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I
used to be like you. I could
at times be insatiable in my desire for information.
And the net, in particular, seemed a godsend – imagine: instant
access to newspapers and magazines from all over the world! I’m
not like that anymore. I’ve
pulled away from it. Oh, I
read – in fact, I probably read much more now than I ever did.
But now I read books almost exclusively.
I cancelled my local paper and I don’t surf the net nearly as
much as I used to. Once, I
had nearly 20 sites I read every day as I had my morning coffee.
Now, I can count the sites I read on one hand, and even then I
don’t read them nearly as thoroughly as I used to.
Why? Because if as
individuals we truly want freedom, if we want to liberate ourselves from
our peculiar American bondage, we need to clear our minds of this
never-ending and misleading trail of trivia that we can’t do anything
about and focus instead on ideas more substantial and more useful – on
ideas we can act upon directly in our own individual lives. Remember
Sherman Adams? Quemoy and
Matsu? John Profumo and
Christine Keeler? The Cosa
Nostra? Bobby Baker?
Alexander Butterfield? Bert
Lance? At one time, all
these names held great meaning for those who “kept up” with
“current events.” They
provided the focus of much argument and debate in and out of the media.
Then, we thought them vitally important.
Now, if they mean anything at all to us, they are merely answers
to questions in an unimportant trivia game. Neil
Postman talks in Amusing
Ourselves to Death about how the nature of information and our
relationship to it changed with the coming of the telegraph in the
1840s. Before then, he
argues, most of the information people possessed related to some aspect
of their lives. There was
therefore a high correlation between information and action.
Before telegraphy, he says, “the information-action ratio was
sufficiently close so that most people had a sense of being able to
control some of the contingencies in their lives” (p. 69).
Certainly newspapers of the day carried stories of scandal and
sensation, but “it was at least local – about places and people
within their experience – and it was always tied to the moment….
For the most part, the information they provided was not only
local but largely functional – tied to the problems and decisions
readers had to address in order to manage their personal and community
affairs” (p. 66). The
telegraph, however, destroyed locality.
It annihilated space. No
longer tied to the earth, information could now for the first time move
faster than any physical messenger.
As a result, says Postman, “the local and the timeless…lost
their central position in newspapers, eclipsed by the dazzle of distance
and speed.” To increase
profits, newspapers began to depend “not on the quality or utility of
the news they provided, but on how much, from what distances, and at
what speed.” He mentions
that during the first week of 1848, a New York newspaper publisher
claimed he had printed “79,000 words of telegraphic content – of
what relevance to his readers, he didn’t say.”
People began receiving “news from nowhere, addressed to no one
in particular . . . . Wars,
crimes, crashes, fires, floods – much of it the social and political
equivalent of Adelaide’s whooping cough – became the content of what
people called ‘the news of the day’” (Postman p. 66-67). But
people could do little if anything about this information.
After all, it had nothing to do with them and took places
hundreds if not thousands of miles away.
How were they to aid poor Adelaide?
Though they knew she had the whooping cough, there was nothing
they could do about it. The
information-action ratio had changed.
Telegraphy, says Postman, “made the relationship between
information and action both abstract and remote.”
People were “faced with the problem of a diminished social and
political potency.” You
may learn, for example, that children in Africa, thousands of miles
away, are starving at this very moment.
What now are you doing to do about it? What
can you do about it? Telegraphy
not only served “to dignify irrelevance and amplify impotence,” says
Postman, it also “made public discourse essentially incoherent”
because “telegraphy was the exact opposite of typography” (p. 69).
Books, for example, take a fair time both to write and to read.
Books are, relatively speaking, permanent.
The telegraph, however, was totally different.
Its value, says Postman, “is undermined by applying the tests
of permanence, continuity, or coherence . . . .
Facts push other facts into and then out of consciousness at
speeds that neither permit nor require evaluation” (p. 70). If
that was true of life just before the War Between the States, how much
more must it be true of life today?
Television gives us “news” all day every day on CNN, Fox,
CNBC, MSNBC, Headline News. And
the internet, of course, gives us almost instant access to information
from all over the world whenever we want it.
But, to be blunt: so what? What
can you and I do about it? I
see in the New York Times, for
instance (and I’m just looking at the top four stories on the front
page as I write this at 4:00 p.m. Eastern time on June 18, 2003), that
the American military has captured a top aide to Saddam Hussein, that
the bishop of Phoenix has resigned amid scandal, that “flaws let
terror suspects enter U.S.” and that the Supreme Court has ten more
decisions this term. What do
any of these things that have occurred hundreds or thousands of miles
away from me have to do with my life?
How will it change as a result of them?
Mostly what this “news” communicates – and what I think
it’s primarily intended to communicate – is that the State is the
most important entity in the land, that it’s good and works hard to
protect you, and that the church, which pretends to be good and helpful,
is really evil and corrupt – after all, not only do priests have sex
with children and hit people with cars before running away, their
leaders cover it up! By
and large, we learn little if anything of use from the current daily
media. As Postman writes,
“The news elicits from you a variety of opinions about which you can
do nothing except to offer them as more news, about which you can do
nothing” (p. 69). What we
consider “news” is merely gossip and is eminently disposable –
after all, tomorrow’s Times will provide us with different details.
The underlying themes, however, will remain the same because the
major American media, just like the American “public” school system,
is designed not to impart knowledge but obedience.
Their purpose is not to inform; their purpose is to indoctrinate. And
whenever we indulge in such reading or viewing, we’re exposing
ourselves to this indoctrination. We
allow them to tell us what’s important, what’s worth discussing and
what’s not. We take what
they have to say as our starting point, allowing them to set the agenda
and define the terms of argument. But
so much of it is exactly what Mick Jagger (of all people!) called it
almost 40 years ago: “useless information supposed to fire my
imagination.” Note
– I just looked again at the Times:
in the last 30 minutes, two stories I mentioned have disappeared and
been replaced with two entirely different ones.
As Postman writes, “civilized people everywhere consider the
burning of a book a vile form of anti-intellectualism.
But the telegraph demands that we burn its contents” (p.
70 – italics in original). It’s
hard, I know, not only to do but to convince yourself of.
Still, if we’re serious about individual liberty, we need to
wean ourselves away from the trivializing, indoctrinating media, from
the television and the radio and the newspapers.
We have to stop filling our minds with “news” about
Adelaide’s whooping cough. We
can’t do anything about that. The
annihilation of space applies only to information, and we only have room
in our minds for so much. We
must, as the poet Diane Wakoski reminds us in Greed,
pick and choose – and we must do so wisely.
We must work within our own limited space.
We have only a limited amount of time and energy; we have only a
limited amount of life. Pick and choose. It’s up to you. |
We
are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph…but perchance the
first news that will leak through into the broad flapping American ear
will be that Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough.
