Fire and Knowledge

I never post videos. This is an ironic exception. The video is a 10 minute interview with Neil Postman from 1995, discussing cyberspace, information glut, and the Faustian bargain of technology. There is nothing here that isn’t in his books or essays — in fact, it is better presented in his writings — but for those of you who haven’t read any of his books (for shame!), this is a brief introduction to a few of his ideas. (Click on the small arrow in the bottom left to play; the large arrow takes you to YouTube and it’s endless diversions of sub-pop culture. I almost said, sub-par culture. Which is more accurate I will let you decide.)

“Watching YouTube is far closer to consuming Internet pornography than staring at the television,” says Troy Patterson in his essay “Click, Respond, Repeat.” I’m not sure if the whole thing is worth reading, but here are the parts that struck me as worth reading and pondering:

Once you’ve clicked on a video and hunched over to concentrate your attention, the experience comes at you, bold and instant, as immediately intelligible as a billboard and rewarding as a dopamine rush. Your inevitable education in pop culture allows you to fill in any contextual blanks automatically. This is TV reduced to its ether—click, respond, repeat—and every video is, first and last, an advertisement for itself….

In this and so many other respects, watching YouTube is far closer to consuming Internet pornography than staring at the television. Like Internet porn, Web video promises something to gratify any appetite in an instant and for a moment. The two also share an illicit quality: You generally watch them alone and when you really should be doing something else. Each mixes the raw with the slick. Neither makes a fetish of too much internal narrative.

But then, all of media culture has an increasingly pornographic feel, doesn’t it? Web video dovetails with both the show-me morals of MySpace and the spy-eyed ethos of reality TV and tabloid glossies. YouTube is the product of an America where every normal person knows he deserves to blow up and get paid, to be naked and famous; where you’re not really consuming unless you’re producing in kind and where your “production” can be your own banal self. Web video is the ideal medium for a world populated by instinctual exhibitionists who double as full-time voyeurs. To quote a performance artist who might have thrived on the Web, nothing succeeds like excess.

Of all the illusions of television, that of its much-touted “educational value” is probably the first. Because of its utter transience as a medium and the complete passivity of its audience, television is doomed to have its effect within the limits of the most narrow and shallow definition of entertainment—that is, entertainment as diversion.

–Wendell Berry, “Discipline and Hope” in A Continuous Harmony (1972), p. 87

[Television] is the medium that almost perfectly expresses the high-tech society: simplistic and forceful, capable of no complexity of thought whatsoever, designed for limited and graphic impacts (best if short and violent, like football and commercials), and sending pulses continually at that psychological nexus that Freud, doctor for the consumer society, called the “pleasure principle,” where desires, always created, are always insatiable.

–Kirkpatrick Sale, Rebels Against the Future (1995), p. 217

The novelist, then, has been encouraged to explore the boundless non-visual world, as the movie maker has taken over much of his former jurisdiction over the fantasy world of sight, sound, and action.

–Daniel Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (1961), p. 129

Although every experienced newspaperman and inquirer knows that the most thoughtful and responsive answers to any difficult question come after long pause, and that the longer the pause the more illuminating the thought that follows it, nonetheless the electronic media cannot bear to suffer a pause of more than five seconds; a pause of thirty seconds of dead time on air seems interminable.

–Theodore White, quoted in Daniel Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (1961), p. 43

I have added Daniel Boorstin’s The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America to my “recommended reading” section. It was an excellent and enlightening read. Boorstin exposits imagery, television, magazines, celebrities, pseudo-events, abridgements, travel, tourism, movies, corporate image, advertising, and more.

I had high expectations for this book, because I have known about it for years and have read many writers quote from it and recommend it. Often when I have such high expectations for a work it disappoints, but The Image was interesting, informative, persuasive and convicting. I highly recommend this book.

What was nutty was that the movie folk were trafficking in illusions in a real world but the real world thought that its reality could only be found in the illusions. Two sets of maniacs.

–Walker Percy, Lancelot, p. 152