On June 12, 1994, former Buffalo Bills quarterback OJ Simpson was arrested for the murders of his wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and a waiter Ron Goldman. The news traveled worldwide in hours if not minutes, and in the same span of time everyone across that wide world had an opinion on the case. I was on the opposite coast from Los Angeles and I certainly found out about it soon enough. But in material terms, the case had exactly as much of an effect on me as I had on it, which is none. The details were awful, but they were being conveyed to people who could get nothing out of them except for titillation.
Was this a first? In the underlying principles, far from it. So says Neil Postman in his 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourses in the Age of Show Business. Postman finds the onset of the process in the nineteenth century spread of telegraphy and photography, which may appear to be unlikely culprits from the perspective of 2026.
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 vermiform 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.
Postman elaborates on the growth of newspapers in this time, which of course made their living on the reporting of news. But in order to fill their quota, they needed to create news to report. Or at any rate, to gather news only available via the use of these new technologies. The news would not have been found worthy of attention by anyone outside of the immediate vicinity of the events before this time.
From here, the development of our own rootless media product was natural enough, although it took time. And there are gratifications to it. I have no plans to give up crossword solving. But we should know that our knowledge is only considered knowledge because of a rather twisted history.
2 comments:
You're right about how the culture was being primed for today's media madness for a good long time and that it was becoming more and more obvious as we stumbled into the 21st century.
Oh yes, I guess most of us remember the three ring circus of the OJ Simpson debacle. The trial was televised at the height of television's dominance on the cultural landscape in the 1990s. Even that initial low speed traffic chase was such a big television event that people preferred it over an NBA finals game. It was an outright media feast right from the beginning, particularly when the judge went against precedent and allowed cameras into the courtroom. It was infotainment of the first order.
Not that it was the first one (remember Rodney King). Jer read me that section (and a number of others) from the Neil Postman book. Amusing Ourselves to Deathmay well be the most amazing piece of cultural criticism ever written. The idea is straightforward, namely the decline of the printed word and the rise of television has completely shifted the meaning of public discourse and how people process informaton. In a print world, politics, religion, education are built on a serious foundation of reasoned thought.. in television world, they are built on show business. It's easy to imagine what Postman would have said about smartphones. Idiocracy, here we come.
What I've found sadly amusing in this century is that the news media having access to so much more in the way of real information actually tends to have all their personalities reading from the same script. The talking heads on the networks even use the same phrases.. and they tell us anything not said by them is unreliable disinformation. Many of us left that cabal long ago having found far more dependable sources elsewhere.
Solving crossword puzzles helps keep the language healthy for future need.
Is there a conspiracy to make everyone stupid, or at least to degrade their attention spans, which sounds like a distinction without a difference? Or is that just a natural result of oligarchs building fortunes with the tools they currently have? Which is the worse answer?
Apparently they found out what "Must See TV" actually means. That decision of the judges, to open up all of the court proceedings to TV cameras, was bizarre from any legal--as opposed to media--perspective. How could you guarantee an unbiased jury after that? All I can think is that both the defense and the prosecution thought the bias would be in their favor.
Interestingly, on the edition I read, Camille Paglia says that she's gradually accepted that Postman was right. That's telling because by her own account she has a bias in favor of visual media. The book has a great chapter on televangelists and the place of religion in the media landscape. He makes the good point that television can't really serve as a church because viewers watch from their homes, which aren't sacralized in the way a church is.
You're very much right in saying that the news media all read from the same script now. And of course that isn't just "news media" as traditionally defined. It's anyone with a large enough platform and the blessing of the market. Without this kind of narrative management most stories of this century would never have taken off.
The language certainly needs all the help it can get.
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