Transcript Amusing Ourselves to Death - Matthew T. Jones Homepage

Amusing Ourselves to Death
Part II
The Age of Show Business
• “What is television? What kinds of
conversations does it permit? What are
the intellectual tendencies it encourages?
What sort of culture does it produce?” (84)
The Age of Show Business
• Attributes of television:
– Television is relentless in its display of
imagery.
– Television requires minimal skill to
comprehend.
– Television is aimed at emotional gratification.
The Age of Show Business
• “But what I am claiming here is not that
television is entertaining but that it has
made entertainment itself the natural
format for the representation of all
experience. […] The problem is not that
television presents us with entertaining
subject matter but that all subject matter is
presented as entertaining, which is
another issue altogether” (87).
The Age of Show Business
• News/current events as entertainment:
– Attractive people and pleasant banter.
– Exciting music.
– Vivid imagery.
– Attractive commercials.
The Age of Show Business
• “The single most important fact about
television is that people watch it… […]. It
is the nature of the medium that it must
suppress the content of ideas in order to
accommodate the requirements of visual
interest; that is to say, to accommodate
the values of show business” (92).
The Age of Show Business
• “Television is our cultures principle mode
of knowing about itself. Therefore – and
this is the critical point – how television
stages the world becomes the model for
how the world is properly to be staged. It
is not merely that on the television screen
entertainment is the metaphor for all
discourse. It is that off the screen the
same metaphor prevails” (92).
The Age of Show Business
• Television has changed the way we
communicate in:
– Courtrooms
– Classrooms
– Operating Rooms
– Board Rooms
– Houses of Worship
“Now…This”
• “‘Now…this’ is commonly used on radio
and television newscasts to indicate that
what one has just heard or seen has no
relevance to what one is about to hear or
see, or possibly to anything one is ever
likely to hear or see” (99).
“Now…This”
• What are the consequences of the
“Now…this” consciousness promoted by
television?
Shuffle Off to Bethlehem
• Two conclusions…
– “The first is that on television, religion, like
everything else, is presented, quite simply
and without apology, as an entertainment.
Everything that makes religion an historic,
profound and sacred human activity is
stripped away; there is no ritual, no dogma,
no tradition, no theology, and above all, no
sense of spiritual transcendence. On these
shows, the preacher is tops. God comes out
as second banana” (117).
Shuffle Off to Bethlehem
• “The second conclusion is that this fact has
more to do with the bias of television than with
the deficiencies of these electronic preachers, as
they are called. […] Most Americans, including
preachers, have difficulty accepting the truth, if
they think about it at all, that not all forms of
discourse can be converted from one medium to
another. It is naïve to suppose that something
that has been expressed in one form can be
expressed in another without significantly
changing its meaning, texture or value” (117).
Shuffle Off to Bethlehem
• Why televised religion doesn’t work:
– It is impossible to consecrate space both on
the screen and surrounding it.
– Television transforms it’s content into
entertainment.
Shuffle Off to Bethlehem
• “There is no great religios leader – from the
Buddah to Moses to Jesus to Mohammed to
Luther – who offered people what they want.
Only what they need. But television is not well
suited to offering people what they need. It is
‘user friendly.’ It is too easy to turn off It is at its
most alluring when it speaks the language of
dynamic visual imagery. It does not
accommodate complex language or stringent
demands” (121).
Reach Out and Elect Someone
• The format of political discourse in
America has been strongly influenced by
the television commercial (today, we can
also add the Email).
• By transforming political discourse from a
rational enterprise to an emotional one,
television (specifically, the television
commercial) has reduced democracy to a
contest between images and not ideas.
Reach Out and Elect Someone
• “By substituting images for claims, the
pictorial commercial made emotional
appeal, not tests of truth, the basis for
consumer decisions” (128).
– In other words: “One can like or dislike a
television commercial…. But one cannot
refute it” (128).
• The shift from product research to market
research.
Reach Out and Elect Someone
• “For on television the politician does not so
much offer the audience an image of
himself, as offer himself as an image of
the audience. And therein lies one of the
most powerful influences of the television
commercial on political discourse” (134).
Teaching as an Amusing Activity
• What’s the matter with Sesame Street?
Teaching as an Amusing Activity
• What’s the matter with Sesame Street?
– “‘Sesame Street’ appeared to be an
imaginative aid in solving the growing problem
of teaching Americans how to read, while, at
the same time, encouraging children to love
school” (143).
Teaching as an Amusing Activity
• What’s the matter with Sesame Street?
– “We now know that ‘Sesame Street’
encourages children to love school only if
school is like ‘Sesame Street.’ Which is to
say, we now know that ‘Sesame Street’
undermines what the traditional idea of
schooling represents (143).”
Teaching as an Amusing Activity
• The world of School
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Social interaction
Critical thinking
Language
Legal requirement
Punishment
Public decorum
Fun as a means to an
end
• The world of TV
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Isolation
Unresponsive to ?s
Images
An act of choice
No risk of punishment
No decorum
Fun as an end in itself
The Huxleyan Warning
• “For in the end, he (Huxley) was trying to
tell us that what afflicted the people in
Brave New World was not that they were
laughing instead of thinking, but that they
did not know what they were laughing
about and why they had stopped thinking”
(163).