A rejoinder one might make to Amusing Ourselves to Death forty years on is that text (if not print) has come back in a very big way. Texting has become a primary means of communication. Many social media playforms — despite all the various turns to video — remain text-based. Just these two phenomena alone mean that many of us read and write much more than we would have had we been the same age in 1985. Add in generative AI tools, the most popular of which are text chat based, and we live in the midst of a huge resurgence of reading and writing (of a particular kind). At the same time, television as envisioned by Postman is no longer what it was. Many of us don’t channel-surf these days and instead are able to choose — often guided by an algorithm — what and when we are going to watch. Commercial breaks, while clearly not a thing of the past, are often optional if one is willing to pay to avoid them. About 40% of Americans still watch broadcast or cable TV, but that has been in steady decline since the rise of streaming. It is quite possible we are either in a fundamentally new media environment, requiring a new kind of analysis along the lines of Postman’s critique (one I am sure is ongoing in the various media-related disciplines), or that text itself can just as easily carry on the legacy of the fragmented world of TV.
Indeed, for Postman, the problem facing us cannot be reduced to the precise medium through which we consume information, but rather the entire media environment that shapes how that consumption is accomplished. The rise of text in the age of TV (or, more accurately for today, the internet), will only ever be reshaped by the dominant medium: “Television arranges our communications environment for us in ways that no other medium has the power to do” (78). So I get it. And yet, I can’t help but consider the historical narrative drawn by the book that contrasts the world of print of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the world of television of the twentieth and ask: how different are these, really? Is the era of print as rational as Postman would have us believe? The book is not a work of history. Indeed, for all its academic trappings it is, in many ways, a polemic. It isn’t meant to get into the nitty-gritty historical details. But we might reverse the narrative and, by asking what aspects of the TV environment existed prior to TV, witness as much continuity between the two as difference.
“From Erasmus in the sixteenth century to Elizabeth Eisenstein in the twentieth,” Postman declares, “almost every scholar who has grappled with the question of what reading does to one’s habits of mind has concluded that the process encourages rationality…To engage the written word means to follow a line of thought, which requires considerable powers of classifying, inference-making and reasoning” (51). I am not a scholar of print and media, but this strikes me as naive. Also in the sixteenth century, Martin Luther published On the Jews and their Lies (1543), among other texts. His antisemitic publications led, pretty directly, to restrictions on Jewish life and their expulsion from Protestant areas of Germany, to say nothing of his broader influence on political antisemitism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. During the French Revolution, print was used to rile up the crowds, spread conspiracy theories, and destabilize various political systems and experiments. These two examples seem to belie the idea that “in a culture dominated by print, public discourse tends to be characterized by a coherent, orderly arrangement of facts and ideas. The public for whom it is intended is generally competent to manage such discourse” (51). Print, just like TV and social media, is perfectly capable of presenting disordered ideas in the service of whomever is able to shape the discourse as well.
Other historians, in particular Robert Darnton, have shown how the “Age of Reason” (as Postman refers to the Enlightenment) was undergirded by what we might today call slop or trash (or, more charitably, popular works that mixed their politics with pleasure). Titillation and pleasure was as much a part of the Age of Print as reasoned discourse. Later, in the nineteenth century, the newspaper ushered in the fragmentation that Postman lays at the feet of TV. The French mass daily or penny press featured the fait divers, the chronicling of random assortments of events from real life, in short format that, as Vanessa Schwartz has argued, aped the conventions of flânerie, and “implied that the everyday might be transformed into the shocking and sensational and ordinary people lifted from the anonymity of urban life and into the realm of spectacle” (36). The classifieds posed their own problem, as several recent books have shown, to efforts to create a media environment premised on rationality, reason, and respectability.
The popularity and success of the mass press was undergirded, moreover, by advertisements and classifieds, a history that Postman does provide his own gloss on: “As late as 1890, advertising, still understood to consist of words, was regarded as an essentially serious and rational enterprise whose purpose was to convey information and make claims in propositional form” (59-60). This I would say would come to a surprise to many late nineteenth century commentators who feared the effect of advertising and mass consumption on the population, especially in democracies. Émile Zola’s Au bonheur des dames (1883), for instance, traces the ways the new department stores of the 1860s manipulated their customers into buying not want they needed, nor even wanted, but what they didn’t even know they desired. I was lucky enough to be in Paris during a recent exhibition of nineteenth and early twentieth-century poster art at the Musée d’Orsay; certainly few of those conveyed much information. Included on the wall text was a, 1897 quote from the French artist Henri Jossot: “The poster on the wall should scream out; it must violate the gaze of passers-by.”
I am not going to claim that nothing changed with the arrival of TV, but whatever it was was not as big a break with what came before as depicted in Amusing Ourselves to Death. This sense of continuity might slightly reshape how we might wrestle with Postman’s conclusion — the one I ended my last post with: “The problem…does not reside in what people watch. The problem is in that we watch. The solution must be found in how we watch.” (160). In my previous post, I said that perhaps we might apply this appeal to our approach to social media. Here, I might put the conclusion into greater question. If watching and reading are less necessarily different than presented in the book, then the problem is not that we watch, but actually may be in what we are watching as well as in how we watch. The medium is the message, but there is no medium that is or will be innocent of our own susceptibility to disinformation and the emotions.
