Fire and Knowledge

Big Brother – pure McLuhan – Times Online

Famously – some would say notoriously – McLuhan defined television as a “cool” medium, that is one in which consumers felt they were participants, as opposed to a “hot” medium like radio where, he argued, they were more like passive recipients (few people talk back to a radio, many do to a television set). For the ITV1 and Channel 4 shows, the viewers were participants in the most direct way. They had to phone in, on costly special lines, to cast their decisive votes. Though such shows are called “reality TV”, they exactly match the concept of “hyper-reality” put forward by McLuhan’s direct heir, the French sociologist Jean Baudrillard. By this, Baudrillard means a media simulacrum which is taken for real life. In his best-known paradox, he argued that the Gulf War of 1990–91 “did not take place”, because, for most people worldwide, it was only a set of tightly controlled images on a television screen.

Neither I’m a Celebrity nor Big Brother represented any reality, of course, other than itself.

Read the introduction to the 20th Anniversay Edition of Amusing Ourselves to Death by Andrew Postman, Neil Postman’s son. An excerpt:

A book of social commentary…published 20 years ago? You’re not busy enough writing emails, returning calls, downloading tunes, playing games (online, PlayStation, Game Boy), checking out websites, sending text messages, IM’ing, Tivoing, watching what you’ve Tivoed, browsing through magazines and newspapers, reading new books – now you’ve got to stop and read a book that first appeared in the last century, not to mention millennium? Come on – like, your outlook on today could seriously be rocked by this plain-spoken provocation about The World of 1985, a world yet to be infiltrated by the Internet, cell phones, PDAs, cable channels by the hundreds, DVDs, call-waiting, caller ID, blogs, flat-screens, HDTV and iPods? Is it really plausible that this slim volume, with its once-urgent premonitions about the nuanced and deep-seated perils of television, could feel timely today, in the Age of Computers? Really, could this book about how TV is turning all public life (education, religion, politics, journalism) into entertainment; how the image is undermining other forms of communication, particularly the written word; and how our bottomless appetite for TV will make content so abundantly available, context be damned, that we’ll be overwhelmed by “information glut” until what is truly meaningful is lost and we no longer care what we’ve lost as long as we’re being amused…Can such a book possibly have relevance to you and The World of 2006 and beyond?

I think you’ve answered your own question.

Channel One: Zero Educational Value

The controversial in-school television program Channel One “airs 10 minutes of news and public affairs and two minutes of commercials or public service announcements daily.” But a new study published by Pediatrics magazine found that students “had a stronger recall of the ads than the programming itself.” Moreover, “students reported having purchased during the preceding three months an average of 2.5 items advertised on the program.” Channel One is broadcast in some 350,000 U.S. schools. The company provides schools with approximately $30,000 worth of audiovisual equipment in exchange for airing the show.

In my high school, we watched Channel One (and its advertisements) every morning, along with our own student-produced “news.” It astounds me that educators let Channel One into schools. It is just another way to make students into consumers–which they need no help doing. Educators should instead be teaching students to beware of advertising and manipulation through visual imagery. When our last stronghold of reading succumbs to things like this, it is almost makes one lose hope. Almost.

(via Question Technology)

It is easy – it is even a luxury – to deny oneself the use of a television set, and I zealously practice that form of self-denial. Every time I see television (at other people’s houses), I am more inclined to congratulate myself on my deprivation. I have no doubt, as I have said, that I am better off without a computer. I joyfully deny myself a motorboat, a camping van, an off-road vehicle, and every other kind of recreational machinery. I have, and want, no “second home.” I suffer very comfortably the lack of colas, TV dinners, and other counterfeit foods and beverages.

I am, however, still in bondage to the automobile industry and the energy companies, which have nothing to recommend them except our dependence on them. I still fly on airplanes, which have nothing to recommend them but speed; they are inconvenient, uncomfortable, undependable, ugly, stinky, and scary. I still cut wood with a chainsaw, which has nothing to recommend it but speed, and has all the faults of an airplane, except it does not fly.

It is plain to me that the line ought to be drawn without fail wherever it can be drawn easily. And it ought to be easy (though many do not find it so) to refuse to buy what one does not need. If you are already solving your problem with the equipment you have – a pencil, say – why solve it with something more expensive and more damaging? If you don’t have a problem, why pay for a solution? If you love the freedom and elegance of simple tools, why encumber yourself with something complicated?

—Wendell Berry, “Feminism, The Body, and the Machine” in The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry (2002), p. 79

Few Americans Know 1st Amendment

Americans apparently know more about “The Simpsons” than they do about the First Amendment.

Only one in four Americans can name more than one of the five freedoms guaranteed by the First Amendment (freedom of speech, religion, press, assembly and petition for redress of grievances.) But more than half can name at least two members of the cartoon family, according to a survey.

Anyone surprised? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?

The New Climate Coalition

“I just want to see us more carefully trying to think through: What are the Christian’s responsibilities to God’s creation? I’m not sure we’ve fulfilled that stewardship very well, as a nation or as individuals. We can do a better job.”

The effort involves a “close to half a million-dollar” ad and publicity campaign beginning with full-page ads in Roll Call and The New York Times on February 9, Ball said. The campaign will follow with a tv spot on Fox News, radio spots on Salem Radio Network, and an ad in Christianity Today.

How do you save the environment? By a publicity campaign using electricity, which causes much of the environmental hazards they are concerned about!

You know you live in strange times when people think they can save the world through advertisements.

Today as never before in human history the child lives in an entertainment environment, among myriad spinoffs and products and commercial references, all of which reinforce the power, or should I say tyranny, of the movie.

—Sven Birkets, The Gutenberg Elegies (1994), p. 29-30

CS Lewis feared film would ruin Narnia

CS Lewis [sic], the author of the Narnia stories, with which Disney hopes to establish a blockbuster movie franchise to rival Harry Potter, was “absolutely opposed” to the idea of a live action version of the stories, it has emerged….

In the letter, dated December 18 1959, Lewis made clear he approved of the radio version of the book produced by Lance Sieveking, a pioneering BBC radio and television producer. But in letters written shortly before the death of his wife, Joy, Lewis also said he was “absolutely opposed – adamant isn’t in it! – to a TV version” of any of the books. “Anthropomorphic animals, when taken out of narrative into actual visibility, always turn into buffoonery or nightmare. At least, with photography,” he wrote.

It has “emerged”? This would seem like common knowledge for those who have read C.S. Lewis’s On Stories or some of his other essays on the imagination. I knew that C.S. Lewis would not approve of Narnia being made into a movie. One of the reasons Lewis wrote the Narnia stories was to expand children’s imaginations (just like his Space Trilogy tried to do with adults), and a movie does not expand the imagination. Reading helps us to use and sharpen our imaginations, but movies do not. This is because we must create the images in our mind when we are reading, but in a movie we are only receiving someone else’s imagination through image.

I think Lewis would feel even more strongly (if that is possible) now that he could see the effects of television on our culture and imaginations–and its effect on books.