Opinion originally published in June, 2024
I have noted before that when some people experience boredom, they turn to politics to find relief. This often starts innocently enough, as people with too much time on their hands usually want to improve the lives of those around them. For example, Custer County is blessed with a robust non-profit environment, with dozens of organizations staffed with volunteers. But sometimes, instead of helping improve through volunteering, people decide to “take up” politics as a hobby. The problem is not that people want to help improve the human condition; rather, they fail to realize that the medium in which they engage in politics is not conducive to finding solutions but rather whipping up anger to grab attention and money.
The “news” on the web is how most people get involved in politics in the modern era. They follow other people on social media, watch videos streamed through a smartphone, and engage in conversations in the comment sections of posts. When you think about it, what other hobby works in this way? If you want to learn how to garden, you would likely buy some books and perhaps seek out a garden club expert, and only with specific problems would you turn to the web for answers. If you are interested in religion, reading the foundational texts would be a good place to start. But with politics, people get involved by hurtling themselves into the screaming mass of humanity in digital form with zero foundation in political history. How many people start with the Federalist Papers, Edmond Burke, or Thomas Paine? My guess to this question is zero.
“The medium is the message” is a term coined by the communication theorist Marshall McLuhan in the 1960s. McLuhan proposed that the medium that is used to communicate information has an overwhelming impact on how the information is received by the end-user: “Content of any medium is always another medium – thus, speech is the content of writing, writing is the content of print, and print itself is the content of the telegraph.” In simple terms, the type of technology that delivers information can be more important than the information itself, but the medium is often invisible.
One of my favorite parables to demonstrate how the most fundamental parts of existence can also be invisible to the inexperienced is as follows: Two young fish swimming upstream came upon a much older fish going the other direction. The older fish asks, “Hey boys, how’s the water today?” The two younger fish looked at each other in puzzlement and asked each other, “What is water?” The technology that presents us with information is much like the water, invisible to the naïve.
While McLuhan’s theory is useful, it was the writer Neil Postman who noticed that the advent of television news programs signaled a change in American culture because of how news was being packaged and presented to viewers. The bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, changed the future of the United States in many ways, one of which is it was the first time a live television news program brought breaking news to a small New York audience. Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, TV news programs spread across the county as more people purchased televisions. News programs kept increasing in time, from 15 minutes to 30 minutes, from once per day to two or even three times per day. Walter Cronkite was hired in 1962 to serve as the anchorman for CBS evening news.
Postman, in his book Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, made a convincing argument that news, in particular, television but also daily newspapers, has degraded the meaning of what news was across the nation. Interestingly, Postman gave his first talk on the subject during the Frankfurt Book Fair in 1984. He was participating in a panel of speakers gathered to talk about George Orwell’s dystopian masterpiece 1984 (which had been published in 1949). Postman argued that the world was moving more toward Aldous Huxley’s dystopian novel Brave New World (published in 1932). For those who have not read either novel, 1984 focused on a world ruled by totalitarian tyrants who used torture and propaganda to make the population conform. Brave New World, by contrast, is about how the public was oppressed by their addiction to amusement and were all too happy to medicate themselves into bliss and voluntarily sacrifice their rights.
This willingness to hand over personal liberty in exchange for amusement was, for Postman, the biggest threat to American Democracy. He pointed out that Americans used to be some of the most well-read population on the planet from the 1700s onward. It would be an understatement to say that the printing press was foundational to the nation. For example, Benjamin Franklin was not only a founding father of the United States but also a successful publisher and writer for his whole career. Postman points out that American’s appetite for the printed word grew with each passing decade. For example, when the famed debates between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas were held in 1858, huge crowds listened for upwards of seven hours about complex subjects that had been argued in books and newspapers. Postman calls the collective knowledge of the crowd listening to the debates as a culture that had developed a typographic mind:
“I choose the Lincoln-Douglas debates as a starting point not only because they were the preeminent example of political discourse in the mid-nineteenth century, but also because they illustrate the power of typography to control the character of that discourse. Both the speakers and their audience were habituated to a kind of oratory that may be described as literary. For all of the hoopla and socializing surrounding the event, the speakers had little to offer, and audiences little to expect, but language. And the language that was offered was clearly modeled on the style of the written word. To anyone who has read what Lincoln and Douglas said, this is obvious from beginning to end.”
This typographic mind, according to Postman, meant that the enterprise of writing and reading the printed word was a serious business and an essentially rational activity. When someone writes, they are making a statement about something, and that statement, fixed on the page, is subject to pushback by the reader more than any other form of communication:
“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; that the sequential, propositional character of the written word fosters what Walter Ong calls the “analytic management of knowledge.” To engage the written word means to follow a line of thought which requires considerable powers of classifying, inference-making and reasoning. It means to uncover lies, confusions, and overgeneralizations, to detect abuses of logic and common sense. It also means to weigh ideas, to compare and contrast assertions, to connect one generalization to another. To accomplish this, one must achieve a certain distance from the words themselves, which is, in fact, encouraged by the isolated and impersonal text. That is why a good reader does not cheer an apt sentence or pause to applaud even an inspired paragraph. Analytic thought is too busy for that, and too detached.”
Postman was writing at a time when a television star had become president of the United States and his scorn of this fact is dripping in every word he writes. To be fair, Ronald Regan was an avid consumer of Reader’s Digest and much of his fear of nuclear war came at first from stories in the weekly magazine. Television was in the process of invading everything Postman thought fostered analytical thinking. From the kid’s show Sesame Street to the rise of the TV evangelical pastors, entertainment had taken over the printed word.
While most of the blame falls on the rise of television, Postman does note it was the advent of the telegraph that changed the printed word. Before the telegraph, the news was almost wholly based on information about a region or a specialty in an industry. Information was hard to gather, and if it was going to be sold to readers, it had to be useful in some way to the end consumer. However, with the telegraph, as it spread across the nation and the world in the 1840s and 1850s, random news factoids could be accumulated from across the world. This was when “the news of the day” was created, which had been impossible before the invention of the telegraph. The journalism aphorism “When a dog bites a man, that is not news, because it happens so often. But if a man bites a dog, that is news.”
Journalism schools still teach what is called the “inverted pyramid” of news writing. This was because telegrams were fairly expensive, and sometimes, news got garbled or cut off. The telegraph, as a means of communication, lacked any type of nuance. So, a news story is written with the most newsworthy info at the top, followed by important details, and then any other general info and background information. Television took the pyramid and put it on steroids.
For whatever reason, mankind’s brain seems to short-circuit when faced with a collection of extremely rare and unusual events from across the world. The noise that this creates in local information environments is deafening to the minds of most people. We all know about light pollution and sound pollution, but the current state of the news is what I call information pollution. The story of “man bites a dog” is worthless to the readers, and it is a type of perverse entertainment that is nearly impossible to resist. In the internet age, such “news” stories are known as “clickbait.” Ironically, the information on which dog bit whom and where could be very important information for people who are living next to a dangerous pet. However, humans talk with each other, and the people neighboring the dangerous dog will adjust their behavior accordingly. And there is no need for journalists to even write that story.
Clickbait stories are nothing more than meaningless randomness that happens across the world compiled in one place. Human minds are wired to be attracted to the unusual, and it might have been of benefit in our ancestors’ past. In many ways, since the invention of the telegraph, the “news” has made its living selling people the equivalent of informational junk food, lacing it with ads selling people literal junk food, sugar, alcohol, and, in the past, tobacco. Not much has changed with the internet, where we can now access junk facts in industrial quantities.
Indeed, the probability expert Nassim Nicholas Taleb has shown in his collection of works Incerto that the more information you receive, say, on the movement of a stock price, the more confused and emotionally exhausted a person becomes. He shows convincingly that less is more, and that time and perspective help make things clearer. Instead, try checking your portfolio once a month, and you will get a much better understanding of how your investments are doing. Constant updates blind us, just like Postman feared.
Because television news programs, with disjointed stories from across the region, state, or world, joined the entertainment business, newspapers had to adjust through the decades. USA Today became the third largest newspaper in the country for several decades, and it modeled precisely the format of television. The front page often had pictures that resembled the types shown in the corner of the television screen as the viewer was watching. It was a superficial source of information in a world drowning in endless random data. When criticized for lack of investigative journalism, the paper’s editor-in-chief John Quinn stated, “We are not up to undertaking projects of the dimensions needed to win prizes. They don’t give awards for the best investigative paragraph.” Postman was dismayed at this statement. “Here is an astonishing tribute to the resonance of television’s epistemology: in the age of television, the paragraph has become the basic unit of news in print media… As other newspapers join in the transformation, the time cannot be far off when awards will be given for the best investigative sentence.” Postman died in 2003; otherwise, he would have surely updated this statement to “the best investigative tweet.”
As this essay nears 2,000 words, I can hear the words of warning from former journalists, editors, and publishers, getting ever more incredulous as I keep typing. There is a notion in our culture that if you want to have any hope whatsoever to gain a reader’s attention for more than an instant, you have to keep it short and concise. But the more years I write, publish, and get feedback from readers, the more readers feel somewhat insulted if I treat them as stupid or not capable of reading a single article. The average reader can process about 200 words per minute, which means this essay with 2,700 words means a reading time of about 13 minutes. To me, it is insulting to think that people don’t have an attention span of 13 minutes if the subject is of interest and perhaps contains valuable context and nuanced information.
This brings us to a key point about truth and the differing dystopia visions of Orwell and Huxley. As Postman wrote at the beginning of Amusing Ourselves to Death:
“What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.” In 1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us. This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right.”
What has been interesting to observe is that the invention of the internet has indeed tried to make us a trivial culture bent on constant distractions; it has also revitalized deep dives into various subject matters. For example, the printed word, the book, has entered a golden age. There were an estimated 2.2 billion books printed and sold in the world in 2016. While there had been fears in 2010 that digital book sales would be the end of the printed book, physical book sales are still 80% of the market and growing.
Let us also not forget that the biggest name in the long-forum interview genre is Joe Rogan. This is a show that lasts for hours, and Rogan and the guests hold a live conversation with each other with large headphones and giant microphones in their faces. This is not a fancy TV news show with quick, meaningless stories, music, and other distractions (except for ads, but those are easy to skip through). From my perspective, there is a very human desire for authenticity, for nuance, and for the journey to find the truth.
So, thankfully, the world does not appear to be headed into the entertainment-induced stupor that Postman and Huxley feared. While those traits often dominate headlines, there is a desire in humans to really explore a subject, and the printed word, particularly the book, has proven to not only be resilient but also benefit from the ability to connect with readers on specific subjects that was nearly impossible before the dawn of the internet.
I will leave the reader one last quote to ponder by the 19th Century French scholar Ernest Rena:
Logic excludes – by definition – nuances, and . . . truth resides exclusively in the nuances.”
The printed word, long conversations, and long contemplative walks are a much better medium for the pursuit of the truth because they allow space and time so that nuances mixed with context of an issue can rise to the surface. There is a reason the saying “to ruminate” indicates a slow mastication of information. Quick facts, truisms, or common sense are nothing more than a type of simplified, entertaining logic that presents well in social media posts. There will always be a part of the population that desires truth, and so I do not fear the demise of the printed word nor a dystopian future where we have entertained ourselves to death, even if it seems we are attempting just that this election cycle.
– Jordan Hedberg
