COMM 150: Neil Postman, 'Amusing Ourselves to Death,' baby-talk and our FINAL EXAM in COMM 150

As we round the corner into the home stretch -- and FINAL EXAMS -- one guy whose theories are going to help us make sense of what's happening in the world of mass communications -- not to mention the questions on the FINAL EXAM, if you get my drift -- is a media critic and communications professor at New York University named Neil Postman. He died in 2003 and wrote his most influential book in the 1980s, but he described today's world to a T. He was like any other academic with a theory to peddle (including me), he overstated his case sometimes. But he said some things that were worth thinking about. You don't have to agree with him. You just have to know what he said well enough to write a 50-point FINAL EXAM essay on it ... or think about it the next time you watch CNN, Fox News or even Channel 20 Springfield.

Postman's main theory was that the mass media -- especially television -- were blurring the lines between entertainment and serious subjects like politics and government, education, religion. In the title of his 1986 book "Amusing Ourselves to Death," he put it in a nutshell. The subtitle: "Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business." Because we seek amusement rather than knowledge, we develop the attention span of cocker spaniel puppies. Or 5-year-olds, as Postman would put it.

"Americans are the best entertained and quite likely the least well-informed people in the Western world," says Postman. [Would it interest you to know that I used exactly the same quote from Postman to set up the term paper in Communications 386 - Media and Government in the Fall Semester of 2008 and 50-point midterm question in COMM 150 in Fall Semester 2007?] "The problem," Postman adds, "is not that television presents us with entertaining subject matter but that all subject matter is presented as entertaining."

Excerpts available on line at http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Broadcast_Media/AmusingOurselves_Postman.html ...

I'm going to give you snippets, without context. Which is what Postman complains about. He says he cringes when a TV anchor segues from one news item to the next by saying, "Now ... this." No context. No explanation. Just unrelated slices of reality. Like this.

Now ... this.

Here's a frequently-quoted snippet. It's long -- hopefully long enough to let us off Postman's hook -- and he builds on the Iranian hostage crisis of 1979 and 1980, but you could plug in any of today's crises and make the same point. The meltdown in Ireland's banking sector. The conflict over islands on the North Korean-South Korean border. See if you recognize what Postman was saying:

... Americans are the best entertained and quite likely the least well-informed people in the Western world. I say this in the face of the popular conceit that television, as a window to the world, has made Americans exceedingly well informed. Much depends here, of course, on what is meant by being informed. I will pass over the now tiresome polls that tell us that, at any given moment, 70 percent of our citizens do not know who is the Secretary of State or the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Let us consider, instead, the case of Iran during the drama that was called the "Iranian Hostage Crisis." I don't suppose there has been a story in years that received more continuous attention from television. We may assume, then, that Americans know most of what there is to know about this unhappy event. And now, I put these questions to you: Would it be an exaggeration to say that not one American in a hundred knows what language the Iranians speak? Or what the word ``Ayatollah" means or implies? Or knows any details of the tenets of Iranian religious beliefs? Or the main outlines of their political history? Or knows who the Shah was, and where he came from?

Nonetheless, everyone had an opinion about this event, for in America everyone is entitled to an opinion, and it is certainly useful to have a few when a pollster shows up. But these are opinions of a quite different order from eighteenth- or nineteenth-century opinions. It is probably more accurate to call them emotions rather than opinions, which would account for the fact that they change from week to week, as the pollsters tell us. What is happening here is that television is altering the meaning of "being informed" by creating a species of information that might properly be called disinformation. I am using this word almost in the precise sense in which it is used by spies in the CIA or KGB. Disinformation does not mean false information. It means misleading information - misplaced, irrelevant, fragmented or superficial information - information that creates the illusion of knowing something, but which in fact leads one away from knowing. In saying this, I do not mean to imply that television news deliberately aims to deprive Americans of a coherent, contextual understanding of their world. I mean to say that when news is packaged as entertainment, that is the inevitable result. And in saying that the television news show entertains but does not inform, I am saying something far more serious than that we are being deprived of authentic information. I am saying we are losing our sense of what it means to be well informed. Ignorance is always correctable. But what shall we do if we take ignorance to be knowledge?

What Postman says about commercials has a great deal of relevance to the way we do politics in the 21st century.

Indeed, we may go this far: The television commercial is not at all about the character of products to be consumed. It is about the character of the consumers of products. Images of movie stars and famous athletes, of serene lakes and macho fishing trips, of elegant dinners and romantic interludes, of happy families packing their station wagons for a picnic in the country- these tell nothing about the products being sold. But they tell everything about the fears, fancies and dreams of those who might buy them. What the advertiser needs to know is not what is right about the product but what is wrong about the buyer. And so, the balance of business expenditures shifts from product research to market research. The television commercial has oriented business away from making products of value and toward making consumers feel valuable, which means that the business of business has now become pseudo-therapy. The consumer is a patient assured by psycho-dramas.

Does this affect the way we elect our leaders? You betcha, as one of our would-be leaders might say it. It goes something like this: TV encourages short, snappy -- but superficial -- sound bites. It breaks down the distinction between public affairs reporting and entertainment like, oh, say "Dancing With the Stars." Where does Jon Stewart fit in here? The commercials program us to look for quick solutions to complex problems. (Take a pill, and your psychological state brightens immediately. Don't believe it? Just watch the pharmaceutical ads.) We look for candidates who are "like us" or share our values rather than "elites" who drone on about public policy. Does it lower the level of public discourse? You betcha.

What's the overall effect of all this? Here's what Postman says. Try it on for size. Agree or disagree? Does he reflect today's reality?

When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainment, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk: culture-death is a clear possibility.

Joseph Siry, professor at Rollins in Florida, has a provocative webpage on the book's main themes ... worth a look ... is it amusing?