yankee Doodle Dandy. If I am not mistaken, Donald
O'Connor duplicated it in Singing in the Rain. So far as I know, it
has been used only once before in a classroom: Hegel tried it several
times in demonstrating how the dialectical method works. the
Pennsylvania Amish try to live in isolation from mainstream American
culture. Among other things, their religion opposes the veneration of
graven images, which means that the Amish are forbidden to see movies
or to be photographed. But apparently their religion has not got
around to disallowing seeing movies when they are being photographed.
In the summer of 1984, for example, a Paramount Pictures crew
descended upon Lancaster County to film the movie Witness, which is
about a detective, played by Harrison Ford, who
falls in love with an Amish woman. Although the Amish were warned by
their church not to
interfere
with the film makers, it turned out that some Amish welders ran to
see the action as soon as their work was done. Other devouts lay in
the grass some distance away, and looked down on the set with
binoculars. "We read about the movie in the paper," said an
Amish woman. "the kids even cut out Harrison Ford's picture."
She added: "But it doesn't really matter that much to them.
Somebody told us he was in Star Wars but that doesn't mean anything
to us." 3 the last time a similar conclusion was drawn was when
the executive director of the American Association of Blacksmiths
remarked that he had read about the automobile but that he was
convinced it would have no consequences for the future of his
organization. In the Winter, 1984, issue of the Official Video
Journal there appears a full-page advertisement for "the Genesis
Project." the project aims to convert the Bible into a series of
movies. the end-product, to be called "the New Media Bible,"
will consist of 225 hours of film and will cost a quarter of a
billion dollars. Producer John Heyman, whose credits include Saturday
Night Fever and Grease, is one of the film makers most committed to
the project. "Simply stated," he is quoted as saying, "I
got hooked on the Bible." the famous Israeli actor Topol, best
known for his role as Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof, will play the
role of Abraham. the advertisement does not say who will star as God
but, given the producer's background, there is some concern that it
might be John Travolta. At the commencement exercises at Yale
University in 1983, several honorary degrees were awarded, including
one to Mother Teresa. As she and other humanitarians and scholars,
each in turn, received their awards, the audience applauded
appropriately but with a slight hint of reserve and impatience, for
it wished to give its heart to the final recipient who waited shyly
in the wings. As the details of her achievements were being
recounted, many people left their seats and
surged toward the stage to be closer to the great woman. And when the
name Meryl Streep was announced, the audience unleashed a sonic boom
of affection to wake the New Haven dead. One man who was present when
Bob Hope received his honorary doctorate at another institution said
that Dr. Streep's applause surpassed Dr. Hope's. Knowing how to
please a crowd as well as anyone, the intellectual leaders at Yale
invited Dick Cavett, the talk-show host, to deliver the commencement
address the following year. It is rumored that this year, Don Rickles
will receive a Doctorate of Humane Letters and Lola Falana will give
the commencement address. Prior to the 1984 presidential elections,
the two candidates confronted each other on television in what were
called "debates." These events were not in the least like
the Lincoln-Douglas debates or anything else that goes by the name.
Each candidate was given five minutes to address such
questions
as, What is (or would be) your policy in Central America? His
opposite number was then given one minute for a rebuttal. In such
circumstances, complexity, documentation and logic can play no role,
and, indeed, on several occasions syntax itself was abandoned
entirely. It is no matter. the men were less concerned with giving
arguments than with "giving off" impressions, which is what
television does best. Post-debate commentary largely avoided any
evaluation of the candidates' ideas, since there were none to
evaluate. Instead, the debates were conceived as boxing matches, the
relevant question being, Who KO'd whom? the answer was determined by
the "style" of the men--how they looked, fixed their gaze,
smiled, and delivered one-liners. In the second debate, President
Reagan got off a swell one-liner when asked a question about his age.
the following day, several newspapers indicated that Ron had KO'd
Fritz with his joke. Thus, the leader of the free world is chosen by
the people in the Age of Television. What all of this means is that
our culture has moved toward a
new way of conducting its business, especially
its important business. the nature of its discourse is changing as
the demarcation line between what is show business and what is not
becomes harder to see with each passing day. Our priests and
presidents, our surgeons and lawyers, our educators and news-casters
need worry less about satisfying the demands of their discipline than
the demands of good showmanship. Had Irving Berlin changed one word
in the title of his celebrated song, he would have been as prophetic,
albeit more terse, as Aldous Huxley. He need only have written,
There's No Business But Show Business.
the American
humorist H. Allen Smith once suggested that of all the worrisome
words in the English language, the scariest is "uh oh," as
when a physician looks at your X-rays, and with knitted brow says,
"Uh oh." I should like to suggest that the words which are
the title of this chapter are as ominous as any, all the more so
because they are spoken without knitted brow--indeed, with a kind of
idiot's delight. the phrase, if that's what it may be called, adds to
our grammar a new part of speech, a conjunction that does not connect
anything to anything but does the opposite: separates everything from
everything. As such, it serves as a compact metaphor for the
discontinuities in so much that passes for public discourse in
present-day America.
"Now .
. . this" is commonly used on radio and television newscasts to
indicate that what one has just heard or seen has no relevance to
what one is about to hear or see, or possibly to anything one is ever
likely to hear or see. the phrase is a means of acknowledging the
fact that the world as mapped by the speeded-up electronic media has
no order
or meaning
and is not to be taken seriously. There
is no murder so
brutal, no
earthquake so devastating, no political blunder so
costly--for
that matter, no ball score so tantalizing or weather report
so
threatening--that it cannot be erased from our minds by a newscaster
saying,
"Now... this."
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 (let us say, for ninety
seconds),
and that you must now give your attention to another fragment
of news or a
commercial. Television did not invent the "Now... this"
world
view. As I have tried to show, it is the offspring of the
intercourse
between telegraphy and photography. But
it is through
television that it has been nurtured and brought
to a perverse maturity.
For on television, nearly every half hour is a
discrete event, separated
in content,
context, and emotional texture from what precedes and
follows
it. In
part because television sells its time in seconds and
minutes, in
part because television must use images rather than words,
in part
because its audience can move freely to and from the television
set,
programs are structured so that almost each eight-minute segment
may stand as
a complete event in itself. Viewers are rarely required to
carry over any thought or feeling from one parcel
of time to another. Of
course, in
television's presentation of the "news of the day," we may
see the
"Now... this" mode of discourse in its boldest and most
embarrassing
form. For
there, we are presented not only with fragmented
news but
news without context, without consequences, without value, and
therefore
without essential seriousness; that is to say, news as pure
entertainment.
Consider, for example, how you would proceed if you were
given the
opportunity to produce a television news show for any station
concerned to
attract the largest possible audience. You would, first,
choose a cast of players, each of whom has a face
that is both "likable"
and
"credible." Those who apply would, in fact, submit to you
their
eight-by-ten
glossies, from which you would eliminate those whose
countenances
are not suitable for nightly display. This
means that you
will exclude
women who are not beautiful or who are over the age of
fifty, men
who are bald, all people who are overweight or whose noses
are too long
or whose eyes are too close together. You
will try, in
other words,
to assemble a cast of talking hair-do's.
"Now... This"
At the very
least, you will want those whose faces would not be unwelcome on a
magazine cover. Christine Craft has just such a face, and so she
applied for a co-anchor position on KMBC-TV in Kansas City. According
to a lawyer who represented her in a sexism suit she later brought
against the station, the management of KMBC-TV "loved
Christine's
look." She was accordingly hired in January 1981. She was fired
in August 1981 because research indicated that her appearance
"hampered viewer acceptance." What exactly does "hampered
viewer acceptance" mean? And what does it have to do with the
news? Hampered viewer acceptance means the same thing for television
news as it does for any television show: Viewers do not like looking
at the performer. It also means that viewers do not believe the
performer, that she lacks credibility. In the case of a theatrical
performance, we have a sense of what that implies: the actor does not
persuade the audience that he or she is the character being
portrayed. But what does lack of credibility imply in the case of a
news show? What character is a co-anchor playing? And how do we
decide that the performance lacks verisimilitude? Does the audience
believe that the newscaster is lying, that what is reported did not
in fact happen, that something important is being concealed? It is
frightening to think that this may be so, that the perception of the
truth of a report rests heavily on the acceptability of the
newscaster. In the ancient world, there was a tradition of banishing
or killing the bearer of bad tidings. Does the television news show
restore, in a curious form, this tradition? Do we banish those who
tell us the news when we do not care for the face of the teller? Does
television countermand the warnings we once received about the
fallacy of the ad hominem argument? If the answer to any of these
questions is even a qualified "Yes," then here is an issue
worthy of the attention of epistemologists. Stated in its simplest
form, it is that television provides a new (or, possibly, restores an
old) definition of truth:
the
credibility of the teller is the ultimate test of the truth of a
proposition. "Credibility" here does not refer to the past
record of the teller for making statements that have survived the
rigors of reality-testing. It refers only to the impression of
sincerity, authenticity, vulnerability or attractiveness (choose one
or more) conveyed by the actor/reporter. This is a matter of
considerable importance, for it goes beyond the question of how truth
is perceived on television news shows. If on television, credibility
replaces reality as the decisive test of truth-telling, political
leaders need not trouble themselves very much with reality provided
that their performances consistently generate a sense of
verisimilitude. I suspect, for example, that the dishonor that now
shrouds Richard Nixon results not from the fact that he lied but that
on television he looked like a liar. Which, if true, should bring no
comfort to anyone, not even veteran Nixon-haters. For the alternative
possibilities are that one may look like a liar but be telling the
truth; or even worse, look like a truth-teller but in fact be lying.
As a producer of a television
news show,
you would be well aware of these matters and would be careful to
choose your cast on the basis of criteria used by David Merrick and
other successful impresarios. Like them, you would then turn your
attention to staging the show on principles that maximize
entertainment value. You would, for example, select a musical theme
for the show. All television news programs begin, end, and are
somewhere in between punctuated with music. I have found very few
Americans who regard this custom as peculiar, which fact I have taken
as evidence for the dissolution of lines of demarcation between
serious public discourse and entertainment. What has music to do with
the news? Why is it there? It is there, I assume, for the same reason
music is used in the theater and films--to create a mood and provide
a leitmotif for the entertainment. If there were no music--as is the
case when any television program is interrupted for a news
flash--viewers would expect something truly alarming, possibly
life-altering.
"Now... This"
But as long as the music is there as a frame for
the program, the viewer is comforted to believe that there is nothing
to be greatly alarmed about; that, in fact, the events that are
reported have as much relation to reality as do scenes in a play.
This perception of a news show as a stylized dramatic performance
whose content has been staged largely to entertain is reinforced by
several other features, including the fact that the average length of
any story is forty-five seconds. While brevity does not always
suggest triviality, in this case it clearly does. It is simply not
possible to convey a sense of seriousness about any event if its
implications are exhausted in less than one minute's time. In fact,
it is quite obvious that TV news has no intention of suggesting that
any story has any implications, for that would require viewers to
continue to think about it when it is done and therefore obstruct
their attending to the next story that waits panting in the wings. In
any case, viewers are not provided with much opportunity to be
distracted from the next story since in all likelihood it will
consist of some film footage. Pictures have little difficulty in
overwhelming words, and short-circuiting introspection. As a
television producer, you would be certain to give both prominence and
precedence to any event for which there is some sort of visual
documentation. A suspected killer being brought into a police
station, the angry face of a cheated consumer, a barrel going over
Niagara Falls (with a person alleged to be in it), the President
disembarking from a helicopter on the White House lawn--these are
always fascinating or amusing, and easily satisfy the requirements of
an entertaining show. It is, of course, not necessary that the
visuals actually document the point of a
story.
Neither is it necessary to explain why such images are intruding
themselves on public consciousness. Film footage justifies itself, as
every television producer well knows. It is also of considerable help
in maintaining a high level of unreality that the newscasters do not
pause to grimace or shiver when they speak their prefaces or epilogs
to the film clips. In-
deed, many newscasters do not appear to grasp the
meaning of what they are saying, and some hold to a fixed and
ingratiating enthusiasm as they report on earthquakes, mass killings
and other disasters. Viewers would be quite disconcerted by any show
of concern or terror on the part of newscasters. Viewers, after all,
are partners with the newscasters in the "Now... this"
culture, and they expect the newscaster to play out his or her role
as a character who is marginally serious but who stays well clear of
authentic understanding. the viewers, for their part, will not be
caught contaminating their responses with a sense of reality, any
more than an audience at a play would go scurrying to call home
because a character on stage has said that a murderer is loose in the
neighborhood. the viewers also know that no matter how grave any
fragment of news may appear (for example, on the day I write a Marine
Corps general has declared that nuclear war between the United States
and Russia is inevitable), it will shortly be followed by a series of
commercials that will, in an instant, defuse the import of the news,
in fact render it largely banal. This is a key element in the
structure of a news program and all by itself refutes any claim that
television news is designed as a serious form of public discourse.
Imagine what you would think of me, and this book, if I were to pause
here, tell you that I will return to my discussion in a moment, and
then proceed to write a few words in behalf of United Airlines or the
Chase Manhattan Bank. You would rightly think that I had no respect
for you and, certainly, no respect for the subject. And if I did this
not once but several times in each chapter, you would think the whole
enterprise unworthy of your attention. Why, then, do we not think a
news show similarly unworthy? the reason, I believe, is that whereas
we expect books and even other media (such as film) to maintain a
consistency of tone and a continuity of content, we have no such
expectation of television, and especially television news. We have
become so accustomed to its discontinuities that we are no longer
struck dumb, as any sane
"Now... This"
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." One can
hardly overestimate the damage that such
juxtapositions do to our sense of the world as a serious place. the
damage is especially massive to youthful viewers who depend so much
on television for their clues as to how to respond to the world. In
watching television news, they, more than any other segment of the
audience, are drawn into an epistemology based on the assumption that
all reports of cruelty and death are greatly exaggerated and, in any
case, not to be taken seriously or responded to sanely. I should go
so far as to say that embedded in the surrealistic frame of a
television news show is a theory of anticommunication, featuring a
type of discourse that abandons logic, reason, sequence and rules of
contradiction. In aesthetics, I believe the name given to this theory
is Dadaism; in philosophy, nihilism; in psychiatry, schizophrenia. In
the parlance of the theater, it is known as vaudeville. For those who
think I am here guilty of hyperbole, I offer the following
description of television news by Robert MacNeil, executive editor
and co-anchor of the "MacNeil-Lehrer News-hour." the idea,
he writes, "is to keep everything brief, not to strain the
attention of anyone but instead to provide constant stimulation
through variety, novelty, action, and movement. You are required...
to pay attention to no concept, no character, and no problem for more
than a few seconds at a time." 2 He goes on to say that the
assumptions controlling a news show are "that bite-sized is
best, that complexity must be avoided, that nuances are dispensable,
that qualifications impede the simple message, that visual
stimulation is a substitute for thought, and that verbal precision is
an anachronism." 3 Robert MacNeil has more reason than most to
give testimony about the television news show as vaudeville act. the
"Mac-Neil-Lehrer Newshour" is an unusual and gracious
attempt to
bring to
television some of the elements of typographic discourse. the program
abjures visual stimulation, consists largely of extended explanations
of events and in-depth interviews (which even there means only five
to ten minutes), limits the number of stories covered, and emphasizes
background and coherence. But television has exacted its price for
MacNeil's rejection of a show business format. By television's
standards, the audience is minuscule, the program is confined to
public-television stations, and it is a good guess that the combined
salary of MacNeil and Lehrer is one-fifth of Dan Rather's or Tom
Brokaw's.
If you were a producer of a television news show
for a commercial station, you would not have the option of defying
television's requirements. It would be demanded of you that you
strive for the largest possible audience, and, as a consequence and
in spite of your
best
intentions, you would arrive at a production very nearly resembling
MacNeil's description. Moreover, you would include some things
MacNeil does not mention. You would try to make celebrities of your
newscasters. You would advertise the show, both in the press and on
television itself. You would do "news briefs," to serve as
an inducement to viewers. You would have a weatherman as comic
relief, and a sportscaster whose language is a touch uncouth (as a
way of his relating to the beer-drinking common man). You would, in
short, package the whole event as any producer might who is in the
entertainment business.
the result
of all this is that Americans are the best entertained and quite
likely the least well-informed people in the Western world. I say
this in the face of the popular conceit that television, as a window
to the world, has made Americans exceedingly well informed. Much
depends here, of course, on what is meant by being informed. I will
pass over the now tiresome polls that tell us that, at any given
moment, percent of our citizens do not know who is the Secretary of
State or the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Let us consider,
instead, the case
"Now... This"
of Iran
during the drama that was called the "Iranian Hostage Crisis."
I don't suppose there has been a story in years that received more
continuous attention from television. We may assume, then, that
Americans know most of what there is to know about this unhappy
event. And now, I put these questions to you: Would it be an
exaggeration to say that not one American in a hundred knows what
language the Iranians speak? Or what the word "Ayatollah"
means or implies? Or knows any details of the tenets of Iranian
religious beliefs? Or the main outlines of their political history?
Or knows who the Shah was, and where he came from?
Nonetheless,
everyone had an opinion about this event, for in America everyone is
entitled to an opinion, and it is certainly useful to have a few when
a pollster shows up. But these are opinions of a quite different
.order from eighteenth- or nineteenth-century opinions. It is
probably more accurate to call them emotions rather than opinions,
which would account for the fact that they change from week to week,
as the pollsters tell us. What is happening here is that television
is altering the meaning of "being informed" by creating a
species of information that might properly be called disinformation.
I am using this word almost in the precise sense in which it is used
by spies in the CIA or KGB. 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. In
saying this, I do not mean to imply that television news deliberately
aims to deprive Americans of a coherent, contextual understanding of
their world. I mean to say that when news is packaged as
entertainment, that is the inevitable result. And in saying that the
television news show entertains but does not inform, I am saying
something far more serious than that we are being deprived of
authentic information. I am saying we are losing our sense of what it
means to be
108
"Now... This"
well
informed. Ignorance is always correctable. But what shall we do if we
take ignorance to be knowledge? Here is a startling example of how
this process bedevils us. A New York Times article is headlined on
February 15, 1983:
REAGAN
MISSTATEMENTS GETTING LESS ATtENTION
the article
begins in the following way:
President
Reagan's aides used to become visibly alarmed at suggestions that he
had given mangled and perhaps misleading accounts of his policies or
of current events in general. That doesn't seem to happen much
anymore. Indeed, the President continues to make debatable assertions
of fact but news accounts do not deal with them as extensively as
they once did. In the view of White House officials, the declining
news coverage mirrors a decline in interest by the general public.
(my italics)
This report is not so much a news story as a
story about the news, and our recent history suggests that it is not
about Ronald Reagan's charm. It is about how news is defined, and I
believe the story would be quite astonishing to both civil
libertarians and tyrants of an earlier time. Walter Lippmann, for
example, wrote in 1920: "There can be no liberty for a community
which lacks the means by which to detect lies." For all of his
pessimism about the possibilities of restoring an eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century level of public discourse, Lippmann assumed, as
did Thomas Jefferson before him, that with a well-trained press
functioning as a lie-detector, the public's interest in a President's
mangling of the truth would be piqued, in both senses of that word.
Given the means to detect lies, he believed, the public could not be
indifferent to their consequences. But this case refutes his
assumption. the reporters
who cover
the White House are ready and able to expose lies, and thus
create the
grounds for informed and indignant opinion. But apparently the public
declines to take an interest. To press reports of White House
dissembling, the public has replied with Queen Victoria's famous
line: "We are not amused." However, here the words mean
something the Queen did not have in mind. They mean that what is not
amusing does not compel their attention. Perhaps if the President's
lies could be demonstrated by pictures and accompanied by music the
public would raise a curious eyebrow. If a movie, like All the
President's Men, could be made from his misleading accounts of
government policy, if there were a break-in of some sort or sinister
characters laundering money, attention would quite likely be paid. We
do well to remember that President Nixon did not begin to come undone
until his lies were given a theatrical setting at the Watergate
hearings. But we do not have anything like that here. Apparently, all
President Reagan does is say things that are not entirely true. And
there is nothing entertaining in that. But there is a subtler point
to be made here. Many of the President's "misstatements"
fall in the category of contradictions-mutually exclusive assertions
that cannot possibly both, in the same context, be true. "In the
same context" is the key phrase here, for it is context that
defines contradiction. There is no problem in someone's remarking
that he prefers oranges to apples, and also remarking that he prefers
apples to oranges--not if one statement is made in the context of
choosing a wallpaper design and the other in the context of selecting
fruit for dessert. In such a case, we have statements that are
opposites, but not contradictory. But if the statements are made in a
single, continuous, and coherent context, then they are
contradictions, and cannot both be true. Contradiction, in short,
requires that statements and events be perceived as interrelated
aspects of a continuous and coherent context. Disappear the context,
or fragment it, and contradiction disappears. This point is nowhere
made more clear to me than in conferences with my younger students
about their writing. "Look here," I say. "In this
para-
graph you
have said one thing. And in that you have said the opposite. Which is
it to be?" They are polite, and wish to please, but they are as
baffled by the question as I am by the response. "I know,"
they will say, "but that is there and this is here." the
difference between us is that I assume "there" and "here,"
"now"
and "then," one paragraph and the next to be connected, to
be continuous, to be part of the same coherent world of thought. That
is the way of typographic discourse, and typography is the universe
I'm
"coming
from," as they say. But they are coming from a different
universe of discourse altogether: the "Now... this" world
of television. the fundamental assumption of that world is not
coherence but discontinuity. And in a world of discontinuities,
contradiction is useless as a test of truth or merit, because
contradiction does not exist. My point is that we are by now so
thoroughly adjusted to the "Now... this" world of news--a
world of fragments, where events stand alone, stripped of any
connection to the past, or to the future, or to other events--that
all assumptions of coherence have vanished. And so, perforce, has
contradiction. In the context of no context, so to speak, it simply
disappears. And in its absence, what possible interest could there be
in a list of what the President says now and what he said then? It is
merely a rehash of old news, and there is nothing interesting or
entertaining in that. the only thing to be amused about is the
bafflement of reporters at the public's indifference. There is an
irony in the fact that the very group that has taken the world apart
should, on trying to piece it together again, be surprised that no
one notices much, or cares. For all his perspicacity, George Orwell
would have been stymied by this situation; there is nothing
"Orwellian" about it. the President does not have the press
under his thumb. the New York Times and the Washington Post are not
Pravda; the Associated Press is not Tass. And there is no Newspeak
here. Lies have not been defined as truth nor truth as lies. All that
has happened is that the public has adjusted to incoherence and been
"Now... This"
amused into indifference. Which is why Aldous
Huxley would not in the least be surprised by the story. Indeed, he
prophesied its coming. He believed that it is far more likely that
the Western democracies will dance and dream themselves into oblivion
than march into it, single file and manacled. Huxley grasped, as
Orwell did not, that it is not necessary to conceal anything from a
public insensible to contradiction and narcoticized by technological
diversions. Although Huxley did not specify that television would be
our main line to the drug, he would have no difficulty accepting
Robert MacNeil's observation that "Television is the soma of
Aldous Huxley's Brave New World." Big Brother turns out to be
Howdy Doody. I do not mean that the trivialization of public
information is all accomplished on television. I mean that television
is the paradigm for our conception of public information. As the
printing press did in an earlier time, television has achieved the
power to define the form in which news must come, and it has also
defined how we shall respond to it. In presenting news to us packaged
as vaudeville, television induces other media to do the same, so that
the total
information environment begins to mirror television. For example,
America's newest and highly successful national newspaper, USA Today,
is modeled precisely on the format of television. It is sold on the
street in receptacles that look like television sets. Its stories are
uncommonly short, its design leans heavily on pictures, charts and
other graphics, some of them printed in various colors. Its weather
maps are a visual delight; its sports section includes enough
pointless statistics to distract a computer. As a consequence, USA
Today, which began publication in September 1982, has become the
third largest daily in the United States (as of July 1984, according
to the Audit Bureau of Circulations), moving quickly to overtake the
Daily News and the Wall Street Journal. Journalists of a more
traditional bent have criticized it for its superficiality and
theatrics, but the paper's editors remain steadfast in their
disregard
112
"Now... This"
of
typographic standards. the paper's Editor-in-Chief, John Quinn, has
said: "We are not up to undertaking projects of the dimensions
needed to win prizes. They don't give awards for the best
investigative paragraph." 'Here is an astonishing tribute to the
resonance of television's epistemology: In the age of television, the
paragraph is becoming the basic unit of news in print media.
Moreover, 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.
It needs
also to be noted here that new and successful magazines such as
People and Us are not only examples of television-oriented print
media but have had an extraordinary "ricochet" effect on
television itself. Whereas television taught the magazines that news
is nothing but entertainment, the magazines have taught television
that nothing but entertainment is news. Television programs, such as
"Entertainment Tonight," turn information about
entertainers and celebrities into "serious" cultural
content, so that the circle begins to close: Both the form and
content of news become entertainment.
Radio, of course, is the least likely medium to
join in the descent into a Huxleyan world of technological narcotics.
It is, after all, particularly well suited to the transmission of
rational, complex language. Nonetheless, and even if we disregard
radio's captivation by the music industry, we appear to be left with
the chilling fact that such language as radio allows us to hear is
increasingly primitive, fragmented, and largely aimed at invoking
visceral response; which is to
say, it is
the linguistic analogue to the ubiquitous rock music that is radio's
principal source of income. As I write, the trend in call-in shows is
for the "host" to insult callers whose language does not,
in itself, go much beyond humanoid grunting. Such programs have
little content, as this word used to be defined, and are merely of
ar-cheological interest in that they give us a sense of what a
dialogue among Neanderthals might have been like. More to the
point, the
language of radio newscasts has become, under the influence of
television, increasingly decontextualized and discontinuous, so that
the possibility of anyone's knowing about the world, as against
merely knowing of it, is effectively blocked. In New York City, radio
station WINS entreats its listeners to "Give us twenty-two
minutes and we'll give you the world." This is said without
irony, and its audience, we may assume, does not regard the slogan as
the conception of a disordered mind.
And so, we
move rapidly into an information environment which may rightly be
called trivial pursuit. As the game of that name uses facts as a
source of amusement, so do our sources of news. It has been
demonstrated many times that a culture can survive misinformation and
false opinion. It has not yet been demonstrated whether a culture can
survive if it takes the measure of the world in twenty-two minutes.
Or if the value of its news is determined by the number of laughs it
provides.
Shuffle Off
to Bethlehem
There is an
evangelical preacher on television who goes by the name of Reverend
Terry. She appears to be in her early fifties, and features a
coiffure of which it has been said that it cannot be mussed, only
broken. Reverend Terry is energetic and folksy, and uses a style of
preaching modeled on early Milton Berle. When her audiences are shown
in reaction shots, they are almost always laughing. As a consequence,
it would be difficult to distinguish them from audiences, say, at the
Sands Hotel in Las Vegas, except for the fact that they have a
slightly cleaner, more wholesome look. Reverend Terry tries to
persuade them, as well as those "at home," to change their
ways by finding Jesus Christ. To help her do this, she offers a
"prosperity Campaign Kit," which appears to have a dual
purpose: As it brings one nearer to Jesus, it also provides advice on
how to increase one's bank account. This makes her followers
extremely happy and confirms their predisposition to believe that
prosperity is the true aim of religion. Perhaps God disagrees. As of
this writing, Reverend Terry has been obliged to
declare
bankruptcy and temporarily halt her ministrations.
Pat
Robertson is the master of ceremonies of the highly successful "700
Club," a television show and religious organization of sorts to
which you can belong by paying fifteen dollars per month. (Of course,
anyone with cable television can watch the show free of charge.)
Reverend Robertson does his act in a much lower register than
Reverend Terry. He is modest, intelligent, and has the kind of charm
television viewers would associate with a cool-headed talk-show host.
His appeal to godliness is considerably more sophisticated than
Reverend Terry's, at least from the standpoint of television. Indeed,
he appears to use as his model of communication "Entertainment
Tonight." His program includes interviews, singers and taped
segments with entertainers who are born-again Christians. For
example, all of the chorus girls in Don Ho's Hawaiian act are
born-again, and in one segment, we are shown them both at prayer and
on stage (although not at the same time). the program also includes
taped reenactments of people who, having been driven to the edge of
despair, are saved by the 700 Club'. Such people play themselves in
these finely crafted docu-dramas. In one, we are shown a woman racked
with anxiety. She cannot concentrate on her wifely duties. the
television shows and movies she sees induce a generalized fear of the
world. Paranoia closes in. She even begins to believe that her own
children are trying to kill her. As the play proceeds, we see her in
front of her television set chancing upon the 700 Club. She becomes
interested in its message. She allows Jesus to enter her heart. She
is saved. At the end of the play, we see her going about her
business, calmly and cheerfully, her eyes illuminated with peace. And
so, we may say that the 700 Club has twice elevated her to a state of
transcendence: first, by putting her in the presence of Jesus;
second, by making her into a television star. To the uninitiated, it
is not entirely clear which is the higher estate.
Toward the
end of each 700 Club show, the following day's acts are
announced. They
are many and various. the
program concludes with
someone's
saying, "All this and more... tomorrow
on the 700 Club."
Jimmy
Swaggart is a somewhat older-style evangelist. Though he plays the
piano quite well, sings sweetly, and uses the full range of
television's resources, when he gets going he favors a kind of
fire-and-brimstone approach. But because this is television, he often
moderates his message with a dollop of ecumenism. For example, his
sermon on the question, Are the
Jews
practicing blasphemy? begins
by assuring his audience that they
are not, by recalling Jesus' bar mitzvah, and by
insisting that Christians owe the Jews a considerable debt. It ends
with his indicating that with the loss of their Temple in Biblical
times, the Jews have somehow lost their way. His message suggests
that they are rather to be pitied than despised but that, in any
case, many of them are pretty nice people. It is the perfect
television sermon--theatrical, emotional, and in a curious way
comforting, even to a Jewish viewer. For television-bless its
heart--is not congenial to messages of naked hate. For one thing, you
never know who is watching, so it is best not to be wildly offensive.
For another, haters with reddened faces and demonic gestures merely
look foolish on television, as Marshall McLuhan observed years ago
and Senator Joseph McCarthy learned to his dismay. Television favors
moods of conciliation and is at its best when substance of any kind
is muted. (One must make an exception here for those instances when
preachers, like Swaggart, turn to the subject of the Devil and
secular humanism. Then they are quite uncompromising in the ferocity
of their assaults, partly, one may assume, because neither the Devil
nor secular humanists are included in the Nielsen Ratings. Neither
are they inclined to watch.) There are at present thirty-five
television stations owned and operated by religious organizations,
but every television station features religious programming of one
sort or another. To prepare myself for writing this chapter, I
watched forty-two hours of television's version of religion, mostly
the shows of Robert Schuller, Oral Roberts, Jimmy Swaggart, Jerry
Falwell, Jim Bakker and Pat Robertson. Forty-two hours were entirely
unnecessary. Five would have provided me with all the conclusions, of
which there are two, that are fairly to be drawn. the first is that
on television, religion, like everything else, is presented, quite
simply and without apology, as an entertainment. Everything that
makes religion an historic, profound and
sacred human
activity is stripped away; there is no ritual, no dogma, no
tradition, no theology, and above all, no sense of spiritual
transcendence. On these shows, the preacher is tops. God comes out as
second banana. the second conclusion is that this fact has more to do
with the bias of television than with the deficiencies of these
electronic preachers, as they are called. It is true enough that some
of these men are uneducated, provincial and even bigoted. They
certainly do not compare favorably with well-known evangelicals of an
earlier period, such as Jonathan Edwards, George Whitefield and
Charles Finney, who were men of great learning, theological subtlety
and powerful expositional skills. Nonetheless, today's television
preachers are probably not greatly different in their limitations
from most earlier evangelicals or from many ministers today whose
activities are confined to churches and synagogues. What makes these
television
preachers
the enemy of religious experience is not so much their weaknesses but
the weaknesses of the medium in which they work. Most Americans,
including preachers, have difficulty accepting the truth, if they
think about it at all, that not all forms of discourse can be
converted from one medium to another. It is naive to suppose that
something that has been expressed in one form can be expressed in
another without significantly changing its meaning, texture or value.
Much prose translates fairly well from one language to another, but
we know that poetry does not; we may get a rough idea of the sense of
a translated poem but usually everything else is lost, especially
that which makes it an object of beauty. the translation makes it
into something it was not. To take another example: We may find it
convenient to send a condolence card to a bereaved friend, but we
delude ourselves if we believe that our card conveys the same meaning
as our broken and whispered words when we are present. the card not
only changes the words but eliminates the context from which the
words take their meaning. Similarly, we delude ourselves if we
believe that most everything a
teacher
normally does can be replicated with greater efficiency by a
microcomputer. Perhaps some things can, but there is always the
question, What is lost in the translation? the answer may even be:
Everything that is significant about education. Though it may be
unAmerican to say it, not everything is televisible. Or to put it
more precisely, what is televised is transformed from what it was to
something else, which may or may not preserve its former essence. For
the most part, television preachers have not seriously addressed this
matter. They have assumed that what had formerly been done in a
church or a tent, and face-to-face, can be done on television without
loss of meaning, without changing the quality of the religious
experience. Perhaps their failure to address the translation issue
has its origin in the hubris engendered by the dazzling number of
people to whom television gives them access. "Television,"
Billy Graham has written, "is the most powerful tool of
communication ever devised by man. Each of my prime-time 'specials'
is now carried by nearly 300 stations across the U.S. and Canada, so
that in a single telecast I preach to millions more than Christ did
in his lifetime." To this, Pat Robertson adds: "To say that
the church shouldn't be involved with television is utter folly. the
needs are the same, the message is the same, but the delivery can
change .... It would be folly for the church not to get
involved
with the most formative force in America." 2 This is gross
technological naivete. If the delivery is not the same, then the
message, quite likely, is not the same. And if the context in which
the message is experienced is altogether different from what it was
in
Jesus' time, we may assume that its social and
psychological meaning is different, as well. To come to the point,
there are several characteristics of television and its surround that
converge to make authentic religious experience impossible. the first
has to do with the fact that there is no way to consecrate the space
in which a television show is experienced. It is an essential
condition of any traditional religious service that the space in
which it is conducted must be invested with some measure of
sacrality. Of course, a church or synagogue is designed as a place of
ritual enactment so that almost anything that occurs there, even a
bingo game, has a religious aura. But a religious service need not
occur only in a church or synagogue. Almost any place will do,
provided it is first decontaminated; that is, divested of its profane
uses. This can be done by placing a cross on a wall, or candles on a
table, or a sacred document in public view. Through such acts, a
gymnasium or dining hall or hotel room can be transformed into a
place of worship; a slice of space-time can be removed from the world
of profane events, and be recreated into a reality that does not
belong to our world. But for this transformation to be made, it is
essential that certain rules of conduct be observed. There will be no
eating or idle conversation, for example. One may be required to put
on a skull cap or to kneel down at appropriate moments. Or simply to
contemplate in silence. Our conduct must be congruent with the
otherworldliness of the space. But this condition is not usually met
when we are watching a religious television program. the activities
in one's living room or bedroom or--God help us--one's kitchen are
usually the same whether a religious program is being presented or
"the A-Team" or "Dallas" is being presented.
People will eat, talk, go to the bathroom, do push-ups or any of the
things they are accustomed to doing in the presence of an animated
television screen. If an audience is not immersed in an aura of
mystery and symbolic otherworldliness, then it is unlikely that it
can call forth the state of mind required for a nontrivial religious
experience. Moreover, the television screen itself has a strong bias
toward a psychology of secularism. the screen is so saturated with
our memories of profane events, so deeply associated with the
commercial and entertainment worlds that it is difficult for it to be
recreated as a frame for sacred events. Among other things, the
viewer is at all times aware that a flick of the switch will produce
a different and secular event on the screenma hockey game, a
commercial, a cartoon. Not only that, but both prior to and
immediately following most religious programs, there are commercials,
promos for popular shows, and a variety of other secular images and
discourses, so that the main message of the screen itself is a
continual promise of entertainment. Both the history and the
ever-present possibilities of the television screen work against the
idea that
introspection
or spiritual transcendence is desirable in its presence. the
television screen wants you to remember that its imagery is always
available for your amusement and pleasure.
the
television preachers themselves are well aware of this. They know
that their programs do not represent a discontinuity in commercial
broadcasting but are merely part of an unbroken continuum. Indeed,
many of these programs are presented at times other than traditional
Sunday hours. Some of the more popular preachers are quite willing to
go "head to head" with secular programs because they
believe they can put on a more appealing show. Incidentally, the
money to do this is no problem. Contributions to these shows run into
the millions. It has been estimated that the total revenue of the
electric church exceeds $500 million a year.
I mention
this only to indicate why it is possible for these preachers to match
the high production costs of any strictly commercial program. And
match them they do. Most of the religious shows feature sparkling
fountains, floral displays, choral groups and elaborate sets. All of
them take as their model for staging some well-known commercial
program. Jim Bakker, for example, uses "the Merv Griffin Show"
as his guide. More than occasionally, programs are done "on
location," in exotic locales with attractive and unfamiliar
vistas.
In addition,
exceedingly handsome people are usually in view, both on the stage
and in the audience. Robert Schuiler is particularly partial to
celebrities, especially movie actors like Efrem Zimbalist, Jr., and
Cliff Robertson, who have declared
their
allegiance to him. Not only does Schuller have celebrities on his
show but his advertisements use their presence to attract an
audience. Indeed, I think it fair to say that attracting an audience
is the main goal of these programs, just as it is for "the
A-Team" and "Dallas."
To achieve
this goal, the most modern methods of marketing and promotion are
abundantly used, such as offering free pamphlets, Bibles and gifts,
and, in Jerry Falwell's case, two free "Jesus First" pins.
the preachers are forthright about how they control the content of
their preaching to maximize their ratings. You shall wait a very long
time indeed if you wish to hear an electronic preacher refer to the
difficulties a rich man will have in gaining access to heaven. the
executive director of the National Religious Broadcasters Association
sums up what he calls the unwritten law of all television preachers:
"You can get your share of the audience only by offering people
something
they want."
You will note, I am sure, that this is an unusual
religious credo. There is no great religious leader--from the Buddha
to Moses to Jesus to Mohammed to Luther--who offered people what they
want. Only what they need. But television is not well suited to
offering people what they need. It is "user friendly." It
is too easy to turn off. It is at its most alluring when it speaks
the language of dynamic visual imagery. It does not accommodate
complex language or stringent demands. As a consequence, what is
preached on television is not anything like the Sermon on the Mount.
Religious programs are filled with good cheer. They celebrate
affluence. Their featured players become celebrities. Though their
messages are trivial, the shows have high ratings, or rather, because
their messages are trivial, the shows have high ratings.
I believe I
am not mistaken in saying that Christianity is a demanding and
serious religion. When it is delivered as easy and amusing, it is
another kind of religion altogether.
There are, of course, counterarguments to the
claim that television degrades religion. Among them is that spectacle
is hardly a stranger to religion. If one puts aside the Quakers and a
few other austere sects, every religion tries to make itself
appealing through art, music, icons and awe-inspiring ritual. the
aesthetic dimension to religion is the source of its attraction to
many people. This is especially true of Roman Catholicism and
Judaism, which supply their congregants with haunting chants;
magnificent robes and shawls; magical hats, wafers and wine;
stained-glass windows; and the mysterious cadences of ancient
languages. the difference between these accoutrements of religion and
the floral displays, fountains and elaborate sets we see on
television is that the former are not, in fact, accoutrements but
integral parts of the history and doctrines of the religion itself;
they require congregants to respond to them with suitable reverence.
A Jew does not cover his head at prayer because a skull cap looks
good on television. A Catholic does not light a votive candle to
improve the look of the altar. Rabbis, priests and Presbyterian
ministers do not, in the midst of a service, take testimony from
movie stars to find out why they are religious people. the spectacle
we find in true religions has as its purpose enchantment, not
entertainment. the distinction is critical. By endowing things with
magic, enchantment is the means through which we may gain access to
sacredness. Entertainment is the means through which we distance
ourselves from it. the reply to this is that most of the religion
available to us on television is "fundamentalist," which
explicitly disdains ritual and theology in favor of direct
communication
with the
Bible itself, that is, with God. Without ensnaring myself in a
theological argument for which I am unprepared, I think it both fair
and obvious to say that on television, God is a vague and subordinate
character. Though His name is invoked repeatedly, the concreteness
and persistence of the image of the preacher carries the clear
message that it is he, not He, who must be worshipped. I do not mean
to imply that the preacher wishes it to
be so; only
that the power of a close-up televised face, in color, makes idolatry
a continual hazard. Television is, after all, a form of graven
imagery far more alluring than a golden calf. I suspect (though I
have no external evidence of it) that Catholic objections to Bishop
Fulton Sheen's theatrical performances on television (of several
years back) sprang from the impression that viewers were misdirecting
their devotions, away from God and toward Bishop Sheen, whose
piercing eyes, awesome cape and stately tones were as close a
resemblance to a deity as charisma allows. Television's strongest
point is that it brings personalities into our hearts, not
abstractions into our heads. That is why CBS' programs about the
universe were called "Walter Cronkite's Universe." One
would think that the grandeur of the universe needs no assistance
from Walter Cronkite. One would think wrong. CBS knows that Walter
Cronkite plays better on television than the Milky Way. And Jimmy
Swaggart plays better than God. For God exists only in our minds,
whereas Swaggart is there, to be seen, admired, adored. Which is why
he is the star of the show. And why Billy Graham is a celebrity, and
why Oral Roberts has his own university, and why Robert Schuller has
a crystal cathedral all to himself. If I am not mistaken, the word
for this is blasphemy. There is a final argument that whatever
criticisms may be made of televised religion, there remains the
inescapable fact that it attracts viewers by the millions. This would
appear to be the meaning of the statements, quoted earlier by Billy
Graham and Pat Robertson, that there is a need for it among the
multitude. To which the best reply I know was made by Hannah Arendt,
who, in reflecting on the products of mass culture, wrote:
This state
of affairs, which indeed is equalled nowhere else in the world, can
properly be called mass culture; its promoters are neither the masses
nor their entertainers, but are those who try to
entertain
the masses with what once was an authentic object of culture, or to
persuade them that Hamlet can be as entertaining as My Fair Lady, and
educational as well. the danger of mass education is precisely that
it may become very entertaining indeed; there are many great authors
of the past who have survived centuries of oblivion and neglect, but
it is
still an
open question whether they will be able to survive an entertaining
version of what they have to say.
If we
substitute the word "religion" for Hamlet, and the phrase
"great religious traditions" for "great authors of the
past," this quotation may stand as the decisive critique of
televised religion. There is no doubt, in other words, that religion
can be made entertaining. the question is, By doing so, do we destroy
it as an "authentic object of culture"? And does the
popularity of a religion that employs the full resources of
vaudeville drive more traditional religious conceptions into manic
and trivial displays? I have already referred to Cardinal O'Connor's
embarrassing attempts to be well liked and amusing, and to a parish
priest who cheerfully tries to add rock music to Catholic education.
I know of one rabbi who has seriously proposed to his congregation
that Luciano Pavarotti be engaged to sing Kol Nidre at a Yom Kippur
service. He believes that the event would fill the synagogue as never
before. Who can doubt it? But as Hannah Arendt would say, that is the
problem, not a solution to one. As a member of the Commission on
Theology, Education and the Electronic Media of the National Council
of the Churches of Christ, I am aware of the deep concern among
"established" Protestant religions about the tendency
toward refashioning Protestant services so that they are more
televisible. It is well understood at the National Council that the
danger is not that religion has become the content of television
shows but that television shows may become the content of religion.
Reach Out
and Elect Someone
In the Last Hurrah, Edwin O'Connor's fine novel
about lusty party politics in Boston, Mayor Frank Skeffington tries
to instruct his young nephew in the realities of political machinery.
Politics, he tells him, is the greatest spectator sport in America.
In 1966, Ronald Reagan used a different metaphor. "Politics,"
he said, "is just like show business." Although sports has
now become a major branch of show business, it still contains
elements that make Skeffington's vision of politics somewhat more
encouraging than Reagan's. In any sport the standard of excellence is
well known to both the players and spectators, and an athlete's
reputation rises and falls by his or her proximity to that standard.
Where an athlete stands in relation to it cannot be easily disguised
or faked, which means that David Garth can do very little to improve
the image of an outfielder with a .218 batting average. It also means
that a public opinion poll on the question, Who is the best woman
tennis player in the world?, is meaningless. the public's opinion has
nothing to do with it. Martina Navratilova's serve
provides the
decisive answer. One may also note that spectators at a sporting
event are usually well aware of the rules of the game and the meaning
of each piece of the action. There is no way for a batter who strikes
out with the bases loaded to argue the spectators into believing that
he has done a useful thing for his team (except, perhaps, by
reminding them that he could have hit into a double play). the
difference between hits and strike-outs, touchdowns and fumbles, aces
and double faults cannot be blurred, even by the pomposities and
malapropisms of a Howard Cosell. If politics were like a sporting
event, there would be several virtues to attach to its name: clarity,
honesty, excellence.
But what
virtues attach to politics if Ronald Reagan is right? Show business
is not entirely without an idea of excellence, but its main business
is to please the crowd, and its principal instrument is artifice. If
politics is like show business, then the idea is not to pursue
excellence, clarity or honesty but to appear as if you are, which is
another matter altogether. And what the other matter is can be
expressed in one word: advertising. In Joe McGinnis' book about
Richard Nixon's campaign in 1968, the Selling of the President, he
said much of what needs to be said about politics and advertising,
both in his title and in the book. But not quite all. For though the
selling of a President is an astonishing and degrading thing, it is
only part of a larger point: In America, the fundamental metaphor for
political discourse is the television commercial.
the television commercial is the most peculiar
and pervasive form of communication to issue forth from the electric
plug. An American who has reached the age of forty will have seen
well over one million television commercials in his or her lifetime,
and has close to another million to go before the first Social
Security check arrives. We may safely assume, therefore, that the
television commercial has profoundly influenced American habits of
thought. Certainly, there is no difficulty in demonstrating that it
has become an important paradigm for the structure of every type of
public discourse. My major purpose here is to show how it has
devastated political discourse. But there may be some value in my
pointing, first, to its effect on commerce itself.
By bringing
together in compact form all of the arts of show business--music,
drama, imagery, humor, celebrity--the television commercial has
mounted the most serious assault on capitalist ideology since the
publication of Das Kapital. To understand why, we must remind
ourselves that capitalism, like science and liberal democracy, was an
outgrowth of the Enlightenment. Its principal theorists, even its
most
prosperous
practitioners, believed capitalism to be based on the idea that both
buyer and seller are sufficiently mature, well informed and
reasonable to engage in transactions of mutual self-interest. If
greed was taken to be the fuel of the capitalist engine, then surely
rationality was the driver. the theory states, in part, that
competition in the marketplace requires that the buyer not only knows
what is good for him but also what is good. If the seller produces
nothing of value, as determined by a rational marketplace, then he
loses out. It is the assumption of rationality among buyers that
spurs competitors to become winners, and winners to keep on winning.
Where it is assumed that a buyer is unable to make rational
decisions, laws are passed to invalidate transactions, as, for
example, those which prohibit children from making contracts. In
America, there even exists in law a requirement that sellers must
tell the truth about their products, for if the buyer has no
protection from false claims, rational decision-making is seriously
impaired.
Of course,
the practice of capitalism has its contradictions. Cartels and
monopolies, for example, undermine the theory. But television
commercials make hash of it. To take the simplest example: To be
rationally considered, any claim--commercial or otherwise--must be
made in language. More precisely, it must take the form of a
proposition, for that is the universe of discourse from which such
words as "true" and "false" come. If that
universe of discourse is discarded, then the application of empirical
tests, logical analysis or any of the other instruments of reason are
impotent.
the move
away from the use of propositions in commercial advertising began at
the end of the nineteenth century. But it was not until the 1950's
that the television commercial made linguistic discourse obsolete as
the basis for product decisions. By substituting images for claims,
the pictorial commercial
made emotional appeal, not tests of truth, the
basis of consumer decisions. the distance between rationality and
advertising is now so wide that it is difficult to remember that
there once existed a connection between them. Today, on television
commercials, propositions are as scarce as unattractive people. the
truth or falsity of an advertiser's claim is simply not an issue. A
McDonald's commercial, for example, is not a series of testable,
logically ordered assertions. It is a drama--a mythology, if you
will--of handsome people selling, buying and eating hamburgers, and
being driven to near ecstasy by their good fortune. No claims are
made, except those the viewer projects onto or infers from the drama.
One can like or dislike a television commercial,
of course. But one cannot refute it. Indeed, we
may go this far: the television commercial is not at all about the
character of products to be consumed. It is about the character of
the consumers of products. Images of movie stars and famous athletes,
of serene lakes and macho fishing trips, of elegant dinners and
romantic interludes, of happy families packing their station wagons
for a picnic in the country--these tell nothing about the products
being sold. But they tell everything about the fears, fancies and
dreams of those who might buy them. What the advertiser needs to know
is not what is right about the product but what is wrong about the
buyer. And so, the balance of business expenditures shifts from
product research to market research. the television commercial has
oriented business away from making products of value and toward
making consumers feel valuable, which means that the business of
business has now become pseudo-therapy. the consumer is a patient
assured by psycho-dramas. All of this would come as a great surprise
to Adam Smith, just as the transformation of politics would be
equally surprising to the redoubtable George Orwell. It is true, as
George Steiner has remarked, that Orwell thought of Newspeak as
originating, in part, from "the verbiage of commercial
advertising." But when Orwell wrote in his famous essay "the
Politics of the English
Language" that politics has become a matter
of "defending the indefensible," he was assuming that
politics would remain a distinct, although corrupted, mode of
discourse. His contempt was aimed at those politicians who would use
sophisticated versions of the age-old arts of double-think,
propaganda and deceit. That the defense of the indefensible would be
conducted as a form of amusement did not occur to him. He feared the
politician as deceiver, not as entertainer. the television commercial
has been the chief instrument in creating the modern methods of
presenting political ideas. It has accomplished this in two ways. the
first is by requiring its form to be used in political campaigns. It
is not necessary, I take it, to say very much about this method.
Everyone has noticed and worried in varying degrees about it,
including former New York City mayor John Lindsay, who has proposed
that political "commercials" be prohibited. Even television
commentators have brought it to our attention, as for example, Bill
Moyers in "the Thirty-second President," a documentary on
his excellent television series "A Walk Through the 20th
Century." My own awakening to the power of the television
commercial as political discourse came as a result of a personal
experience of a few years back, when I played a minuscule role in
Ramsey Clark's Senate campaign against Jacob Javits in New York. A
great believer in the traditional modes of political discourse, Clark
prepared a small library of carefully articulated position papers on
a variety of subjects from race relations to nuclear power to the
Middle
East. He
filled each paper with historical background, economic and political
facts, and, I thought, an enlightened sociological perspective. He
might as well have drawn cartoons. In fact, Jacob Javits did draw
cartoons, in a manner of speaking. If Javits had a carefully phrased
position on any issue, the fact was largely unknown. He built his
campaign on a series of thirty-second television commercials in which
he used visual imagery, in much the same way as a McDonald's
commercial, to project himself as a man of experience, virtue and
piety. For all I
know, Javits believed as strongly in reason as
did Ramsey Clark. But he believed more strongly in retaining his seat
in the Senate. And he knew full well in what century we are living.
He understood that in a world of television and other visual media,
"political knowledge" means having pictures in your head
more than having words. the record will show that this insight did
not fail him. He won the election by the largest plurality in New
York State history. And I will not labor the commonplace that any
serious candidate for high political office in America requires the
services of an image manager to design the kinds of pictures that
will lodge in the public's collective head. I will want to return to
the implications of "image politics" but it is necessary,
before that, to discuss the second method by which the television
commercial shapes political discourse. Because the television
commercial is the single most voluminous form of public communication
in our society, it was inevitable that Americans would accommodate
themselves to the philosophy of television commercials. By
"accommodate," I mean that we accept them as a normal and
plausible form of discourse. By "philosophy," I mean that
the television commercial has embedded in it certain assumptions
about the nature of communication that run counter to those of other
media, especially the printed word. For one thing, the commercial
insists on an unprecedented brevity of expression. One may even say,
in-stancy. A sixty-second commercial is prolix; thirty seconds is
longer than most; fifteen to twenty seconds is about average. This is
a brash and startling structure for communication since, as I
remarked earlier, the commercial always addresses itself to the
psychological needs of the viewer. Thus it is not merely therapy. It
is instant therapy. Indeed, it puts forward a psychological theory of
unique axioms: the commercial asks us to believe that all problems
are solvable, that they are solvable fast, and that they are solvable
fast through the interventions of technology, techniques and
chemistry. This is, of course, a preposterous theory about the roots
of discontent, and would appear so to anyone hearing or reading it.
But the commercial disdains exposition, for that takes time and
invites argument. It is a very bad commercial indeed that engages the
viewer in wondering about
the validity
of the point being made. That is why most commercials use the
literary device of the pseudo-parable as a means of doing their work.
Such "parables" as the Ring Around the Collar, the Lost
Traveler's Checks and the Phone Call from the Son Far Away not only
have irrefutable emotional power but, like Biblical parables, are
unambiguously didactic. the television commercial is about products
only in the sense that the story of Jonah is about the anatomy of
whales, which is to say, it isn't. Which is to say further, it is
about how one ought to live one's life. Moreover, commercials have
the advantage of vivid visual symbols through which we may easily
learn the lessons being taught. Among those lessons are that short
and simple messages are preferable to long and complex ones; that
drama is to be preferred over exposition; that being sold solutions
is better than being confronted with questions about problems. Such
beliefs would naturally have implications for our orientation to
political discourse; that is to say, we may begin to accept as normal
certain assumptions about the political domain that either derive
from or are amplified by the television commercial. For example, a
person who has seen one million television commercials might well
believe that all political problems have fast solutions through
simple measures--or ought to. Or that complex language is not to be
trusted, and that all problems lend themselves to theatrical
expression. Or that argument is in bad taste, and leads only to an
intolerable uncertainty. Such a person may also come to believe that
it is not necessary to draw any line between politics and other forms
of social life. Just as a television commercial will use an athlete,
an actor, a musician, a novelist, a scientist or a countess to speak
for the virtues of a product in no way within their domain of
expertise, television also frees politicians from the limited field
of their own expertise. Political figures may
show up
anywhere, at any time, doing anything, without being thought odd,
presumptuous, or in any way out of place. Which is to say, they have
become assimilated into the general television culture as
celebrities. Being a celebrity is quite different from being well
known. Harry Truman was well known but he was not a celebrity.
Whenever the public saw him or heard him, Truman was talking
politics. It takes a very rich imagination to envision Harry Truman
or, for that matter, his wife, making a guest appearance on "the
Goldbergs" or "I Remember Mama." Politics and
politicians had nothing to do with these shows, which people watched
for amusement, not to familiarize themselves with poo litical
candidates and issues. It is difficult to say exactly when
politicians began to put themselves forward, intentionally, as
sources of amusement. In the 1950's, Senator Everett Dirksen appeared
as a guest on "What's My Line." When he was running for
office, John F.
Kennedy
allowed the television cameras of Ed Murrow's "Person to Person"
to invade his home. When he was not running for office, Richard Nixon
appeared for a few seconds on "Laugh-In," an hour-long
comedy show based on the format of a television commercial. By the
1970% the public had started to become accustomed to the notion that
political figures were to be taken as part of the world of show
business. In the 1980's came the deluge. Vice-presidential candidate
William Miller did a commercial for American Express. So did the star
of the Watergate Hearings, Senator Sam Ervin. Former President Gerald
Ford joined with former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger for brief
roles on "Dynasty." Massachusetts Governor Mike Dukakis
appeared on "St. Elsewhere." Speaker of the House Tip
O'Neill did a stint on "Cheers." Consumer advocate Ralph
Nader, George McGovern and Mayor Edward Koch hosted "Saturday
Night Live." Koch also played the role of a fight manager in a
made-for-television movie starring James Cagney. Mrs. Nancy Reagan
appeared on "Diff'rent Strokes." Would
anyone be
surprised if Gary Hart turned up on "Hill Street Blues"? Or
if Geraldine Ferraro played a small role as a Queens housewife in a
Francis Coppola film? Although it may go too far to say that the
politician-as-celebrity has, by itself, made political parties
irrelevant, there is certainly a conspicuous correlation between the
rise of the former and the decline of the latter. Some readers may
remember when voters barely knew who the candidate was and, in any
case, were not preoccupied with his character and personal life. As a
young man, I balked one November at voting for a Democratic mayoralty
candidate who, it seemed to me, was both unintelligent and corrupt.
"What has that to do with it?" my father protested. "All
Democratic candidates are unintelligent and corrupt. Do you want the
Republicans to win?" He meant to say that intelligent voters
favored the party that best represented their economic interests and
sociological perspective. To vote for the "best man" seemed
to him an astounding and naive irrelevance. He never doubted that
there were good men among Republicans. He merely understood that they
did not speak for his class. He shared, with an unfailing eye, the
perspective of Big Tim Sullivan, a leader of New York's Tammany Hall
in its glory days. As Terence Moran recounts in his essay, "Politics
1984," Sullivan was once displeased when brought the news that
the vote in his precinct was 6,382 for the Democrat and two for the
Republican. In evaluating this disappointing result, Sullivan
remarked, "Sure, didn't Kelly come to me to say his wife's
cousin was running on the Republican line and didn't I, in the
interests of domestic tranquility, give him leave to vote Republican?
But what I want to know is, who else voted Republican?" 2 I will
not argue here the wisdom of this point of view. There may be a
case for
choosing the best man over party (although I know of none). the point
is that television does not reveal who the best man is. In fact,
television makes impossible the determination of who is better than
whom, if we mean by "better"
such things as more capable in negotiation, more
imaginative in executive skill, more knowledgeable about
international affairs, more understanding of the interrelations of
economic systems, and so on. the reason has, almost entirely, to do
with "image." But not because politicians are preoccupied
with presenting themselves in the best possible light. After all, who
isn't? It is a rare and deeply disturbed person who does not wish to
project a favorable image. But television gives image a bad name. For
on television the politician does not so much offer the audience an
image of himself, as offer himself as an image of the audience. And
therein lies one of the most powerful influences of the television
commercial on political discourse. To understand how image politics
works on television, we may use as an entry point the well-known
commercial from which this chapter takes the first half of its title.
I refer to the Bell Telephone romances, created by Mr. Steve Horn, in
which we are urged to "Reach Out and Touch Someone." the
"someone" is usually a relative who lives 'in Denver or Los
Angeles or Atlanta--in any case, very far from where we are, and who,
in a good year, we will be lucky to see on Thanksgiving Day. the
"someone" used to play a daily and vital role in our lives;
that is to say, used to be a member of the family. Though American
culture stands vigorously opposed to the idea of family, there
nonetheless still exists a residual nag that something essential to
our lives is lost when we give it up. Enter Mr. Horn's commercials.
These are thirty-second homilies concerned to provide a new
definition of intimacy in which the telephone wire will take the
place of old-fashioned co-presence. Even further, these commercials
intimate a new conception of family cohesion for a nation of kinsmen
who have been split asunder by automobiles, jet aircraft and other
instruments of family suicide. In analyzing these commercials, Jay
Rosen makes the following observation: "Horn isn't interested in
saying anything, he has no message to get across. His goal is not to
provide information about Bell, but to somehow bring out from the
broken ties of millions of American lives a feeling which might focus
on the telephone .... Horn does not express himself. You do not
express yourself. Horn expresses you." 3
This is the lesson of all great television commercials: They provide
a slogan, a symbol or a focus that creates for viewers a
comprehensive and compelling image of themselves. In the shift from
party politics to television politics, the same goal is sought. We
are not permitted to know who is best at being President or Governor
or Senator, but whose image is best in touching and soothing
the deep
reaches of our discontent. We look at the television screen and ask,
in the same voracious way as the Queen in Snow White and the Seven
Dwarfs, "Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the fairest one of
all?" We are inclined to vote for those whose personality,
family life, and style, as imaged on the screen, give back a better
answer than the Queen received. As Xenophanes remarked twenty-five
centuries ago, men always make their gods in their own image. But to
this, television politics has added a new wrinkle: Those who would be
gods refashion themselves into images the viewers would have them be.
And so, while image politics preserves the idea of self-interest
voting, it alters the meaning of "self-interest." Big Tim
Sullivan and my father voted for the party that represented their
interests, but "interests" meant to them something
tangible--patronage, preferential treatment, protection from
bureaucracy, support for one's union or community, Thanksgiving
turkeys for indigent families. Judged by this standard, blacks may be
the only sane voters left in America. Most of the rest of us vote our
interests, but they are largely symbolic ones, which is to say, of a
psychological nature. Like television commercials, image politics is
a form of therapy, which is why so much of it is charm, good looks,
celebrity and personal disclosure. It is a sobering thought to recall
that there are no photographs of Abraham Lincoln smiling, that his
wife was in all likelihood a psycho-path, and that he was subject to
lengthy fits of depression. He
would hardly
have been well suited for image politics. We do not want our mirrors
to be so dark and so far from amusing. What I am saying is that just
as the television commercial empties itself of authentic product
information so that it can do its psychological work, image politics
empties itself of authentic political substance for the same reason.
It follows from this that history can play no significant role in
image politics. For history is of value only to someone who takes
seriously the notion that there are patterns in the past which may
provide the present with nourishing traditions. "the past is a
world," Thomas Carlyle said, "and not a void of grey haze."
But he wrote this at a time when the book was the principal medium of
serious public discourse. A book is all history. Everything about it
takes one back in time--from the way it is produced to its linear
mode of exposition to the fact that the past tense is its most
comfortable form of address. As no other medium before or since, the
book promotes a sense of a coherent and usable past. In a
conversation of books, history, as Carlyle understood it, is not only
a world but a living world. It is the present that is shadowy. But
television is a speed-of-light medium, a present-centered medium. Its
grammar, so to say, permits no access to the past. Everything
presented in moving pictures is experienced as
happening
"now," which is why we must be told in language that a
videotape we are seeing was made months before. Moreover, like its
forefather, the telegraph, television needs to move fragments of
information, not to collect and organize them. Carlyle was more
prophetic than he could imagine: the literal gray haze that is the
background void on all television screens is an apt metaphor of the
notion of history the medium puts forward. In the Age of Show
Business and image politics, political discourse is emptied not only
of ideological content but of historical content, as well. Czeslaw
Milosz, winner of the 1980 Nobel Prize for Literature, remarked in
his acceptance speech in Stockholm that our
age is
characterized by a "refusal to remember"; he cited, among
other things, the shattering fact that there are now more than one
hundred books in print that deny that the Holocaust ever took place.
the historian Carl Schorske has, in my opinion, circled closer to the
truth by noting that the modern mind has grown indifferent to history
because history has become useless to it; in other words, it is not
obstinacy or ignorance but a sense of irrelevance that leads to the
diminution of history. Television's Bill Moyers inches still closer
when he says, "I worry that my own business . . . helps to make
this an anxious age of agitated amnesiacs .... We Americans seem to
know everything about the
last twenty-four hours but very little of the
last sixty centuries or the last sixty years." 4 Terence Moran,
I believe, lands on the target in saying that with media whose
structure is biased toward furnishing images and fragments, we are
deprived of access to an historical perspective. In the absence of
continuity and context, he says, "bits of information cannot be
integrated into an intelligent and consistent whole." 5 We do
not refuse to remember; neither do we find it exactly useless to
remember. Rather, we are being rendered unfit to remember. For if
remembering is to be something more than nostalgia, it requires a
contextual basis--a theory, a vision, a metaphor-- something within
which facts can be organized and patterns discerned. the politics of
image and instantaneous news provides no such context, is, in fact,
hampered by attempts to provide any. A mirror records only what you
are wearing today. It is silent about yesterday. With television, we
vault ourselves into a continuous, incoherent present. "History,"
Henry Ford said, "is bunk." Henry Ford was a typographic
optimist. "History," the Electric Plug replies, "doesn't
exist." If these conjectures make sense, then in this Orwell was
wrong once again, at least for the Western democracies. He envisioned
the demolition of history, but believed that it would be accomplished
by the state; that some equivalent of the Ministry of Truth would
systematically banish inconvenient facts and destroy the records of
the past. Certainly, this is the way of the
Soviet
Union, our modern-day Oceania. But as Huxley more accurately foretold
it, nothing so crude as all that is required. Seemingly benign
technologies devoted to providing the populace with a politics of
image, instancy and therapy may disappear history just as
effectively, perhaps more permanently, and without objection. We
ought also to look to Huxley, not Orwell, to understand the threat
that television and other forms of imagery pose to the foundation of
liberal democracy--namely, to freedom of information. Orwell quite
reasonably supposed that the state, through naked suppression, would
control the flow of information, particularly by the banning of
books. In this prophecy, Orwell had history strongly on his side. For
books have always been subjected to censorship in varying degrees
wherever they have been an important part of the communication
landscape. In ancient China, the Analects of Confucius were ordered
destroyed by Emperor Chi Huang Ti. Ovid's banishment from Rome by
Augustus was in part a result of his having written Ars Amatoria.
Even in Athens, which set enduring standards of intellectual
excellence, books were viewed with alarm. In Areopagitica, Milton
provides an excellent review of the many examples of book censorship
in Classical Greece, including the case of Protagoras, whose books
were burned because he began one of his discourses with the
confession that he did not know whether or not there were gods. But
Milton is careful to observe that in all the cases before his own
time, there were only two types of books that, as he puts it, "the
magistrate cared to take notice of": books that were blasphemous
and books that were libelous. Milton stresses this point because,
writing almost two hundred years after Gutenberg, he knew that the
magistrates of his own era, if unopposed, would disallow books of
every conceivable subject matter. Milton knew, in other words, that
it was in the printing press that censorship had found its true
metier; that, in fact, information and ideas did not become a
profound
cultural problem until the maturing of the Age of Print. Whatever
dangers there may be in a word that is written, such a word is a
hundred times more dangerous when stamped by a press. And the problem
posed by typography was recognized early; for example, by Henry VIII,
whose Star Chamber was authorized to deal with wayward books. It
continued to be recognized by Elizabeth I, the Stuarts, and many
other post-Gutenberg monarchs, including Pope Paul IV, in whose reign
the first Index Librorum Prohibitorurn was drawn. To paraphrase David
Riesman only slightly, in a world of printing, information is the
gunpowder of the mind; hence come the censors in their austere robes
to dampen the explosion. Thus, Orwell envisioned that ( 1 )
government control over (2) printed matter posed a serious threat for
Western democracies. He was wrong on both counts. (He was, of course,
right on
both counts
insofar as Russia, China and other pre-electronic cultures are
concerned.) Orwell was, in effect, addressing himself to a problem of
the Age of Print--in fact, to the same problem addressed by the men
who wrote the United States Constitution. the Constitution was
composed at a time when most free men had access to their communities
through a leaflet, a newspaper or the spoken word. They were quite
well positioned to share their political ideas with each other in
forms and contexts over which they had competent control. Therefore,
their greatest worry was the possibility of government tyranny. the
Bill of Rights is largely a prescription for preventing government
from restricting the flow of information and ideas. But the Founding
Fathers did not foresee that tyranny by government might be
superseded by another sort of problem altogether, namely, the
corporate state, which through television now controls the flow of
public discourse in America. I raise no strong objection to this fact
(at least not here) and have no intention of launching into a
standard-brand complaint against the corporate state. I merely note
the fact with apprehension, as did George Gerbner, Dean of the
Annenberg School of Communication, when he wrote:
Television
is the new state religion run by a private Ministry of Culture (the
three networks), offering a universal curriculum for all people,
financed by a form of hidden taxation without representation. You pay
when you wash, not when you watch, and whether or not you care to
watch ....
Earlier in
the same essay, Gerbner said:
Liberation
cannot be accomplished by turning [television] off. Television is for
most people the most attractive thing going any time of the day or
night. We live in a world in which the vast majority will not turn
off. If we don't get the message from the tube, we get it through
other people.
I do not
think Professor Gerbner meant to imply in these sentences that there
is a conspiracy to take charge of our symbolic world by the men who
run the "Ministry of Culture." I even suspect he would
agree with me that if the faculty of the An-nenberg School of
Communication were to take over the three networks, viewers would
hardly notice the difference. I believe he means to say--and in any
case, I do--that in the Age of Television, our information
environment is completely different from what it was in 1783; that we
have less to fear from government restraints than from television
glut; that, in fact, we have no way of protecting ourselves from
information disseminated by
corporate
America; and that, therefore, the battles for liberty must be fought
on different terrains from where they once were. For example, I would
venture the opinion that the traditional civil libertarian opposition
to the banning of books from school libraries and from school
curricula is now largely irrelevant. Such acts of censorship are
annoying, of course, and must be opposed. But they are trivial. Even
worse, they are distracting, in that they divert civil libertarians
from confronting those questions that have to do with the claims of
new technologies.
To put it
plainly, a student's freedom to read is not seriously injured by
someone's banning a book on Long Island or in Anaheim or anyplace
else. But as Gerbner' suggests, television clearly does impair the
student's freedom to read, and it does so with innocent hands, so to
speak. Television does not ban books, it simply displaces them. the
fight against censorship is a nineteenth-century issue which was
largely won in the twentieth. What we are confronted with now is the
problem posed by the economic and symbolic structure of television.
Those who run television do not limit our access to information but
in fact widen it. Our Ministry of Culture is Huxleyan, not Orwellian.
It does everything possible to encourage us to watch continuously.
But what we watch is a medium which presents information in a form
that renders it simplistic, nonsubstantive, nonhistorical and
noncontextual; that is to say, information packaged as entertainment.
In America, we are never denied the opportunity to amuse ourselves.
Tyrants of all varieties have always known about the value of
providing the masses with amusements as a means of pacifying
discontent. But most of them could not have even hoped for a
situation in which the masses would ignore that which does not amuse.
That is why tyrants have always relied, and still do, on censorship.
Censorship, after all, is the tribute tyrants pay to the assumption
that a public knows the difference between serious discourse and
entertainment--and cares. How delighted would be all the kings, czars
and fuehrers of the past (and commissars of the present) to know that
censorship is not a necessity when all political discourse takes the
form of a jest.
Teaching as
an Amusing Activity
There could not have been a safer bet when it
began in 1969 than that "Sesame Street" would be embraced
by children, parents and educators. Children loved it because they
were raised on television commercials, which they intuitively knew
were the most carefully crafted entertainments on television. To
those who had not yet been to school, even to those who had just
started, the idea of being taught by a series
of
commercials did not seem peculiar. And that television should
entertain them was taken as a matter of course. Parents embraced
"Sesame Street" for several reasons, among them that it
assuaged their guilt over the fact that they could not or would not
restrict their children's access to television. "Sesame Street"
appeared to justify allowing a four- or five-year-old to sit
transfixed in front of a television screen for unnatural periods of
time. Parents were eager to hope that television could teach their
children something other than which breakfast cereal has the most
crackle. At the same time, "Sesame Street" relieved them of
the responsibility of teaching their preschool children how to
read--no small matter in a culture where children are apt to be
considered a nuisance. They could also plainly see that in spite of
its faults, "Sesame Street" was entirely consonant with the
prevailing spirit of America. Its use of cute puppets, celebrities,
catchy tunes, and rapid-fire editing was certain to give pleasure to
the children and would therefore serve as adequate preparation for
their entry into a fun-loving culture.
As for
educators, they generally approved of "Sesame Street," too.
Contrary to common opinion, they are apt to find new methods
congenial, especially if they are told that education can be
accomplished more efficiently by means of the new techniques. (That
is why such ideas as "teacher-proof" textbooks,
standardized tests, and, now, microcomputers have been welcomed into
the classroom.) "Sesame Street" appeared to be an
imaginative aid in solving the growing problem of teaching Americans
how to read, while, at the same time, encouraging children to love
school. We now know that "Sesame Street" encourages
children to love school only if school is like "Sesame Street."
Which is to say, we now know that "Sesame Street"
undermines what the traditional idea of schooling represents. Whereas
a classroom is a place of social interaction, the space in front of a
television set is a private preserve. Whereas in a classroom, one may
ask a teacher questions, one can ask nothing of a television screen.
Whereas school is centered on the development of language, television
demands attention to images. Whereas attending school is a legal
requirement, watching television is an act of choice. Whereas in
school, one fails to attend to the teacher at the risk of punishment,
no penalties exist for failing to attend to the television screen.
Whereas to behave oneself in school means to observe rules of public
decorum, television watching requires no such observances, has no
concept of public decorum. Whereas in a classroom, fun is never more
than a means to an end, on television it is the end in itself. Yet
"Sesame Street" and its progeny, "the Electric
Company," are not to be blamed for laughing the traditional
classroom out of existence. If the classroom now begins to seem a
stale and flat
environment
for learning, the inventors of television itself are to blame, not
the Children's Television Workshop. We can hardly expect those who
want to make good television shows to concern themselves with what
the classroom is for. They are concerned with what television is for.
This
does not
mean that "Sesame Street" is not educational. It is, in
fact, nothing but educational--in the sense that every television
show is educational. Just as reading a book--any kind of book
repromotes a particular orientation toward learning, watching a
television show does the same. "the Little House on the
Prairie,"
"Cheers"
and "the Tonight Show" are as effective as "Sesame
Street" in promoting what might be called the television style
of learning. And this style of learning is, by its nature, hostile to
what has been called book-learning or its handmaiden,
school-learning. If we are to blame "Sesame Street" for
anything, it is for the pretense that it is any ally of the
classroom. That, after all, has been its chief claim on foundation
and public money. As a television show, and a good one, "Sesame
Street" does not encourage children to love school or anything
about school. It encourages them to love television.
Moreover, it
is important to add that whether or not "Sesame Street"
teaches children their letters and numbers is entirely irrelevant. We
may take as our guide here John Dewey's observation that the content
of a lesson is the least important thing about learning. As he wrote
in Experience and Education: "Perhaps the greatest of all
pedagogical fallacies is the notion that a person learns only what he
is studying at the time. Collateral learning in the way of formation
of enduring attitudes... may be and often is more important than the
spelling lesson or lesson in geography or history .... For these
attitudes are
fundamentally
what count in the future." In other words, the most important
thing one learns is always something about how one learns. As Dewey
wrote in another place, we learn what we do. Television educates by
teaching children to do what television-viewing requires of them. And
that is as precisely remote from what a classroom requires of them as
reading a book is from watching a stage show.
Although one would not know it from consulting
various recent proposals on how to mend the educational system, this
point--that reading books and watching television differ entirely in
what they imply about learning--is the primary educational issue in
America today. America is, in fact, the leading case in point of what
may be thought of as the third great crisis in Western education. the
first occurred in the
fifth
century B.c., when Athens underwent a change from an oral culture to
an alphabet-writing culture. To understand what this meant, we must
read Plato. the second occurred in the sixteenth century, when Europe
underwent a radical transformation as a result of the printing press.
To understand what this meant, we must read John Locke. the third is
happening now, in America, as a result of the electronic revolution,
particularly the invention of television. To understand what this
means, we must read Marshall McLuhan.
We face the
rapid dissolution of the assumptions of an education organized around
the slow-moving printed word, and the equally rapid emergence of a
new education based on the speed-of-light electronic image. the
classroom is, at the moment, still tied to the printed word, although
that connection is rapidly weakening. Meanwhile, television forges
ahead, making no concessions to its great technological predecessor,
creating new conceptions of knowledge and how it is acquired. One is
entirely justified in saying that the major educational enterprise
now being undertaken in the United States is not happening in its
classrooms but in the home, in front of the television set, and under
the jurisdiction not of school administrators and teachers but of
network executives and entertainers. I don't mean to imply that the
situation is a result of a conspiracy or even that those who control
television want this responsibility. I mean only to say that, like
the alphabet or the printing press, television has by its power to
control the time, attention and cognitive habits of our youth gained
the power to control their education.
This is why
I think it accurate to call television a curriculum. As I understand
the word, a curriculum is a specially constructed information system
whose purpose is to influence,
teach, train or cultivate the mind and character
of youth. Television, of course, does exactly that, and does it
relentlessly. In so doing, it competes successfully with the school
curriculum. By which I mean, it damn near obliterates it. Having
devoted an earlier book, Teaching as a Conserving Activity, to a
detailed examination of the antagonistic nature of the two
curriculums--television and school--I will not burden the reader or
myself with a repetition of that analysis. But I would like to recall
two points that I feel I did not express forcefully enough in that
book and that happen to be central to this one. I refer, first, to
-the fact that television's principal contribution to educational
philosophy is the idea that teaching and entertainment are
inseparable. This entirely original conception is to be found nowhere
in educational discourses, from Confucius to Plato to Cicero to Locke
to
John Dewey.
In searching the literature of education, you will find it said by
some that children will learn best when they are interested in what
they are learning. You will find it said--Plato and Dewey emphasized
this --that reason is best cultivated when it is rooted in robust
emotional ground. You will even find some who say that learning is
best facilitated by a loving and benign teacher. But no one has ever
said or implied that significant learning is effectively, durably and
truthfully achieved when education is entertainment. 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 to
think conceptually and rigorously do not come easily to the young but
are hard-fought victories. Indeed, Cicero remarked that the purpose
of education is to free the student from the tyranny of the present,
which cannot be pleasurable for those, like the young, who are
struggling
hard to do
the opposite--that is, accommodate themselves to the present.
Television offers a delicious and, as I have said, original
alternative to all of this. We might say there are three commandments
that form the philosophy of the education which television offers.
the influence of these commandments is observable in every type of
television programming--from "Sesame Street" to the
documentaries of "Nova" and "the National Geographic"
to "Fantasy Island' to MTV. the commandments are as follows:
Thou shalt
have no prerequisites
Every
television program must be a complete package in itself. No previous
knowledge is to be required. There must not be even a hint that
learning is hierarchical, that it is an edifice constructed on a
foundation. the learner must be allowed to enter at any point without
prejudice. This is why you shall never hear or see a television
program begin with the caution that if the viewer has not seen the
previous programs, this one will be meaningless. Television is a
nongraded curriculum and excludes no viewer for any reason, at any
time. In other words, in doing away with the idea of sequence and
continuity in education, television undermines the idea that sequence
and continuity have anything to do with thought itself.
Thou shalt
induce no perplexity
In
television teaching, perplexity is a superhighway to low ratings. A
perplexed learner is a learner who will turn to another station. This
means that there must be nothing that has to be remembered, studied,
applied or, worst of all, endured. It is assumed that any
information, story or idea can be made immediately accessible, since
the contentment, not the growth, of the learner is paramount.
Thou shalt
avoid exposition like the ten plagues visited upon Egypt
Of all the enemies of television-teaching,
including continuity and perplexity, none is more formidable than
exposition. Arguments, hypotheses, discussions, reasons, refutations
or any of the traditional instruments of reasoned discourse turn
television into radio or, worse, third-rate printed matter. Thus,
television-teaching always takes the form of story-telling, conducted
through dynamic images and supported by music. This is as
characteristic of "Star Trek" as it is of "Cosmos,"
of "Diff'rent Strokes" as of "Sesame Street," of
commercials as of "Nova." Nothing will be taught on
television that cannot be both visualized and placed in a theatrical
context. the name we may properly give to an education without
prerequisites, perplexity and exposition is entertainment. And when
one considers that save for sleeping there is no activity that
occupies more of an American youth's time than television-viewing, we
cannot avoid the conclusion that a massive reorientation toward
learning is now taking place. Which leads to the second point I wish
to emphasize: the consequences of this reorientation are to be
observexd not only in the decline of the potency of the classroom
but, paradoxically, in the refashioning of the classroom into a place
where both teaching and learning are intended to be vastly amusing
activities. I have already referred to the experiment in Philadelphia
in which the classroom is reconstituted as a rock concert. But this
is only the silliest example of an attempt to define education as a
mode of entertainment. Teachers, from primary grades through college,
are increasing the visual stimulation of their lessons; are reducing
the amount of exposition their students must cope with; are relying
less on reading and writing assignments; and are reluctantly
concluding that the principal means by which student interest may be
engaged is entertainment. With no difficulty I could fill the
remaining pages of this chapter with examples of teachers'
efforts--in some instances, unconscious-to make their classrooms into
second-rate television shows. But I will rest my case with "the
Voyage of the Mimi," which may be taken as a synthesis, if not
an apotheosis, of the New Education. "the Voyage of the Mimi"
is the name of an expensive science and mathematics project that has
brought together some of the most prestigious institutions in the
field of education--the United
States
Department of Education, the Bank Street College of Education, the
Public Broadcasting System, and the publishing firm Holt, Rinehart
and Winston. the project was made possible by a $3.65 million grant
from the Department of Education, which is always on the alert to put
its money where the future is. And the future is "the Voyage of
the Mimi." To describe the project succinctly, I quote from four
paragraphs in the New York Times of August 7, 1984:
Organized around a twenty-six-unit television
series that depicts the adventures of a floating whale-research
laboratory, [the project] combines television viewing with lavishly
illustrated books and computer games that simulate the way scientists
and navigators work .... "the
Voyage of the Mimi" is built around
fifteen-minute television programs that depict the adventures of four
young people who accompany two scientists and a crusty sea captain on
a voyage to monitor the behavior of humpback whales off the coast of
Maine. the crew of the converted tuna trawler navigates the ship,
tracks down the whales and struggles to survive on an uninhabited
island after a storm damages the ship's hull
.... Each
dramatic episode is then followed by a fifteen-minute
documentary
on related themes. One such documentary involved a visit by one of
the teen-age actors to Ted Taylor, a nuclear physicist in Greenport,
L.I., who has devised a way of purifying sea water by freezing it.
the
television programs, which teachers are free to record off the air
and use at their convenience, are supplemented by a series of books
and computer exercises that pick up four academic themes that emerge
naturally from the story line: map and navigational skills, whales
and their environment, ecological systems and computer literacy.
the television programs have been broadcast over
PBS; the books and computer software have been provided by Holt,
Rinehart and Winston; the educational expertise by the faculty of the
Bank Street College. Thus, "the Voyage of the Mimi" is not
to be taken lightly. As Frank Withrow of the Department of Education
remarked, "We consider it the flagship of what we are doing. It
is a model that others will begin to follow." Everyone involved
in the project is enthusiastic, and extraordinary claims of its
benefits come trippingly from their tongues. Janice Trebbi Richards
of Holt, Rinehart and Winston asserts, "Research shows that
learning increases when information is presented in a dramatic
setting, and television can do this better than any other medium."
Officials of the Department of Education claim that the appeal of
integrating three media--television, print, and computers--lies in
their potential for cultivating higher-order thinking skills. And Mr.
Withrow
is quoted as
saying that projects like "the Voyage of the Mimi" could
mean great financial savings, that in the long run "it is
cheaper than anything else we do." Mr. Withrow also suggested
that there are many ways of financing such projects. "With
'Sesame Street,'" he said, "it took five or six years, but
eventually you can start bringing in the money with T-shirts and
cookie jars." We may start thinking about what "the Voyage
of the Mimi" signifies by recalling that the idea is far from
original. What is here referred to as "integrating three media"
or a "multi-media presentation" was once called
"audio-visual aids," used by teachers for years, usually
for the modest purpose of enhancing
student
interest in the curriculum. Moreover, several years ago, the Office
of Education (as the Department was then called) supplied funds to
WNET for a similarly designed project called "Watch Your Mouth,"
a series of television dramatizations in which young people inclined
to misuse the English language fumbled their way through a variety of
social problems. Linguists and educators prepared lessons for
teachers to use in conjunction with each program. the dramatizations
were compelling-although not nearly as good as "Welcome Back,
Kotter," which had the unassailable advantage of John Travolta's
charisma--but there exists no evidence that students who were
required to view "Watch Your Mouth" increased their
competence in the use of the English language. Indeed, since there is
no shortage of mangled English on everyday commercial television, one
wondered at the time why the United States government would have paid
anyone to go to the trouble of producing additional ineptitudes as a
source of classroom study. A videotape of any of David Susskind's
programs would provide an English teacher with enough linguistic
aberrations to fill a semester's worth of analysis. Nonetheless, the
Department of Education has forged ahead, apparently in the belief
that ample evidence--to quote his. Richards again--"shows that
learning increases when information is presented in a dramatic
setting, and that television can do this better than any other
medium." the most charitable response to this claim is that it
is misleading. George Comstock and his associates have reviewed 2,800
studies on the general topic of television's influence on behavior,
including cognitive processing, and are unable to point to persuasive
evidence that "learning increases when information is presented
in a dramatic setting." 2 Indeed, in studies conducted by Cohen
and Salomon; Meringoff; Jacoby, Hoyer and Sheluga; Stauffer, Frost
and Rybolt; Stern; Wilson; Neuman; Katz, Adoni and Parness; and
Gunter, quite the opposite conclusion is justified. Jacoby et all.
found, for example, that only 3.5 percent of viewers were
able to
answer successfully twelve true/false questions concerning two
thirty-second
segments of commercial television programs and advertisements.
Stauffer et all. found in studying students' responses to a news
program transmitted via television, radio and print, that print
significantly increased correct responses to questions regarding the
names of people and numbers contained in the material. Stern reported
that 51 percent of viewers could not recall a single item of news a
few minutes after viewing a news program on television. Wilson found
that the average television viewer could retain only 20 percent of
the information contained in a fictional televised news story. Katz
et all. found that 21 percent of television viewers could not recall
any news items within one hour of broadcast. On the basis of his and
other studies, Salomon has concluded that "the meanings secured
from television are more likely to be segmented, concrete and less
inferential, and those secured from reading have a higher likelihood
of being better tied to one's stored knowledge and thus are more
likely to be inferential." 4 In other words, so far as many
reputable studies are concerned, television viewing does not
significantly increase learning, is inferior to and less likely than
print to cultivate higher-order, inferential thinking. But one must
not make too much of the rhetoric of grants-manship. We are all
inclined to transform our hopes into tenuous claims when an important
project is at stake. Besides, I have no doubt that his. Richards can
direct us to several studies that lend support to her enthusiasm. the
point is that if you want money for the redundant purpose of getting
children to watch even more television than they already do--and
dramatizations at that--you have to escalate the rhetoric to
Herculean proportions. What is of greatest significance about "the
Voyage of the Mimi" is that the content selected was obviously
chosen because it is eminently televisible. Why are these students
studying the behavior of humpback whales? How critical is it that the
"academic themes" of navigational and
map-reading skills be learned? Navigational skills have never been
considered an "academic theme" and in fact seem singularly
inappropriate for most students in big cities. Why has it been
decided that "whales and their environment" is a subject of
such compelling interest that an entire year's work should be given
to it? I would suggest that "the Voyage of the Mimi" was
conceived by someone's asking the question, What is television good
for?, not, What is education good for? Television is good for
dramatizations, shipwrecks, seafaring adventures, crusty old sea
captains, and physicists being interviewed by actor-celebrities. And
that, of course, is what we have got in "the Voyage of the
Mimi." the fact that this adventure sit-com is accompanied by
lavishly illustrated books and computer games only underscores that
the television presentation
controls the
curriculum. the books whose pictures the students will scan and the
computer games the students will play are dictated by the content of
the television shows, not the other way around. books, it would
appear, have now become an audio-visual aid; the principal carrier of
the content of education is the television show, and its principal
claim for a preeminent place in the curriculum is that it is
entertaining. Of course, a television production can be used to
stimulate interest in lessons, or even as the focal point of a
lesson. But what is happening here is that the content of the school
curriculum is being determined by the character of television, and
even worse, that character is apparently not included as part of what
is studied. One would have thought that the school room is the proper
place for students to inquire into the ways in which media of all
kinds--including television--shape people's attitudes and
perceptions. Since our students will have watched approximately
sixteen thousand hours of television by high school's end, questions
should have arisen, even in the minds of officials at the Department
of Education, about who will teach our students how to look at
television, and when not to, and with what critical equipment when
they do.
"the Voyage of the Mimi" project bypasses these questions;
indeed, hopes that the students will immerse themselves in the
dramatizations in the same frame of mind used when watching "St.
Elsewhere" or "Hill Street Blues." (One may also
assume that what is called "computer literacy" does not
involve raising questions about the cognitive biases and social
effects of the computer, which, I would venture, are the most
important questions to address about new technologies.)
"the Voyage of the Mimi," in other
words, spent $3.65 million for the purpose of using media in exactly
the manner that media merchants want them to be used--mindlessly and
invisibly, as if media themselves have no epistemological or
political agenda. And, in the end, what will the students have
learned? They will, to be sure, have learned something about whales,
perhaps about navigation and map reading, most of which they could
have learned just as well by other means. Mainly, they will have
learned that learning is a form of entertainment or, more precisely,
that anything worth learning can take the form of an entertainment,
and ought to. And they will not rebel if their English teacher asks
them to learn the eight parts of speech through the medium of rock
music. Or if their social studies teacher sings to them the facts
about the War of 1812. Or if their physics comes to them on cookies
and T-shirts. Indeed, they will expect it and thus will be well
prepared to receive their politics, their religion, their news and
their
commerce in
the same delightful way.
II.
the Huxleyan
Warning
There are
two ways by which the spirit of a culture may be shriveled. In the
first--the Orwellian--culture becomes a prison. In the second--the
Huxleyan--culture becomes a burlesque.
No one needs
to be reminded that our world is now marred by many prison-cultures
whose structure Orwell described accurately in his parables. If one
were to read both 1984 and Animal Farm, and then for good measure,
Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon, one would have a fairly precise
blueprint of the machinery of thought-control as it currently
operates in scores of countries and on millions of people. Of course,
Orwell was not the first to teach us about the spiritual devastations
of tyranny. What is irreplaceable about his work is his insistence
that it makes little difference if our wardens are inspired by right-
or left-wing ideologies. the gates of the prison are equally
impenetrable, surveillance equally rigorous, icon-worship equally
pervasive.
What Huxley
teaches is that in the age of advanced technology, spiritual
devastation is more likely to come from an enemy with a smiling face
than from one whose countenance exudes suspicion and hate. In the
Huxleyan prophecy, Big Brother does not watch us, by his choice."
We watch him, by ours. There is no need for wardens or gates or
Ministries of Truth. When a population becomes distracted by trivia,
when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of
entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of
baby-talk, when, in
short, a
people become an audience and their public business a vaudeville act,
then a nation finds itself at risk; culture-death is a clear
possibility.
In America, Orwell's prophecies are of small
relevance, but Huxley's are well under way toward being realized. For
America is engaged in the world's most ambitious experiment to
accommodate itself to the technological distractions made possible by
the electric plug. This is an experiment that began slowly and
modestly in the mid-nineteenth century and has now, in the latter
half of the twentieth, reached a perverse maturity in America's
consuming love-affair with television. As nowhere else in the world,
Americans have moved far and fast in bringing
to a close
the age of the slow-moving printed word, and have granted to
television sovereignty over all of their institutions. By ushering in
the Age of Television, America has given the world the clearest
available glimpse of the Huxleyan future.
Those who
speak about this matter must often raise their voices to a
near-hysterical pitch, inviting the charge that they are everything
from wimps to public nuisances to Jeremiahs. But they do so because
what they want others to see appears benign, when it is not invisible
altogether. An Orwellian world is much easier to recognize, and to
oppose, than a Huxleyan. Everything in our background has prepared us
to know and resist a prison when the gates begin to close around us.
We are not likely, for example, to be indifferent to the voices of
the Sakharovs and the Timmermans and the Walesas. We take arms
against such a sea of troubles, buttressed by the spirit of Milton,
Bacon, Voltaire, Goethe and Jefferson. But what if there are no cries
of anguish to be heard? Who is prepared to take arms against a sea of
amusements? To whom do we complain, and when, and in what tone of
voice, when serious discourse dissolves into giggles? What is the
antidote to a culture's being drained by laughter?
I fear that
our philosophers have given us no guidance in this
matter.
Their warnings have customarily been directed against those
consciously formulated ideologies that appeal to the worst tendencies
in human nature. But what is happening in America is not the design
of an articulated ideology. No Mein Kampf or Communist Manifesto
announced its coming. It comes as the unintended consequence of a
dramatic change in our modes of public conversation. But it is an
ideology nonetheless, for it imposes a way of life, a set of
relations among people and ideas, about which there has been no
consensus, no discussion and no opposition. Only compliance. Public
consciousness has not yet assimilated the point that technology is
ideology. This, in spite of the fact that before our very eyes
technology has altered every aspect of life in America during the
past eighty years. For example, it would have been excusable in 1905
for us to be unprepared for the cultural changes the automobile would
bring. Who could have suspected then that the automobile would tell
us how we were to conduct our social and sexual lives? Would reorient
our ideas about what to do with our forests and cities? Would create
new ways of expressing our personal identity and social standing?
But it is much later in the game now, and
ignorance of the score is inexcusable. To be unaware that a
technology comes equipped with a
program for
social change, to maintain that technology is neutral, to make the
assumption that technology is always a friend to culture is, at this
late hour, stupidity plain and simple. Moreover, we have seen enough
by now to know that technological changes in our modes of
communication are even more ideology-laden than changes in our modes
of transportation. Introduce the alphabet to a culture and you change
its cognitive habits, its social relations, its notions of community,
history and religion. Introduce the printing press with movable type,
and you do the same. Introduce speed-of-light transmission of images
and you make a cultural revolution. Without a vote. Without polemics.
Without guerrilla resistance. Here is ideology, pure if not serene.
Here is ideology without
words, and
all the more powerful for their absence. All that is required to make
it stick is a population that devoutly believes in the inevitability
of progress. And in this sense, all Americans are Marxists, for we
believe nothing if not that history is moving us toward some
preordained paradise and that technology is the force behind that
movement. Thus, there are near insurmountable difficulties for anyone
who has written such a book as this, and who wishes to end it with
some remedies for the affliction. In the first place, not everyone
believes a cure is needed, and in the second, there probably isn't
any. But as a true-blue American who has imbibed the unshakable
belief that where there is a problem, there must be a solution, I
shall conclude with the following suggestions. We must, as a start,
not delude ourselves with preposterous notions such as the straight
Luddite position as outlined, for example, in Jerry Mander's Four
Arguments for the Elimination of Television. Americans will not shut
down any part of their technological apparatus, and to suggest that
they do so is to make no suggestion at all. It is almost equally
unrealistic to expect that nontrivial modifications in the
availability of media will ever be made. Many civilized nations limit
by law the amount of hours television may operate and thereby
mitigate the role television plays in public life. But I believe that
this is not a possibility in America. Once having opened the Happy
Medium to full public view, we are not likely to countenance even its
partial closing. Still, some Americans have been thinking along these
lines. As I write, a story appears in the New York Times (September
27, 1984) about the plans of the Farmington, Connecticut, Library
Council to sponsor a "TV Turnoff." It appears that such an
effort was made the previous year, the idea being to get people to
stop watching television for one month. the Times reports that the
turnoff the previous January was widely noted by the media. Ms. Ellen
Babcock, whose family participated, is quoted as saying, "It
will be interesting to see if the
impact is
the same this year as last year, when we had terrific media
coverage." In other words, Ms. Babcock hopes that by watching
television, people will learn that they ought to stop watching
television. It is hard to imagine that Ms. Babcock does not see the
irony in this position. It is an irony that I have confronted many
times in being told that I must appear on television to promote a
book that warns people against television. Such are the
contradictions of a television-based culture. In any case, of how
much help is a one-month turnoff?. It is a mere pittance; that is to
say, a penance. How comforting it must be when the folks in
Farmington are done with their punishment and can return to their
true occupation. Nonetheless, one applauds their effort, as one must
applaud the efforts of those who see some relief in limiting certain
kinds of content on television-for example, excessive violence,
commercials on children's shows, etc. I am particularly fond of John
Lindsay's suggestion that political commercials be banned from
television as we now ban cigarette and liquor commercials. I would
gladly testify before the Federal Communications Commission as to the
manifold merits of this excellent idea. To those who would oppose my
testimony by claiming that such a ban is a clear violation of the
First Amendment, I would offer a compromise: Require all political
commercials to be preceded by a short statement to the effect that
common sense has determined that watching political commercials is
hazardous to the intellectual health of the community. I am not very
optimistic about anyone's taking this suggestion seriously. Neither
do I put much stock in proposals to improve the quality of television
programs. Television, as I have implied earlier, serves us most
usefully when presenting junk-entertainment; it serves us most ill
when it co-opts serious modes of discourse--news, politics, science,
education, commerce, religion--and turns them into entertainment
packages. We would all be better off if television got worse, not
better.
"the
A-Team" and "Cheers" are no threat to our public
health. "
Minutes,"
"Eye-Witness
News" and "Sesame Street" are.
the problem,
in any case, does not reside in what people watch. the problem is in
that we watch. the solution must be found in how we watch. For I
believe it may fairly be said that we have yet to learn what
television is. And the reason is that there has been no worthwhile
discussion, let alone widespread public understanding, of what
information is and how it gives direction to a culture. There is a
certain poignancy in this, since there are no
people who more frequently and enthusiastically use such phrases as
"the information age,"
"the
information explosion," and "the information society."
We have apparently advanced to the point where we have grasped the
idea that a change in the forms, volume, speed and context of
information means something, but we have not got any further.
What is
information? Or more precisely, what are information? What are its
various forms? What conceptions of intelligence, wisdom and learning
does each form insist upon? What conceptions does each form neglect
or mock? What are the main psychic effects of each form? What is the
relation between information and reason? What is the kind of
information that best facilitates thinking? Is there a moral bias to
each information form? What does it mean to say that there is too
much information? How would one know? What redefinitions of important
cultural meanings do new sources, speeds, contexts and forms of
information require? Does television, for example, give a new meaning
to "piety," to "patriotism," to "privacy"?
Does television give a new meaning to "judgment" or to
"understanding"? How do different forms of information
persuade? Is a newspaper's "public" different from
television's "public"? How do different information forms
dictate the type of content that is expressed?
These
questions, and dozens more like them, are the means through which it
might be possible for Americans to begin talking back to their
television sets, to use Nicholas Johnson's
phrase. For no medium is excessively dangerous if
its users understand what its dangers are. It is not important that
those who ask the questions arrive at my answers or Marshall
McLuhan's (quite different answers, by the way). This is an instance
in which the asking of the questions is sufficient. To ask is to
break the spell. To which I might add that questions about the
psychic, political and social effects of information are as
applicable to the computer as to television. Although I believe the
computer to be a vastly overrated technology, I mention it here
because, clearly, Americans have accorded it their customary mindless
inattention; which means they will use it as they are told, without a
whimper. Thus, a central thesis of computer technology--that the
principal difficulty we have in solving problems stems from
insufficient data--will go unexamined. Until, years from now, when it
will be noticed that the massive collection and speed-of-light
retrieval of data have been of great value to large-scale
organizations but have solved very little of importance to most
people and have
created at
least as many problems for them as they may have solved.
In any case,
the point I am trying to make is that only through a deep and
unfailing awareness of the structure and effects of information,
through a demystification of media, is there any hope of our gaining
some measure of control over television, or the computer, or any
other medium. How is such media consciousness to be achieved? There
are only two answers that come to mind, one of which is nonsense and
can be dismissed almost at once; the other is desperate but it is all
we have.
the
nonsensical answer is to create television programs whose intent
would be, not to get people to stop watching television but to
demonstrate how television ought to be viewed, to show how television
recreates and degrades our conception of news, political debate,
religious thought, etc. I imagine such demonstrations would of
necessity take the form of parodies, along the lines of "Saturday
Night Live" and "Monty Python,"
the idea
being to induce a nationwide horse laugh over television's control of
public discourse. But, naturally, television would have the last
laugh. In order to command an audience large enough to make a
difference, one would have to make the programs vastly amusing, in
the television style. Thus, the act of criticism itself would, in the
end, be co-opted by television. the parodists would become
celebrities, would star in movies, and would end up making television
commercials.
the desperate answer is to rely on the only mass
medium of communication
that, in theory, is capable of addressing the
problem: our schools. This
is the
conventional American solution to all dangerous social problems,
and is, of
course, based on a naive and mystical faith in the efficacy
of
education. the process rarely works. In
the matter at hand, there
is even less
reason than usual to expect it to. Our
schools have not
yet even got around to examining the role of the
printed word in shaping
our
culture. Indeed, you will not find two high school seniors in a
hundred who
could tell you--within a five-hundred-year margin of
error--when
the alphabet was invented. I
suspect most do not even know
that the
alphabet was invented. I
have found that when the question is
put to them,
they appear puzzled, as if one had asked, When were trees
invented, or
clouds? It is the very principle of myth, as Roland
Barthes
pointed out, that it transforms history into nature, and to ask
of our
schools that they engage in the task of demythologizing media is
to ask
something the schools have never done.
And yet
there is reason to suppose that the situation is not hopeless.
Educators are not unaware of the effects of
television on their students. Stimulated by the arrival of the
computer, they discuss it a great deal--which is to say, they have
become somewhat "media conscious." It is true enough that
much of their consciousness centers on the question, How can we use
television (or the computer, or word processor) to control education?
They have not yet got to the question, How can we use education to
control television (or the computer, or word processor)? But our
reach for solutions ought to exceed our present grasp, or what's our
dreaming for? Besides, it is an acknowledged task of the schools to
assist the young in learning how to interpret the symbols of their
culture. That this task should now require that they learn how to
distance themselves from their forms of information is not so bizarre
an enterprise that we cannot hope for its inclusion in the
curriculum; even hope that it will be placed at the center of
education.
What I
suggest here as a solution is what Aldous Huxley suggested, as well.
And I can do no better than he. He believed with H. G. Wells that we
are in a race between education and disaster, and he wrote
continuously about the necessity of our understanding the politics
and epistemology of media. For in the end, he was trying to tell us
that what afflicted the people in Brave New World was not that they
were laughing instead of thinking, but that they did not know what
they were laughing about and why they had stopped thinking.
Chapter I:
the Medium Is the Metaphor
As quoted in
the Wisconsin State Journal, August 24, 1983, Section 3, page 1.
Cassirer,
p. 43.
Frye,
p. 227.
Chapter 2:
Media as Epistemology
- Frye, p. 217.
- Frye, p. 218. 3. Frye, p. 218.
As quoted in
Ong, "Literacy and the Future of Print," pp. 201-202.
Ong,
Oralityt p. 35.
6.
Ong,
Orality, p. 109.
7.
Jerome
Bruner, in Studies in Cognitive Growth, states that growth is "as
much from the outside in as from the inside out," and that "much
of [cognitive growth[ consists in a human being's becoming linked
with culturally transmitted 'amplifiers' of motoric, sensory, and
reflective capacities." (pp. 1-2)
According to
Goody, in the Domestication of the Savage blind, "[writing]
changes the nature of the representations of the world (cognitive
processes) for those who cannot [read]." He continues: "the
existence of the alphabet therefore changes the type of data that an
individual is dealing with, and it changes the repertoire of
programmes he has available for treating his data." (p. 110)
Julian
Jaynes, in the Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of
the
Bicameral Mind, states that the role of "writing in the
breakdown of the bicameral voices is tremendously important." He
claims that the written word served as a "replacement" for
the hallucinogenic image, and took up the right hemispheric function
of sorting out and fitting together data.
Walter Ong,
in the Presence of the Word, and Marshall McLuhan, in Understanding
Media, stress media's effects on the variations in the ratio and
balance among the senses. One might add that as early as 1938, Alfred
North Whitehead (in Modes of Thought) called attention to the need
for a thorough study of the effects of changes in media on the
organization of the sensorium.
Chapter 3:
Typographic America
- Franklin, p. 175.
- Hart, p. 8. 3. Hart, p. 8. 4. Hart, p. 8. 5. Hart, p. 15.
6. Lockridge,
p. 184. 7. Lockridge, p. 184. 8. Hart, p. 47.
- Mumford, p. 136.
- Stone, p. 42.
- Hart, p. 31.
- Boorstin, p. 315. 13. Boorstin, p. 315. 14. Hart, p. 39. 15. Hart, p. 45.
- Fast, p. x (in Introduction).
This press
was not the first established on the American continent. the Spanish
had established a printing office in Mexico a hundred years earlier.
18.
Mott, p. 7.
19.
Boorstin,
p. 320.
20.
Mott, p. 9.
21.
Lee, p. 10.
22.
23.
24.
25.
26.
27.
28.
29.
30.
31.
32.
33.
34.
35.
36.
37.
38.
39.
40.
41.
42.
43.
44.
45.
Boorstin,
p. 326. Boorstin, p. 327. Hart, p. 27. Tocqueville, p. 58.
Tocqueville,
pp. 5-6. Hart p. 86.
Curti
pp. 353-354. Hart p. 153.
Hart p. 74.
Curti
p. 337.
Hart p. 102.
Bet [er,
p. 183. Curti, p. 356. Berger, p. 158. Berger, p. 158.
Berger,
p. 158. Curti, p. 356. Twain, p. 161. Hofstadter, p. 145.
Hofstadter,
p. 19. Tocqueville, p. 260. Miller, p. 269. Miller, p.
271. Marx,
p. 150.
Chapter 4:
the Typographic Mind
- Sparks, p. 4.
- Sparks, p. 11. 3. Sparks, p. 87.
Questions
were continuously raised about the accuracy of the transcriptions of
these debates. Robert Hitt was the verbatim reporter for the debates,
and he was accused of repairing Lincoln's "illiteracies."
the accusations were made, of course, by Lincoln's political enemies,
who, perhaps, were dismayed by the impression Lincoln's performances
were making on the country. Hitt emphatically denied he had
"doctored" any of Lincoln's speeches.
5. Hudson,
p. 5. 6. Sparks, p. 86. 7. Mill, p. 64.
- Hudson, p. 110. 9. Paine, p. 6. 10. Hudson, p. 132. 11. Perry Miller, p. 15. 12. Hudson, p. 65. 13. Hudson, p. 143.
- Perry Miller, p. 119.
- Perry Miller, p. 140.
- Perry Miller, pp. 140-141. 17. Perry Miller, p. 120. 18. Perry Miller, p. 153. 19. Presbrey, p. 244. 20. Presbrey, p. 126. 21. Presbrey, p. 157. 22. Presbrey, p. 235.
23.
Anderson, p.
17. In this connection, it is worth citing a letter, dated January
15, 1787, written by Thomas Jefferson to Monsieur de Crave-coeur. In
his letter, Jefferson complained that the English were
trying to
claim credit for an American invention: making the circumference of a
wheel out of one single piece of wood. Jefferson speculated that
Jersey farmers learned how to do this from their reading of Homer,
who described the process clearly. the English must have copied the
procedure from Americans, Jefferson wrote, "because ours are the
only farmers who can read Homer."
Chapter 5:
the Peek-a-Boo World
1.
Thoreau,
p. 36.
2.
Harlow,
p. 100.
3.
Czitrom,
pp. 15-16.
4.
Sontag,
p. 165.
5.
Newhall,
p. 33.
6.
Salomon,
p. 36.
Notes
- Sontag, p. 20. 8. Sontag, p. 20. Chapter 6: the Age of Show Business
On July 20, 1984, the New York Times reported
that the Chinese National Television network had contracted with CBS
to broadcast sixty-four hours of CBS programming in China. Contracts
with NBC and ABC are sure to
follow. One
hopes that the Chinese understand that such transactions are of great
political consequence. the Gang of Four is as nothing compared with
the Gang of Three.
2.
This story
was carried by several newspapers, including the Wisconsin State
Journal, February 24, 1983, Section 4, p. 2.
3.
As quoted in
the New York Times, June 7, 1984, Section A, p. 20.
Chapter 7:
"Now... This"
1.
For a fairly
thorough report on Ms. Craft's suit, see the New York Times, July 29,
1983.
2.
MacNeil,
p. 2.
3.
MacNell,
p. 4.
4.
See Time,
July 9, 1984, p. 69.
Chapter 8:
Shuffle Off to Bethlehem
1.
Graham, pp.
5-8. For a detailed analysis of Graham's style, see Michael Real's
Mass Mediated Culture. For an amusing and vitriolic one, see Roland
Barthes' "Billy Graham at the Winter Cyclo-dome," in the
Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies. Barthes says, "If God really
does speak through the mouth of Dr. Graham, then God is a real
blockhead."
2.
As quoted in
"Religion in Broadcasting," by Robert Abelman and Kimberly
Neuendorf, p. 2. This study was funded by a grant from Unda-USA,
Washington, D.C.
3.
Armstrong,
p. 137.
4.
Arendt,
p. 352.
Chapter 9:
Reach Out and Elect Someone
1.
Drew,
p. 263.
2.
Moran,
p. 122.
3.
Rosen,
p. 162.
4.
Quoted from
a speech given on March, 27, 1984, at the Jewish Museum in New York
City on the occasion of a conference of the National Jewish Archive
of Broadcasting.
5.
Moran,
p. 125.
6.
From a
speech given at the twenty-fourth Media Ecology Conference, April 26,
1982, in Saugerties, New York. For a full account of Dean Gerbner's
views, see "Television: the New State Religion," Etcetera
34:2 (June, 1977: 145-150.
Chapter I0:
Teaching as an Amusing Activity
- Dewey, p. 48.
- Comstock, S. Chaffee, N. Katzman, M. McCombs, and D. Roberts, Television and Human Behavior (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978).
3.
- Cohen and G. Salomon, "Children's Literate Television Viewing: Surprises and Possible Explanations," Journal of Communication 29 (1979): 156-163; L. M. Meringoff, "What Pictures Can and Can't Do for Children's Story Comprehension," paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, April, 1982; J. Jacoby, W. D. Hoyer and D. A. Sheluga, Miscomprehension of Televised Communications (New York: the Educational Foundation of the American Association of Advertising Agencies, 1980); J. Stauffer, R. Frost and
- Rybolt, "Recall and Learning from Broadcast News: Is Print Better?," Journal of Broadcasting (Summer, 1981): 253-262; A. Stern, "A Study for the National Association for Broadcasting," in M. Barret (ed.), the Politics of Broadcasting, 1971-1972 (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1973);
- E. Wilson, "the Effect of a Medium on Loss of Information," Journalism Quarterly 51 (Spring, 1974): 111-115; W. R. Neuman, "Patterns of Recall Among Television News Viewers," Public Opinion Quarterly 40 (1976): 118-125; E. Katz, H. Adoni
and
P. Parness,
"Remembering the News: What the Pictures Add to
Recall,"
Journalism Quarterly 54 (1977): 233-242; B. Gunter,
"Remembering
Television News: Effects of Picture Content," Journal of
General
Psychology 102 (1980): 127-133.
4. Salomon,
p. 81.
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