Neil Postman—Amusing Ourselves To Death

Neil Postman
Amusing Ourselves To Death
(1984)

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[9] In studying the Bible as a young man, I found intimations of the idea that forms of media favor particular kinds of content and therefore are capable of taking command of a culture. I refer specifically to the Decalogue, the Second Commandment of which prohibits the Israelites from making concrete images of anything. "Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water beneath the earth." I wondered then, as so many others have, as to why the God of these people would have included instructions on how they were to symbolize, or not symbolize, their experience. It is a strange injunction to include as part of an ethical system unless its author assumed a connection between forms of human communication and the quality of a culture. We may hazard a guess that a people who are being asked to embrace an abstract, universal deity would be rendered unfit to do so by the habit of drawing pictures or making statues or depicting their ideas in any concrete, iconographic forms. The God of the Jews was to exist in the Word and through the Word, an unprecedented conception requiring the highest order of abstract thinking. Iconography thus became blasphemy so that a new kind of God could enter a culture. People like ourselves who are in the process of converting their culture from word-centered to image-centered might profit by reflecting on this Mosaic injunction. But even if I am wrong in these conjectures, it is, I believe, a wise and particularly relevant supposition that the media of communication available to a culture are a dominant influence on the formation of the culture's intellectual and social preoccupations.

Speech, of course, is the primal and indispensable medium. It made us human, keeps us human, and in fact defines what human means. This is not to say that if there were no other means of communication all humans would find it equally convenient to speak about the same things in the same way. We know enough about language to understand that variations in the

[10]

structures of languages will result in variations in what may be called "world view." How people think about time and space, and about things and processes, will be greatly influenced by the grammatical features of their language. We dare not suppose therefore that all human minds are unanimous in understanding how the world is put together. But how much more divergence there is in world view among different cultures can be imagined when we consider the great number and variety of tools for conversation that go beyond speech. For although culture is a creation of speech, it is recreated anew by every medium of communication—from painting to hieroglyphs to the alphabet to television. 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 . 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 . Whether we are experiencing the world through the lens of speech or the printed word or the television camera, our media-metaphors classify the world for us, sequence it, frame it, enlarge it, reduce it, color it, argue a case for what the world is like. As Ernst Cassirer remarked:

Physical reality seems to recede in proportion as man's symbolic activity advances. Instead of dealing with the things themselves man is in a sense constantly conversing with himself. He has so enveloped himself in linguistic forms, in artistic images, in mythical symbols or religious rites that he cannot see or know anything except by the interposition of [an] artificial medium.

[11]

What is peculiar about such interpositions of media is that their role in directing what we will see or know is so rarely noticed. A person who reads a book or who watches television or who glances at his watch is not usually interested in how his mind is organized and controlled by these events, still less in what idea of the world is suggested by a book, television, or a watch. But there are men and women who have noticed these things, especially in our own times, Lewis Mumford, for example, has been one of our great noticers. He is not the sort of a man who looks at a clock merely to see what time it is. Not that he lacks interest in the content of clocks, which is of concern to everyone from moment to moment, but he is far more interested in how a clock creates the idea of "'moment to moment." He attends to the philosophy of clocks, to clocks as metaphor, about which our education has had little to say and clock makers nothing at all. "The clock," Mumford has concluded, "is a piece of power machinery whose 'product' is seconds and minutes." In manufacturing such a product, the clock has the effect of disassociating time from human events and thus nourishes the belief in an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences. Moment to moment, it turns out, is not God's conception, or nature's. It is man conversing with himself about and through a piece of machinery he created.

Richard Maltby—Mixed Economies

Richard Maltby
Harmless Entertainment: Hollywood and the Ideology of Consensus
(1983)

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CHAPTER 3

MIXED ECONOMIES

...

[65]

TELEVISION AND THE NEIGHBORHOOD THEATRES

It is not possible to attribute the subsequent developments in the American film industry wholly to the effects of the Paramount decrees, but their influence was of greater consequence in the restructuring of the industry in the post-war period than any other single factor. By comparison, the impact of television on the studios has been exaggerated . Undoubtedly, the main reason for the decline in audience attendance over the period from 1947 to 1962 was the availability of television as an alternative form of entertainment. But during those fifteen years the methods of American production underwent a major reorganization which was only in part the consequence of falling attendance. It is more accurate to suggest that the effects of the Paramount decrees were exacerbated and accelerated by the immediate financial pressures imposed on the studios by audience defections.

[66]

The initial decline in audience attendance in the immediate post-war period had little to do with television. After the peak attendance year of 1946, a fall to pre-war levels was perhaps to be expected, independent of other influences. That natural fall in audience numbers was aggravated by the post-war restructuring of the national economy, as wartime production resources were diverted into the manufacture of consumer goods. Returning servicemen married, started families, and acquired consumer durables, which both reduced the amount of money available for leisure-time spending and tied families to their homes. When box-office receipts began to decline in the 1947 season, there were fewer television sets in America than there were cinemas. Television, indeed, was one of the major beneficiaries of this redirection of the economy into the production of consumer goods, as the movies suffered from its concomitant concentration of financial resources on the nuclear unit, the suburban family home. The growth of television sales, television's enormous penetration of the American market in the ten years after 1948, and the nature of its content intensified the already existent tendency of the family audience to find its entertainment at home rather than going out to the movies to find it. That this tendency was, however, independent of television itself can be seen in the rise of book sales and the growth of the magazine industry in the immediate post- war period.

Most of the misconceptions about the relationship between the American film industry and the society in which it operates stem from the widespread acceptance of the myth of the undifferentiated mass audience. In the discussion of television's effect on audience decline this myth has been particularly important in imposing a simplistic causal relationship where in fact a much more complex process of interaction was taking place. By 1957, the "mass audience" had ceased to exist. An Opinion Research Corporation survey in that year found that only 15 per cent of the American public attended the cinema as often as once a week, and that this group accounted for 62 per cent of total admissions. But if the audience was no longer a mass, it still seemed to be socially heterogeneous. Apart from establishing that 72.2 per cent of cinema-goers were under 30, the survey failed to find significant variation in attendance on the basis of income, education or sex. However, even without precise demographic statistics to locate exactly which sections of the audience stopped going to the cinema, conclusions can be drawn from, for example, the pattern of theatre closures.

[67]

Viewed from a distance, the statistical evidence would appear to indicate a severe general decline in film attendance and in theatre seating in the first post-war decade. There was a drop in seating capacity of 18 per cent, from 12.5 million seats in 1948 to 10.6 million in 1954. In the decade after 1946, 4,120 theatres closed altogether. Another 5,200 theatres were operating at a loss by 1956, while 5,700 were breaking even. Of the 19,000 cinemas operating in the United States, 56 per cent were failing to make a pro-fit, and it was estimated that, as a whole, the exhibition sector was making a net loss of $11.8 million.

Frederic Stuart argues cogently that television was responsible for 80 per cent of the decline in audience attendance between 1948 and 1956, basing his conclusion on a state-by-state study of box-office receipts and theatre closures. While the evidence he presents would appear overwhelming, his statistical data conceal the extent to which the theatre closures constituted a structural reorganization of the exhibition industry, and the way the production companies' response to the Paramount decrees and the threat of television exacerbated the initial decline in overall attendance. The vast majority of the theatres that closed, and a very high proportion of those doing poorly, were small, late-run houses in neighborhood areas, used to changing their programs at least twice a week and gaining their support from a small proportion of the local community who attended regularly. These were the theatres that had made two staple Hollywood products--the family film and the B-feature--profitable concerns. They catered to the middle-class family audiences who had "gone to the movies" once or twice a week, rather than specifically going to see an individual film. But despite their numbers and the size of their audiences, these theatres had not, even in the 1930s, comprised a particularly important source of revenue to distributors, because of the relatively low rentals they were charged. In the post-war economic atmosphere, their share of the market was steadily diminishing. In 1951 the 8,000 small theatres at the bottom of the exhibition ladder produced only 20 per cent of gross domestic rental income.

Even the demise of the small neighborhood theatre cannot be attributed entirely to television. Rather, it was the result of a set of interlocking and cumulative pressures--of which television was one--and has to be seen in the light of other developments in exhibition. ...

Karen Kurczynski—Jorn on Abstraction and Inhumanity

Kurczynski, The Art and Politics of Asger Jorn

...this renewed interest in painting [in the 1950s] had an important social function as a profound rejection of what critics perceived as the threatening aspects of the spread of mass-media technologies mostly experienced on a screen. (196)

...cultural critics who contrasted the material specificity of painting as the ultimate medium of sensory engagement to the alienating effects of the mass media, despite the media's own claims to collapse distance into televisual "immediacy." (197)

Jorn's interest in gesture was about singularity itself, meaning not an especially talented individual but rather the volatile presence of a subjectivity at a particular moment or in relation to such a specific image. ... Jorn's emphasis on irreproducible singularity turned its back on the ideas of technological progress that the historical avant-garde had believed in so strongly before the war. (197)

In 1962, Jorn wrote that the great inhumanity of both the camps and the bomb was their dehumanization of people as a mass: [quoting Jorn directly] "The threatening thing about the German concentration camps as well as the American Hiroshima explosion lies in no way in the atrocities, which are no worse than those happening in many other places on earth. The shattering thing is their colossal and blind mass effect that makes humanity more and more valueless." (197)

Here, then, is a dissent from mass-ification but NOT from abstraction per se. This seems more lucid than lumping the two together, since the concurrent use of the A-word to denote both (1) nonmaterial intellectual images, and (2) visual representations skewed to the edge of recognizability, inevitably clouds more than it clarifies; and so here we have an excellent demonstration of just what is NOT abstract about so-called Abstract Painting, i.e. its materiality...or at least one could choose to parse "immediacy" and "singularity" of "gesture" this way. Abstract art is itself; here KK gives an account of a moment in history wherein Jorn and others (Adorno is mentioned) would/could not see television as simply being itself, but rather fixated on its ability to REproduce, and on a "mass" scale. I suppose the theory of Medium as Message would hold that TV is an "immediate" experience of TV itself, not merely an uncanny reproduction of other content. There's really no Right Answer to that disjunction, just different ways of looking. But looking in BOTH cases is passive, so the fact that the painterlies also had powerful theories of collective (NOT mass!) artisthood really ought to be acknowledged as a factor here. It unifies their theory, makes it whole, and supports their claims above. Mass communication technologies would not be democratized for decades yet, hence there was no such thing as active/generative participation in either the medium or the message of the new mass culture. Hence when KK subsequently points to Jorn's own use of some modern reproductive techniques in his own ongoing work, it must be borne in mind that the analogy to television (which is the specific example used above) breaks down over the question of activity/generativity; also (more so yet) over the lack of mass access to the network of TVs. (The network, by the way, seems to have since become both the medium and the message; if Jorn et al failed to see this coming, it was because they didn't have to see it coming to know that anyone could paint but not just anyone could broadcast.) And as for "mak[ing] humanity more and more valueless," few developments have contributed more to that process than the networks by which us humans have been forced to learn how many of us there are and how much we all suck. The media theorists carried the day as soon as the mass- became able to generate media content as easily as they could smear fingerpaint; but this has indeed made everyone more interchangeable, hence "valueless," than ever before, and it has not actually brought us either literally or figuratively closer together.

[from a notebook, 2018]