Fire and Knowledge

Information must be moved and consumed continuously. That is the price to be paid for speed-of-light transmission. What the information may be is of no consequence, as long as it is attention-getting, and does not inhibit the flow of new information coming fast behind it.

–Neil Postman, Teaching as a Conserving Activity (1979), p. 82

If we say that these industries only give our youth what they will pay for, the question remains, Why do our youth turn away from civilized speech? The answer, in my opinion, is that the electronic information environment, with television at its center, is fundamentally hostile to conceptual, segmented, linear modes of expression, so that both writing and speech must lose some of their power.

–Neil Postman, Teaching as a Conserving Activity (1979), p. 74

Television attacks the monopoly of the printed word. In fact, by distributing information, albeit in pictures, to everyone in the culture simultaneously, it threatens all systems that have a hierarchical structure. A hierarchy is a drama played by superiors, inferiors, and equals. Information is the means by which we assign people their role in the drama and, indeed, justify that role.

–Neil Postman, Teaching as a Conserving Activity (1979), p. 68

In a medium in which the image captures most attention, personality supercedes—in fact, all but obliterates—ideas and issues. That is why one becomes a celebrity by the mere fact of appearing on television. No prior accomplishment is required. Nor a reason for being there. It is accomplishment enough for one’s image to be on television. It is its own reason. In such a situation, individualism takes on a wholly different aspect from its meaning in a book culture. The individualism of the book leads to the dominance of the mind. The individualism of TV leads to the dominance of personality.

–Neil Postman, Teaching as a Conserving Activity (1979), p. 66

This week, April 24-30, 2006, is TV turn-off week. Did you know that the average US home has a television on for over 7 hours a day? And that they admit to watching it for an average of 4 hours a day? 49% of Americans say they watch too much TV. Do something about it this week. Turn the stupid thing off. Instead of mindlessly staring into a screen, pick out a couple of good books to read (see my recommended reading page for my suggestions). If you haven’t already read it, one of those books should be Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death. Everyone should read Postman’s book at least once. It will help you understand the effects of television on our society and make you want to keep it off. As a society, we have long turned away from reading in favor of watching. Let’s reverse that trend. It can only happen through each of us doing something about it. If someone laments the current problems that television has had a hand in creating (and there are many), and then turns on the tube each night, they are part of the problem. Let’s be part of a solution. I challenge you to keep your television off the entire week—and, God willing, beyond.

A few more resources about television:

• Television: the Cyclops That Eats Books by Larry Woiwode
• Important Books About Television (and not TV shows about books) by Douglas Groothuis
• Quotes about television from books I’ve read

Taking the Tube Underground

Anne Marie Waters writes about her reasons why to remove television from the family hearth. I could not agree more. An excerpt:

I recall the evening my husband sat on the floor, packing up as we prepared to move out of our apartment and into our first house, fingering some of the great classics of literature he owned as he pulled them from shelves and placed them into boxes. “I never have time to read this stuff,” he mused. “But, back when I did, it really stuck with me, you know? You don’t forget the great books—they change who you are.”

I begrudgingly had to admit to myself that I couldn’t remember one issue from all the political debate and commentary programs I had watched that had really changed my life meaningfully—or even at all. Of all those countless hours I had spent watching television, nothing remained, not one memory of having learned anything true or valuable or lasting. I couldn’t even remember the topics of the shows we had watched just the night before….

As the older boys ran ahead, we were sad to notice that almost every single house we passed in our neighborhood had the curtains drawn, every light in the house off but for the iridescent glow of the big-screen TVs dominating the front living rooms.

It struck me that we don’t even need to do much to be very different from the world, to offer something better than the mediocrity that the world offers. And those of us who want to transform the culture around us need not be known just for our opposition to a corrupt culture.

We can offer something better and richer: homes that beckon with the glow not of our enormous TV sets, but of lives in which imperfect people strive to love and engage with one another by the power of the gospel–homes offering good music, great books, warm conversation, reflection and authenticity and laughter and service and children and activity and true hope . . . the kind of lives not found anywhere but in real life.

The printed word cannot compete with the movies on their ground, and should not. You can describe beautiful faces, car chases, or valleys full of Indians on horseback until you run out of words, and you will not approach the movies’ spectacle. Novels written with film contracts in mind have a faint but unmistakable, and ruinous, odor. I cannot name what, in the text, alerts the reader to suspect the writer of mixed motives; I cannot specify which sentences, in several books, have caused me to read on with increasing dismay, and finally close the books because I smelled a rat. Such books seems uneasy being books; they seem eager to flight off their disguises and jump onto screens.

—Annie Dillard, The Writing Life (1989), pp. 18-19

Motivated no longer by practical needs, but by loneliness and fear, women began to identify themselves by what they bought rather than what they did. They bought labor-saving devices that worked, as most modern machines have tended to work, to devalue or replace the skills of those who used them. They bought manufactured foods, which did likewise. They bought any product that offered to lighten the burdens of housework, to be “kind to hands,” or to endear one to one’s husband. And they furnished their houses, as they made up their faces and selected their clothes, neither by custom nor invention, but by the suggestion of articles and advertisements in “women’s magazines.” Thus housewifery, once a complex discipline acknowledged to be one of the bases of culture and economy, was reduced to the exercise of purchasing power. The housewife’s only remaining productive capacity was that of reproduction. But even as a mother she remained a consumer, subjecting herself to an all-presuming doctor and again to written instructions calculated to results in the purchase of merchandise. Breast-feeding of babies became unfashionable, one suspects, because it was the last form of home production; no way could be found to persuade a woman to purchase her own milk. All these “improvements” involved a radical simplification of mind and was bound to have complicated, and ironic, results. As housekeeping became simpler and easier, it also became more boring. A woman’s work became less accomplished and less satisfying. It became easier for her to believe that what she did was not important. And this heightened her anxiety and made her even more avid and even less discriminating as a consumer. The cure not only preserved the diseases, it compounded it.

—Wendell Berry, “The Body and the Earth,” in The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry (2002), p. 110