I recently read Neil Postman's excellent Amusing Ourselves to Death. Postman offers a critique of the
corrosive effect of television on American discourse, education and culture.
Television is of course the dominant media of the 20th century, and as Postman
describes it, "The problem is not that television presents us with
entertaining subject matter but that all subject matter is presented as
entertaining, which is another issue altogether." Anything presented on
television is evaluated first by its potential to entertain; its capacity to
inform or enlightened is nearly irrelevant. When entertainment becomes the central
virtue, politics becomes talking heads shouting at each other, rather than a
considered debate over the issues and merits of policy. Religion is reduced to
a public spectacle without any spiritual or moral dimensions. Educational
television teaches children that anything that isn't fun isn't worth
learning.
Amusing
Ourselves to Death is
one hell of a jeremiad, but it was published in 1985. What does Postman’s theory imply when
extended to the defining media of the 21st century, the Internet?
The technology of the Internet is very good at two things, interpersonal communication, like email, IM, and forums, and personal publishing such as
blogs, Twitter, Facebook, and Youtube. The best thing that can happen to
something on the web is that it goes viral, that people feel compelled to send
it on to all their friends. Intrapersonal communication, a need to pass around
the best stuff, and a forum for public display; strip out the jargon and what
you have is old fashioned gossip.
Email and IMs make gossip faster and easier, but don't alter its age-old nature
and purpose of maintaining cliques. (I use clique in the formal sense to mean a
small group of people strongly connected to one another, rather than as a
description of what happens in high school.) Friends, families, collegial groups are all
cliques, and they maintain their integrity or cliquishness by the constant
exchange of news and private observations.
Cliques are vital; we turn to them for support and personal definition.
Facebook carries out the ostensible functions of gossip
without any human intermediation whatsoever, we stay in touch with our friends,
find out how their lives and relationships are going, check out their favorite
bands and TV shows, but it does not have the same social function. The Twitter feed is a sterile medium compared
to the richness of interpersonal relationships. It is a diet-gossip that allows
us to feel as if we have many friends, while in reality we become further
isolated. Friendships maintained by passively observing profiles and blindly
flinging updates into the ether can’t be counted on in the same way as old
fashioned friendships.
Gossip has always played a role in politics, but when it plays the preeminent
role, honest evaluation of our leaders, their beliefs, and executive ability
become impossible. The more salacious a piece of gossip is, the more engaging
it is. Instead of being entertained, we are disgusted and titillated, the truth
of a rumor is basically irrelevant, and fact-checking often
strengthens misinformed beliefs. The damage to public discourse is
obvious. Politics becomes little more than innuendo, name-calling, and black
propaganda. Yes, it’s always been bad, but I believe that the level of
misinformation in the public sphere is rising, and is embedded in the
architecture of Internet technologies.
I don't have an antidote. We never came up with one for television, and a
glance at the TV-guide will show you it’s worse than ever before (see the
Ghosts-and-Loggers, I mean History Channel.) On an individual level, we can
steel ourselves against internet rumor, and work to maintain friendships in the
real world, but that's just a band-aid. I think it will take a new medium. But any new technology must be better than
what it replaces, and the possibilities of what we will find more engaging than
entertainment and gossip frightens me.
