The Neil Postman Problem
Monday night, Anjie and I went to Hale's Ales in Ballard to Dick Staub's The Kindlings Muse. If you haven't checked it out, you should. Every Monday night, former Chicago radio personality Dick Staub hosts an evening with experts in various fields of creativity, arts, religion, and politics hoping to foster what he calls "hospitable" conversations about Christian faith and current culture. Podcasts of these conversations can be found at The Kindling's Muse web site.
Monday night's forum was a discussion of the ongoing relevance of Neil Postman's late 1980's book Amusing Ourselves to Death in which Postman argues that mass media culture--especially the visual culture, namely television--is a detriment to rational discourse, especially discourse on a national level. Staub was joined by Image journal editor Gregory Wolfe, local Seattle artist Scott Erickson, and the producer of The Kindling's Muse, Jennie Spohr.
I've been using Postman's book in my classes for the past eight or nine years, which made me curious as to how the conversation would go. Greg Wolfe did his usual brilliant commentary, summarizing Postman's major thesis that everything these days is entertainment, that informed serious discourse is next to impossible in this television age, and that the very medium of television shrinks and distorts no matter how responsibly it is used. For Postman, reading is a higher form of processing information, and even back in those days, he was worried that we were suffering as a culture because we got most of our information from television and celebrity magazines. The idea is that how we process information, and the various technologies that support those processes, impact and change not only what we think, but how we think, how we go about reasoning, and that the sort of reasoning championed by the Enlightment simply cannot be fostered by a mass media barrage of images. Ken Myer argued much the same thing in another great book All God's Children and Blue Suede Shoes.
What was curious was that I kept expecting to hear the pushback to Postman's arguments, that mass media technologies--especially television and the Internet--are too new to really assess how they might impact the intellectual life long term. Or that the access to so much new information on a global scale changes the possibilities and make potential connections almost infinite in scope. And certainly no one ventured the opinion that the rapid, never ending process of juxtaposition of disparate images and the endless assembling of those images into self-constructed stories is a cognitive process every bit as rich and effective as the abstract reasoning championed by the Greeks and everybody else in Western culture since Socrates and Plato.
I look at it like this: let's suppose we conducted a hypothetical case study concerning two children of comparable intelligence and opportunity. From the age of three, let's say that the first child read almost exclusively, hardly ever watching television, and using the Internet for primarily social contact and research. Let's say the other child spends most of his time watching television, reading only when part of an assignment, never for pleasure according to his own choice, and his use of the Internet was not only for social contact and research, but was primarily for entertainment. Now there will no doubt be difference between these two children. What might those differences be? We can hem and haw all day long, but in the end, I think you would be hard pressed to find many parents who would not prefer their children to grow up with the acquired skill sets of the first child rather than the skills sets of the second.
To put it another way, a person can do strong analysis of film and television, be it social, theological, or psychological, but if they only watched film and television, they would never learn how to do such analysis. Is it fair to say that for the engagement of pop culture to be effective, the critic must bring a literary mind to their analysis of the film? I may be wrong here, but does it not take deep rationality to grasp the meanings and truths of post-modern juxtapositions?
Anyway, the rebuttal to Postman's thesis was pretty non-existent on Monday night's panel. There were some general statements like "we shouldn't elevate the word over the image or the image over the word," which to my ear sounded mostly like, "Can't we just all get along?" What was stunning to me was how the panel's comments gave us a sort of case study of Postman's point. Wolfe, the panel expert raised in, steeped in, and championing the culture of reading and literature made reasoned, cogent, entertaining, and illuminating points regarding Postman's thesis (one which he obviously agrees with in great degree), while Erickson and Spohr, both younger and extremely intelligent in their own right, were unable to clearly articulate anything in rebuttal. Actually, Erickson seemed to support Postman, arguing for a deeper kind of art that demands work on the part of the audience (far more so that pop culture requires). He also observed that the television culture does not allow for the kind of silent meditation and interaction with reality required to penetrate the spiritual world deeply. Jennie Spohr was the closest thing to a champion mass media pop culture had, and in the end, didn't really offer any strong reasons why Postman may have gotten it wrong. While earnest and sincere in her statements about good films impacting our lives for the good (she and Staub had just gotten back from the Sundance Festival, where they say what they considered deeply impactful films), she did not really have an answer to why the loss of the historical primacy of the word over the image isn't a bad thing. No doubt there are good reasons to fight for the place of image at the table, but we didn't hear them Monday night.
I tend to agree with Postman that something deep is missing in the national conversation, namely civil reasoning, politics being driven more by sound bytes, spin doctors, and image positioning. On the other hand, I also suspect that those who point us to the relative youth of the technologies of pop culture are right in suggesting that we have no idea what the long term implications might be. I hope they're all good.
But truthfully, I'm not sure--at least on the cultural and intellectual level--that it will be good at all.
But here's the really sticky question: does rich cultural life necessarily lead to rich spiritual life and experience? Would we be willing to give up cultural sophistication in order to be closer to God? At what point does the desire to be more fully human culturally interfere with the journey to God? It's not a rhetorical question. I honestly don't know.
...heading off to read a book...
6:59:15 PM 
