While this book was
published in 1985, and it sees television as the source of all that
is wrong with the world, (one feels that if Postman watched GoggleBox
he might well throw himself of the nearest cliff), it is very easy to
transfer the arguments forward 30 years and hit “find and replace”,
exchanging Television for Facebook/Google etc, and retain a coherent
argument without need for further amendment.
As an example try
replacing television for Google in the following paragraph:
“Television is the
command center in subtler ways as well. Our use of other media, for
example, is largely orchestrated by television. Through it we learn
what telephone system to use, what movies to see, what books, records
and magazines to buy, what radio programmes to listen to. Television
arranges our communications environment for us in ways that no other
medium has the power to do.”
But then, while the
book is powerful and persuasive, as I progressed through it I did get
the nagging doubt. That Postman in 1985 was lamenting the demise of
public discourse in essentially the exact same terms as many in the
UK are now doing post the EU referendum perhaps points to the fact
that it has been ever thus. Although nostalgia is not what it used to
be, people have been lamenting the demise in public discourse since
at least the time of Plato.
That Postman is
writing in the context of Reagan lends itself to the drawing of
parallels to Trump – that a mere film star was elected President
offended the sensibilities of many in the 1980s, the worry that it
was not Trump the “businessman” but Trump the “reality TV
celebrity” that got elected that has many currently running scared.
One of the current
great tensions is that because social media is “unfiltered” there
is no way to limit the circulation of “fake” news. To quote from
Postman again “Walter Lippmann, for example wrote in 1920: 'There
can be no liberty for a community which lacks the means by which to
detect lies.' … [he assumed] that with a well-trained press
functioning as a lie-detector... the public could not be indifferent
to their consequences.” - The press have largely lost control of
content that the public encounter, but, if we think about Hillsbourgh
and The Sun, even when the press were in control and filtering
content it is difficult to characterise them as either a lie-detector
or well-trained. So again while the mechanisms are different I am not
sure it the outcomes are materially different.
But on one point
Postman is insightful – he trys to shift us from seeing Orwell's
state censorship as the threat to Huxley's Brave New World of
pleasure seeking self censorship – we are definitely the generation
who played Pokemon Go while Rome burns, even if Rome has always been
burning.
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