The House Next Door

From The Star-Ledger
Monday, January 02, 2006

"A GREAT media-metaphor shift has taken place in America, with the result that the content of much of our discourse has become dangerous nonsense."

So wrote Neil Postman in 1985's "Amusing Ourselves to Death," a heady, influential book about TV's corrosive effect on thought that has just been reissued in a 20th anniversary paperback edition, with an introduction by Postman's son Andrew.

Although he's not a household name, Postman, who died in 2003, is one of the most influential social critics of the last 50 years, thanks primarily to "Amusing Ourselves," which was required reading for pretty much anyone who took a class in criticism, rhetoric or media history during the past couple of decades.

Postman's specific cultural references have inevitably become dated. After two decades, Dr. Ruth Westheimer has been succeeded by Dr. Phil, "Dynasty" by "Desperate Housewives," and Ronald Reagan by George W. Bush.

But the gist of Postman's book remains unassailable: a detailed explication of his mentor Marshall McLuhan's most widely quoted bit of wisdom, "The medium is the message."

Quoting Lewis Mumford, Postman reminded readers that, just as hours and minutes did not exist until the invention of that abstract concept called "time," the modern sense of entertainment, with its terse, emotionally pungent, hammer-blow-edited bits of data, did not exist until the creation of the telegraph.

The telegraph, Postman wrote, "made information into a commodity, a thing that could be bought and sold irrespective of its uses or meaning." And thus context -- the thing that held together the abstract complexities of spoken and written discourse -- was pulverized and replaced by sensation.

The telegraphic sensibility gained a visual equivalent with the invention of cinema. That sensibility was further refined by television. TV didn't merely entertain us, Postman wrote; it reordered our view of reality, starting with our collective sense of what constituted a good use of our time.

As Postman noted, the seven famous debates between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas were all-day affairs, consisting of two men speaking for hours at a stretch, yet they drew huge audiences that hung on every word. Just a few decades later, in the post-telegraph world, such events would seem unthinkably dull.

Every successful new device alters the way we think about the world, and encourages us to value only the data that feeds (or conforms to) those devices. So of course TV, a flickering electronic box, prefers images to words, brevity to length and free-associative excitement to depth, context and complex arguments.

That's why the phrase "That was great TV!" is usually uttered not in reference to an intellectually provocative argument or a subtle and illuminating bit of dialogue, but an Indy 500 pileup, a nuclear explosion on "24," a murderous fist fight between Tony and Ralphie on "The Sopranos" or Sean Hannity equating liberalism with treason.

Everything that appears on TV is, first and foremost, television: a show; a wild ride or a relaxing bath; a stream of nonrationally stimulating images, dusted with spoken or printed words (narration, graphics, a crawl) that spice up the pictures but don't necessarily contextualize, deepen or contradict them.

Postman's most basic and valuable achievement was to remind us that whether we're watching a public affairs show, a sports event, a game show, or a scripted comedy or drama, what we are seeing is TV first and something else second. And if it wasn't entertainment before, it would become entertainment as soon as it appeared onscreen. (Dr. Ruth was an example of TV's transformative power: If you actually read transcripts of her TV appearances, there's nothing inherently cute or funny about her plain-spoken sex advice, but on television, her tiny frame and German accent read as comical, even trivial.)

The person who forgets about TV's presto-changeo effect, warned Postman, has effectively abandoned the active thought processes associated with reading and speaking, and become a passive consumer of images, a person who could hear the pre-cable news anchor's all-purpose segue, "And now ... this," without recognizing how nonsensical, even surreal it sounded.

I dug up the quote that opens this column while watching MSNBC Thursday night. "Countdown" host Keith Olbermann had just finished narrating a half-joking salute to the apropos-of-nothing video clips that power four-fifths of every "Countdown" broadcast (daredevils, explosions, stupid criminals caught on tape, children falling down).

Depressed, I flipped around to CNN, Fox News and CNN Headline News and saw teasers for the same handful of brain-meltingly trivial "stories" about disappearing co-eds, shark attacks, street thugs intimidating people in a particular neighborhood of Milwaukee and so forth, and realized that Postman's icy write-off of TV news, which seemed exaggerated then, has finally come to pass.

As 2005 faded and 2006 loomed, there was no shortage of nationally and globally significant stories: the continuing bloodshed in Iraq, the ongoing wrangle over America's legal definitions of torture, the increasingly dramatic run-up to Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito's confirmation hearings, the rebuilding of the storm-damaged Gulf Coast. But aside from some brief images of brushfire-damaged Texas landscapes, four major cable news channels didn't consider any of that stuff exciting enough to lead the 9 o'clock hour. The key word is "exciting."

"Amusing Ourselves" came out during a much smaller, slower, less fragmented media culture than the one we have today. CNN was five years old and consisted mainly of dry packaged reports and even drier headline recitations by anchors who sat behind desks rather than wandering around Situation Rooms. The Internet was used mainly by computer programmers and defense industry employees, and the major networks produced nightly newscasts and news magazines that seemed glib and trashy at the time but now seem like models of patience and intellectual rigor. Yet here was Postman, warning of TV news producers doing whatever they needed to do to keep people watching.

For Postman, TV's eagerness to keep our adrenaline levels sky-high meant banishing ambiguity and complexity -- hallmarks of written and spoken language -- while giving "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."

In a medium that prefers diversion to meaning, Postman wrote, it is "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."

And now ... this.


For my Top 10 TV programs of 2005, click here.