🐰 Down The Rabbit Hole 🕳️

“The effects of technology are always unpredictable. We may predict a number of direct consequences, but as technology interacts with itself and with human beings, the ultimate outcomes are beyond our comprehension.”

~ Jacques Ellul

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Greetings, dear newsletter subscribers,

For those of you celebrating...happy 4th of July!

Chapter Six of Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death, “The Age of Show Business” chronicles the ways in which by the mid-80s, when he wrote his book, American culture had been infiltrated by television. Postman’s chief concern is that things that should be taken seriously (politics, religion, education, heart surgery(!), etc.) were slowly being undermined by the spirit of entertainment.

“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?” (Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death, p. 84)

Postman does not have a problem with the fact that people use the television for entertainment (he recognizes that it is a very entertaining medium), but that they were corrupting serious things by making everything entertaining. As I’ve mentioned before, it appears to be human nature to seek out the easy way, and in the case of entertainment, to always seek the dopamine hit that entertainment offers.

“[O]ne 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.” (Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death, p. 86)

One of the great problems, of course, is that entertainment and dopamine hits do not create a culture that has the capacity to create anything meaningful. The fewer people there are who take the time to do difficult things like learning to read, like training their mind in a certain field and on certain problems over an extended period of time, etc., the fewer solutions to problems there will be, the fewer great works of art there will be, and so on. Great human culture is the fruit of a society’s capacity to connect with and to express one’s inner world, a process that requires patience, work, self-reflection, and attention, which are things that the modern world does not have time for.

The Vlog & Joe Rogan

“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….” (Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death, p. 90)

Not all is gloom and doom, however! While the TikTokization of culture is to be lamented, Neil Postman would have been pleased, I think, to learn that one of the presidential candidates in 2024 sat down for a nearly three hour conversation with Joe Rogan, a video that has been watched nearly 60 million times. Long form conversation channels as well as vlogs have proven that many people are actually interested in longer format television, and are not seeking to be merely entertained.

While there is reason for hope, a critical difference that Postman would likely point out is that with the dawn of the Visual Age our information culture has been shattered into countless different pieces. One of the great virtues of the Typographic Age was that all serious discourse took place within essentially a communal information ecosystem: the written text and the adjacent medium of text-based oral discourse. While there are those who are looking for something more, for a deeper engagement with important concepts, the vast majority have been educated to be content with sound bites and their accompanying dopamine hits.

“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…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.” (Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death, p. 92–93)

Ok...that's it for today! As always, please share with a friend who you think might find this of interest...and join the conversation on my Substack page.

Have a great holiday weekend...enjoy Neil Postman's excellent book...and reach out if you have any thoughts/questions you'd like to share! We'll be looking at Chapter Seven next week.

Warmly,

Herman

PS: Do you know of someone who might be interested in joining our book study? If so, please forward this email on to them!