Taming the Tube

...Postman argues, in brief, that the Brave New World-like nature of electronic discourse has rendered print so nearly irrelevant that censorship of the printed word is an irrelevance...

...For all his fervor and intelligence (and these are the most compelling passages in the book), he fails to recognize that Jerry Falwell and his ilk are not about religion, but rather are purveyors of a social and political agenda...

...Northrop Frye has written that "free speech is cultivated and precise speech, which means that there are far too many people who are neither capable of it nor would know if they lost it...

...Heavily influenced by Marshall Mc-Luhan, Postman's thesis is that the transition from typography to video carries with it a commensurate shift in episte-mologies...

...such information is called news, and introduces, on a large scale, "irrelevance, impotence, and incoherence...

...For instance, in a well-argued chapter on television evangelists, Postman points out the chasm-like distance between the quotidian place of television in the household and the sanctified nature of a true place of worship...

...Even a cursory glance at American political culture in the last twenty-five years will attest to the accuracy of that statement...

...George Robinson (George Robinson, a member of the National Writers Union, writes on film, sports, and civil liberties for Newsday, The Cleveland Plain Dealer, and other publications...

...Clearly, the insipidness and irrelevance of television have infected our public life to a dismaying degree...

...Using the Lincoln-Douglas debates as a model, he argues that prior to the invention of the telegraph, public discourse was characterized by the ordered, structured processes of the printed word...

...America was founded by intellectuals, a rare occurrence in the history of modern nations...

...Since the introduction of the telegraph, however, we are bombarded with discontinuous, often inappropriately juxtaposed information of events we cannot influence, events that don't affect our lives...

...As he puts it, "two media so vastly different cannot accommodate the same ideas...

...The trouble lies elsewhere...

...To the extent that one can go back over a printed page and reread, ponder, and consider (at one's own pace)—which can't be done with video (at least, not without a VCR)—he is correct...

...He speaks with conviction of the manner in which television gospel-mongers make themselves superstars in place of God...

...He fails, however, to draw any conclusion from this fact, leaving himself open to charges of technological determinism...

...As Postman himself admits, in many nations, especially in the Third World, television means one station, controlled by the state apparatus, that broadcasts a limited number of hours each day...

...This approach leads to some odd conclusions...

...There are several striking flaws in this otherwise provocative book...

...Perhaps it is such naivete that leads Postman to make the most astounding statement in the book: that civil liberties advocates are wasting their time combating print censorship...

...Postman traces the function of the printed word in American political and cultural discourse...

...There is no gainsaying the trivializing nature of television as a medium...

...But what of the consequences of this shift for American public life...

...Postman, a communications theorist at New York University, suggests, rather, that television, by its very nature, hopelessly trivializes anything it touches and, as a result, "much of our public discourse has become dangerous nonsense...

...fluff is what the medium has a flair for...

...Postman's central fear-that the death of American freedoms will come not from an Orwellian superstate but, instead, from our unwillingness to put away our toys and act like adults—is not an unfounded one...

...He observes, "From its beginning until well into the Nineteenth Century, America was dominated by the printed word and an oratory based on the printed word...

...The linear progression of print, Postman believes, calls upon functions of rationality and discrimination that are not invoked by the discontinuities of video...

...The switch from print to electronic media has had serious consequences for the nature of the information disseminated and, consequently, for the social compact on which our democracy is premised: that the responsibility to inform oneself accompanies the power of the vote...

...As Postman writes, "the problem is not that television presents us with entertaining subject matter but that all subject matter is presented as entertaining...

...The charges are well-founded, I think...

...In an even more startling leap, he suggests that the best way anticensorship forces can spread freedom is, if I understand him correctly, by promoting stricter control of the electronic media...

...One need only consider the track record and appeal of Ronald Reagan, or compare the Lincoln-Douglas debates, as Postman does, with the travesties that took place in the 1984 Presidential campaign...

...The printed word calls upon entirely different faculties from those engaged by television, and we experience information received by reading in a radically different way from data observed on the tube...

...The phrase "the consent of the governed" presupposes the existence of an informed populace, one whose consent will have some meaning...

...He shows little interest in the socioeconomic forces that have shaped American television and, instead, dwells on what he takes to be the "essence" of the medium...

...I am inclined to agree with Postman, moreover, that television is at its best when it is most trivial...

...for all his citation of historical events, Postman's analysis of American television is ahistorical...

...Still, despite all of the odd twists and turns of Postman's reasoning, there is much that is convincing about Amusing Ourselves to Death...

...In acknowledging one of them—that much of his analysis applies almost exclusively to American television programming—he inadvertently points to the book's most serious shortcoming...

...Neil Postman's new book, Amusing Ourselves to Death, argues that the deleterious effects of the rise of television go far beyond the mere coarsening of our public discourse at which most critics of the medium have pointed...

...Until this century, information was disseminated to an ostensibly informed American populace through the printed word...