You Want Me to What??? Turn Off My TV???

Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (NF 1985, 2005 reprint) - Neil Postman; Penguin, 184 pages.

Just How Stupid Are We?: Facing the Truth about the American Voter (NF 2008) - Rick Shenkman; Basic Books, 210 pages.


It’s important to keep in mind that Postman’s book was first published in the days before plasma TVs, hundreds of channels, DVDs, iPods, iPhones, Xbox and PlayStation gaming systems and the Internet. If what Postman said in 1985 is true, that we really have been dumbed down by television, what does that say for us in 2008 with an even wider array of devices for our amusement?

Postman begins with a brief discussion of two highly influential, possibly even prophetic novels, Orwell’s 1984 and Huxley’s Brave New World. While Orwell was concerned that people would be deprived of truthful information by those in power, Huxley was concerned that we wouldn’t care about the truth because we’d be too busy being entertained. “Orwell,” Postman says, “feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.”

According to Postman, the Age of Typography began its decline with the invention of Morse code and continued on through radio and television. Yet Postman isn’t saying that changes in media necessarily bring about changes in the structure of the mind or cognitive abilities. “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.”

When the medium changes from word-centered to image-centered, people are given less opportunity to examine and analyze a wide variety of information that runs the risk of being presented out of its original context. It’s also true that information in a print medium can be taken out of context, but with a visually based medium, “facts push other facts into and then out of consciousness at speeds that neither permit nor require evaluation.”

Take the television news, for example. Newscasters present news stories with serious, sometimes urgent attention and concentration, but it isn’t long before someone says, “And now, this...”, signaling that it’s time to focus on the next story, relegating the previous one into the realm of the irrelevant.

Yet television goes to great lengths to assure viewers that by watching, they can learn all they need to know about political figures, especially presidential candidates. This idea is a central focus of Rick Shenkman’s new book Just How Stupid Are We?: Facing the Truth about the American Voter.

According to Shenkman, the average American voter has not absorbed the basic facts about basic political issues. We embrace misinformation and myth, largely because we haven’t gathered the facts and given them careful thought. Has this happened because we watch television more than we read newspapers, or is there more to it than that? What does it say about us when only “1 in 4 Americans can name more than one of the five freedoms guaranteed by the First Amendment, but more than half of Americans can name at least two members” of The Simpsons?

Is the mythologizing of history to blame? Or is it our reliance on sound bites and thirty-second news clips? And are the newspapers really a more reliable source of information? Can we trust public opinion polls (plus or minus three percent)?

You see it all the time: Democrats pointing fingers at Republicans, Republicans pointing at Democrats, each blaming the other for the current mess we’re in. Yet, as Shenkman states, you never see either side pointing the finger at the American people. The wisdom of the American people (the most informed people in the world, after all) is sacred, not to be questioned.
Shenkman asks,

Why had The People elected to the presidency persons of both political parties wholly lacking in foreign policy experience, and not just once as in the case of George W. Bush, but over and over and over again? Why had The People taken so little interest in international issues that both their media and their leaders felt compelled through the years to limit public debate about foreign policy? Why did The People not pay attention to developments in Afghanistan and the Middle East? And why did they not remember the history of the Middle East - and their country’s role in rearranging the affairs of that region’s countries, putting in power tyrants such as the Shah and conniving to keep in power dictators like Saddam?

Again, we are reluctant to confront our myths. But how can we confront them when we’re surrounded with news of Britney’s custody settlement and Angelina’s twins? Sure, you can find out Obama’s and McCain’s stands on foreign policy, but you might have to dig a little.

Still, Shenkman believes we are not too far gone (or, rather, too far stupid). There is hope and maybe reading Amusing Ourselves to Death and Just How Stupid Are We? is a good first step.