The spread of disinformation that is palpable on social media can be traced to a much earlier period in history, back when the news could only be communicated through newspapers. In the beginning, there was a high standard of quality that was expected of them, but eventually newspapers came to depend not on the quality or usefulness of their news, but on how much and at what speed they provided it.
James Bennett of the New York Herald boasted that his paper contained 79,000 words of telegraphic content in the first week of 1848. Information is important if it creates possibilities for action. In any communication environment, input (what you are informed of) exceeds output (the possibilities of action based on information). But telegraphy and other mediums in the future made this relationship between information and action more remote and abstract. For the first time in history, people were faced with the problem of information glut – their social and political potency had simultaneously been diminished.
You may get a sense of what this means by asking yourself another series of questions:
What steps do you plan to take to reduce the conflict in the Middle East? Or the rates of inflation, crime and unemployment? What are your plans for preserving the environment or reducing the risk of nuclear war? What do you plan to do about NATO, OPEC, the CIA, affirmative action, and the monstrous treatment treatment of the Baha’is in Iran? I shall take the liberty of answering for you: You plan to do nothing about them. You may, of course, cast a ballot for someone who claims to have some plans, as well as the power to act. But this you can do only once every two or four years by giving one hour of your time, hardly a satisfying means of expressing the broad range of opinions you hold. Voting, we might even say, is the next to last refuge of the politically impotent.
The photograph, unlike words and sentences, does not give us an idea or concept about the world. A photograph by itself cannot deal with the unseen or the abstract. It does not speak of “man”, but of a man – it deals with the here and now exclusively.
Television has become the command center of our actions, through it, we learn about what movies to see, telephone system to use and radio programs to listen to.
As a small, ironic example of this point, consider this: In the past few years, we have been learning that the computer is the technology of the future. We are told that our children will fail in school and be left behind in life if they are not “computer literate.” We are told that we cannot run our businesses, or compile our shopping lists, or keep our checkbooks tidy unless we own a computer. Perhaps some of this is true. But the most important fact about computers and what they mean to our lives is that we learn about all of this from television. Television has achieved the status of “meta-medium”—an instrument that directs not only our knowledge of the world, but our knowledge of ways of knowing as well.
Postman’s argument isn’t just about television, but about new ways of communicating information, which involves less text and more images.
Clearly, TV has replaced by the internet and smartphones. If we were to consider Postman’s argument in our context, the more images and the less written words this new virtual world of ours contains, the less we understand about what’s actually happening.
The Medium is the Message
The Medium is the Message was written in 1964, and the ideas in it seem to become more relevant in time. McLuhan’s thesis is that the medium through which we communicate, whether TV or Radio or Newspaper, creates an entire industry around it that we are not aware of: a new way of living, and a new way of thinking.
It is not that the TV is merely transmitting ideas– the existence of TV creates a ripple effect through society. People’s reading habits change, the way they think changes, what they choose to discuss (events happening far away), and even what types of emotions they choose to feel (anger, outrage). The TV format, with its constraint due to advertising considerations, influences how people pay attention and for how long.
The counter intuitive idea here is that the message itself is basically meaningless – what really matters is the technological medium, how we interface with it, and how it affects society.
I bring forward these quixotic uses of television to ridicule the hope harbored by some that television can be used to support the literate tradition. Such a hope represents exactly what Marshall McLuhan used to call “rear-view mirror” thinking: the assumption that a new medium is merely an extension or amplification of an older one; that an automobile, for example, is only a fast horse, or an electric light a powerful candle.
Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman
For Postman, this is a mistake because it misunderstands how new mediums redefine the meaning of public discourse. it isn’t that television (or smartphones) extend or amplify culture – it attacks it. A media based on pictures is a continuation of only one thing – the tradition that began by the telegraph and photograph in the mid-nineteenth century, not by the printing press in the fifteenth century.
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