« on: November 06, 2016, 01:19:29 am »
The 1985 Book That Predicted Today’s Media—And Political—Madness
By Paul Rowan Brian
November 4, 2016http://thefederalist.com/2016/11/04/the-1985-book-that-predicted-todays-media-and-political-madness/Over 30 years ago, Neil Postman's 'Amusing Ourselves to Death' predicted America would turn politics into something resembling The Donald Trump Show. Are you not entertained?
America is just a few days away from confronting a significant possibility that the next leader of the free world will be a man who’s predominantly a creation of the tabloid media and reality television.
Even a few years ago, this might have been an unthinkable outcome, but Neil Postman’s gloomy and witty book Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business warned about such eventualities way back in 1985. Postman’s prophetic jeremiad argues that television dumbs down discourse and makes the political media a simpering sidekick of the entertainment industry.
“Thinking does not play well on television, a fact that television directors discovered long ago,” Postman writes.
Postman, a media theorist and social critic who died in 2003, jokes that Irving Berlin should have changed one word to his iconic song to make it more accurate for the present day by entitling it “There’s No Business But Show Business.”
Nostradamus of the Digital Age
Postman saw today’s click-craving, faux-outrage 24/7 news cycle slouching over the field of satellite dishes to be born from decades away. Even though the Internet Age was not yet upon him, he saw where the path of everything-as-entertainment was leading: to people having shorter average attention spans than goldfish, to a continuous present where contradictions and context are just minor details of no great interest.
“With television we vault ourselves into a continuous, incoherent present,” Postman writes. “In a world of discontinuities, contradiction is useless as a test of truth or merit.”
In foreseeing the climate that would pave the way for pure-celebrity candidates like Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jesse Ventura, and Donald Trump, not to mention the elevation of politicians like President Barack Obama to celebrity status, Postman surely deserves his reputation as the Nostradamus of the digital age.
We now live in a political climate where politicians embrace fame. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau makes national news for being photographed shirtless. Trump hires a media provocateur as his campaign CEO, prompting speculation his plan is to form a media empire if his presidential run doesn’t pan out. Hillary Clinton’s supporters fret that her appearance on Kimmel received lower ratings than reuns of Teen Moms and Friends (but she’s trying to increase star power by hanging out with Justin Timberlake).
By the way, if you’re interested (and who wouldn’t be), Mike Pence recently had his haircut livestreamed on Facebook by CNNPolitics. It’s clear that Postman’s world of media madness is afoot, and it’s running faster than Usain Bolt.
Huxley > Orwell
Amusing Ourselves to Death essentially champions Aldous Huxley’s vision of the future in Brave New World over George Orwell’s vision in 1984.
“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 capacity to think,” Postman writes.
To extend the Big Brother metaphor: Is he so funny / annoying / brilliant / stupid / crazy / ridiculous that you can’t look away? Good news: because of the high ratings he’ll be back with all-new episodes next season.
“In the Huxleyan prophecy, Big Brother does not watch us, by his choice. We watch him, by ours,” Postman prophesies with dark humor. Orwell saw a future where books were banned, Huxley one in which there was no need to ban books because nobody wanted to read them in the first place.
The Age of Show Business
“In every tool we create, an idea is embedded that goes beyond the function of the thing itself,” Postman writes. “As a culture moves from orality to writing to printing to televising, its ideas of truth move with it.”
Postman endeavors to prove that in the Age of Typography (elsewhere he calls it the Age of Exposition), when books and print newspapers were the sole source of information, discourse was “generally coherent, serious and rational.” But in the Age of Television (elsewhere he calls it the Age of Show Business), political discourse in particular has become “shriveled and absurd,” reliant on context-free snippets of information and entertaining spectacles and gaffes.
“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,” he writes. “The result is that we are a people on the verge of amusing ourselves to death.”
Extend Postman’s anti-triviality point of view into the multi-platform antics of the online world, and his critique just gets stronger. One wonders what he would have thought of the vortex of spending hours a day seeking social media validation in their custom-made digital clubs of friends and tweeps, most of whom they don’t even know. Indeed, video gamers can now inhabit their own elaborately designed self-contained universes.
Postman notes indeed, that “questions about the psychic, political and social effects of information are as applicable to the computer as to the television.”
What Now?<..snip..>
Entire Article at link Above
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No government in the 12,000 years of modern mankind history has led its people into anything but the history books with a simple lesson, don't let this happen to you.
