Amusing Ourselves to Death

1
Amusing Ourselves to Death

• Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

2
Aldous Huxley

• Contrary to common belief, Huxley and Orwell did
  not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns that
  we will be overcome by an externally imposed
  oppression. But in Huxleys vision, no Big
  Brother is required to deprive people of their
  autonomy, maturity, and history. As he saw it,
  people will come to love their oppression, to
  adore the technologies that undo their capacities
  to think (vii).

3
The Medium is the Metaphor

• Boston (The Revolutionary War)
• New York (Ellis Island)
• Las Vegas??? Our politics, religion, news,
  athletics, education, and commerce have been
  transformed into congenial adjuncts of show
  business, largely without protest or even much
  popular notice. The result is that we are a
  people on the verge of amusing ourselves to
  death (4).

4
The Medium is the Metaphor

• Form and Content
• smoke signals
• For on television, discourse is conducted
  largely through visual imagery, which is to say
  that television gives us a conversation in
  images, not words. The emergence of the
  image-manager in the political arena and the
  concomitant decline of the speech writer attest
  to the fact that television demands a different
  kind of content from other media. You cannot do
  political philosophy on television. Its form
  works against the content (7).

5
The Medium is the Metaphor

• this book is an inquiry into and lamentation
  about the most significant American cultural fact
  of the second half of the twentieth century the
  decline of the Age of Typography and the
  ascendancy of the Age of Television. This
  change-over has dramatically and irreversibly
  shifted the content and meaning of public
  discourse, since two media so vastly different
  cannot accommodate the same ideas (8).

6
The Medium is the Metaphor

• Each medium, like language itself, makes
  possible a unique mode of discourse by providing
  a new orientation for thought, for expression,
  for sensibility. Which, of course, is what
  McLuhan meant in saying the medium is the
  message. His aphorism, however is in need of
  amendment because, as it stands, it may lead one
  to confuse a message with a metaphor

7
The Medium is the Metaphor

• A message denotes a specific, concrete statement
  about the world. But the forms of our media,
  including the symbols through which they permit
  conversation, do not make such statements. They
  are rather like metaphors, working by unobtrusive
  but powerful implication to enforce their special
  definitions of reality (10).

8
The Medium is the Metaphor

• Examples
• The Clock (Mumfords observations)
• Writing
• Eyeglasses
• The Microscope
• What I mean to point out here is that the
  introduction into a culture of a technique such
  as writing or a clock is not merely an extension
  of mans power to bind time but a transformation
  of his way of thinking (13).

9
The Medium is the Metaphor

• Where do our notions of mind come from if not
  from metaphors generated by our tools (15).

10
Media as Epistemology

• Oral versus Print courtroom example
• The Oral versus Print thesis example
• the concept of truth is intimately linked to
  the biases of forms of expression. Truth does
  not, and never has, come unadorned. It must
  appear in the proper clothing or it is not
  acknowledged, which is a way of saying that the
  truth is a kind of cultural prejudice (22/23).

11
Media as Epistemology

• Oral skills (25)
• Memory, Performance Skills
• Print skills (25)
• Immobility of the body
• Focus on meaning (not appearance)
• Detachment / Objectivity (critical skills)
• Comprehension
• Delayed gratification
• Abstraction

12
Medium as Epistemology

• My argument is limited to saying that a major
  new medium changes the structure of discourse it
  does so by encouraging certain uses of the
  intellect, by favoring certain definitions of
  intelligence and wisdom, and by demanding a
  certain kind of content in a phrase, by
  creating new forms of truth telling (27).

13
Medium as Epistemology

• We must be careful in praising or condemning
  because the future may hold surprises for us.
  The invention of the printing press itself is a
  paradigmatic example. Typography fostered the
  modern idea of individuality, but it destroyed
  the medieval sense of community and integration.
  Typography created prose, but made poetry into an
  exotic and elitist form of expression.
  Typography made modern science possible but
  transformed religious sensibility into mere
  superstition. Typography assisted in the growth
  of the nation-state but thereby made patriotism
  into a sordid if not lethal emotion (29).
• Everything Bad is Good for You

14
Typographic America

• In colonial America, religion, politics, and
  social life were steeped in print literacy.
• Beginning in the sixteenth century, a great
  epistemological shift had taken place in which
  knowledge of every kind was transferred to, and
  made manifest through, the printed page (33).

15
Typographic America

• The Printing Press Invented in southern Germany
  (near Augsburg, Regensburg, Ulm Nuremberg) in
  the 1450s. Johannes Gansfleisch zur laden zum
  Gutenberg used a modified linen press fitted with
  typeface made from tin antimony to build the
  first printing press.

16
Typographic America

• The first printing press in America appeared in
  1638 at Harvard University.

17
Typographic America

• Widespread literacy and schools in 17th Century
  England.
• Widespread literacy in the colonies.
• Common Sense (1776) by Thomas Paine.
• Federalist Papers (1787/1788) by Alexander
  Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay.

18
Typographic America

• The influence of the printed word in every arena
  of public discourse was insistent and pwerful not
  merely because of the quantity of printed matter
  but because of its monopoly(41).

19
The Typographic Mind

• The Lincoln vs. Douglas debates of 1858 Print
  literacy in oral performance.
• Is there any audience of Americans today who
  could endure seven hours of talk? Or five? Or
  three? Especially without pictures of any kind?
  (45).
• See example on page 46.

20
The Typographic Mind

• Whenever language is the principal medium of
  communication especially language controlled by
  the rigors of print an idea, a fact, a claim is
  the inevitable result. The idea may be banal,
  the fact irrelevant, the claim false, but there
  is not escape from meaning when language is the
  instrument guiding ones thought. Though one may
  accomplish it from time to time, it is very hard
  to say nothing when employing a written English
  sentence (50).

21
The Typographic Mind

• To be confronted by the cold abstractions of
  printed sentences is to look upon language bare,
  without the assistance of either beauty or
  community (50).
• Early in the morning, at break of day, in all
  the freshness and dawn of ones strength, to read
  a book I call that vicious. (Nietzche, Ecce
  Homo, 1888)

22
The Typographic Mind

• Skills of the Reader
• Following a line of thought
• Classification
• Inference-making
• Reasoning
• Critical reading
• Comparison of ideas
• Connect generalizations
• Detachment
• Delayed Gratification

23
The Typographic Mind

• Effects of literacy on culture
• Science
• Capitalism
• Secularization
• Continuous progress

24
The Typographic Mind

• The evolution of advertising
• 1890s from rational to emotional appeals
• Politics and Religion
• From the Age of Exposition to the Age of Show
  Business.

25
The Peek-a-Boo World

• Until the 1840s information could only move as
  quickly as human beings
• Samuel Morse invented the telegraph in 1837.
  Space was annihilated.
• Maine and Texas?
• telegraphy gave legitimacy to the idea of
  context-free information that is, to the ida
  that the value of information need not be tied to
  any function it might serve in social and
  political decision-making and action, but may
  attach merely to its novelty, interest, and
  curiosity (65).

26
The Peek-a-Boo World

• Information as a commodity
• The penny press.
• AP wire services.
• The telegraph may have made the country into
  one neighborhood, but it was a peculiar one,
  populated by strangers who knew nothing but the
  most superficial facts about each other (67).

27
The Peek-a-Boo World

• Information Action Ratio
• Thus we have a great loop of impotence The news
  elicits from you a variety of opinions about
  which you can do nothing except to offer them as
  more news, about which you can do nothing (69).

28
The Peek-a-Boo World

• The principle strength of the telegraph was its
  capacity to move information, not collect it,
  explain it or analyze it. In this respect,
  telegraphy was the exact opposite of typography
  (69).
• To the telegraph, intelligence meant knowing of
  lots of things, not knowing about them (70).

29
The Peek-a-Boo World

• Thus, to the reverent question posed by Morse
  What hath God wrought? a disturbing answer came
  back a neighborhood of strangers and pointless
  quantity a world of fragments and
  discontinuities (70).

30
The Peek-a-Boo World

• The invention of photography Louis Daguerre
  (1835)
• Photography vs. Print
• Argumentation
• Context

31
The Peek-a-Boo World

• In a peculiar way, the photograph was the
  perfect complement to the flood of telegraphic
  news-from-nowhere that threatened to submerge
  readers in a sea of facts from unknown places
  about strangers with unknown faces. For the
  photograph gave a concrete reality to the
  strange-sounding datelines, and attached faces to
  the unknown names

32
The Peek-a-Boo World

• Thus it provided the illusion, at least, that
  the news had a connection to something within
  ones sensory experience. It created an apparent
  context for the news of the day. And the news
  of the day created a context for the photograph
  (75).

33
The Peek-a-Boo World

• Context free information is given a
  pseudo-context through the union of telegraphy
  and photography.
• Pseudo-Context A pseudo-context is a structure
  invented to give fragmented and irrelevant
  information a seeming use.
• Because information presented in a pseudo-context
  lacks use value in our everyday lives, it exists
  for amusement.

34
The Peek-a-Boo World

• Together, this ensemble of electronic
  techniques called into being a new world a
  peek-a-boo world, where now this event, now that,
  pops into view for a moment, then vanishes again.
  It is a world without much coherence or sense a
  world that does not ask us, indeed, does not
  permit us to do anything a world that is, like
  the childs game of peek-a-boo, entirely
  self-contained (77).

35
The Peek-a-Boo World

• TELEVISION AS A GAME
• OF PEEK-A-BOO