Published August 22, 2024
In his 1985 classic, Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman offered a critique of the social and political changes brought about by the ubiquity of television in American society. Metaphors tell us what something is like, and, according to Postman, our media (print, radio, television, etc.) operate a lot like metaphors: they “classify the world for us, sequence it, frame it, enlarge it, reduce it, color it, argue a case for what the world is like.”
Postman’s problem with television was not that it conveys unserious or false information (though it often does that), but that the constraints and tendencies of the medium itself shape the kinds of things we are capable of saying and understanding about the world through television. Television creates in us an (often unexamined) expectation that reality ought to conform, indeed, does conform, to the sorts of things that make for “good television.”
And, as Postman insists, all television is entertainment.
Not that there’s anything wrong with entertainment. But the problem as Postman described it was that television had, by the mid-1980s, all but displaced print media as the defining “media-metaphor” of our society. Compared to television, communicating through the printed word requires a clarity of thought and expression, and demands both author and reader be capable of making (or following) sustained, complex arguments.
For much of the nation’s history, Americans (rich and poor alike) were deeply formed by the print media’s monopoly, particularly over our public discourse. The habits of mind and thought this encouraged, in turn, had a profound effect on social and political life. When television replaced print media as the defining metaphor of American public life, the consequences were dramatic. Yet somehow, they went largely unnoticed.
Neil Postman, who died in 2003, is very much worth reading (or re-reading) today. Looking around at the current media environment (and the state of our politics and public discourse) Postman’s concerns about the deleterious effects of broadcast television seem, somehow, both prescient and quaint. It is fascinating to think what he would have made of the rise of cable news, reality TV, and, above all, the explosion of social media.
What, for example, would Postman have to say about the age of smartphones, and of Twitter and TikTok?
These thoughts came to me recently when I was vacationing at the beach with my family. For a good ten days, my smartphone was rarely used for anything except taking photos of my kids as they splashed in the waves or for texting my wife from the grocery store to ask if we needed more limes.
Not being on my phone means I missed some things going on in the world. Some important things. The sorts of things about which I feel a “professional obligation” to keep abreast. It’s not that I can do much about these things. So, it was nice – if only for ten days or so – not to have to worry about things over which I have very little or no control.
And that is why the beach brought my thoughts back to Neil Postman. Postman wasn’t one of those cranks who simply blames everything he doesn’t like on television. For example, one of the lamentable features of our age is information overload. This is a relatively new problem, but it’s not one television created.
As Postman points out, it really began with the humble telegraph and only got worse from there: “For the first time in human history, people were faced with the problem of information glut, which means that simultaneously they were faced with the problem of a diminished social and political potency.”
Today, we have more information than we know what to do with, and much of it – the most spectacular and sensational information – has little or nothing to do with us and, anyway, is beyond our ability to control. Postman illustrates this problem by posing a series of questions pertaining to important issues of his day:
What steps do you plan to take to reduce the conflict in the Middle East? Or the rates of inflation, crime and unemployment? What are your plans for preserving the environment or reducing the risk of nuclear war? What do you plan to do about NATO, OPEC, the CIA, affirmative action, and the monstrous treatment of the Baha’is in Iran?
These were all important issues in 1985. Some of them – depressingly, most of them – remain important issues today, almost 40 years later. But what do you or I plan to do about any of them? Postman is unflinching in his answer: “I shall take the liberty of answering for you: You plan to do nothing about them.”
He’s right, of course. Or rather, he was half right. Because, while the sensible thing to do is recognize one’s impotence in resolving these remote and abstract problems, many people today simply can’t help themselves. And so they shriek into their phones and post the video on social media, or they occupy college campuses, or they glue themselves to priceless works of art, or they lie down in traffic during rush hour.
Or they funnel their exasperated impotence into politics, particularly national politics, where the scale of problems is most evident, and the action of a citizen is most impotent. As Postman put it, every couple of years we can, “cast a ballot for someone who claims to have some plans, as well as the power to act.” Why would such a vision of citizenship satisfy anyone?
It is not hard to find all this same impotent frustration within the Church, too. Our ecclesial arguments are invariably nationalized and globalized. Personal morality is downplayed; moral responsibility for various global issues is emphasized.
In an age in which our very notions of citizenship and public life are increasingly malformed by the media we consume, the old saw that “all politics is local” is less and less adequate as a description of the reality we see around us. We’re not better for it.
Stephen P. White is a fellow in the Catholic Studies Program at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Mr. White’s work focuses on the application of Catholic social teaching to a broad spectrum of contemporary political and cultural issues. He is the author of Red, White, Blue, and Catholic (Liguori Publications, 2016).
