BOOK CLUB: Amusing Ourselves to Death - Part 2 (Patreon)

[Pictured: A 'Far Side' comic featuring a man sitting in front of a computer screen displaying "FATAL ERROR." The man is thinking, "Oh come on - how fatal can it be?" while the Grim Reaper enters the room behind him.]We're out the other side of yet another philosophical literary tunnel and this time, I think it's finally taught us enough to fix the world. I look forward to the global peace that we will collectively bring about in the upcoming fortnight. Also looking forward to when everyone stops messaging me questions about what happened to CJ, nothing happened to CJ, CJ is alive, stop asking me if CJ is not alive because they are alive because nothing happened to CJ.Let's talk for a little bit about Postman's usage of 'disinformation' in this book. His definitional passage comes from pages 107-8.

[Opinions people have today] are opinions of a quite different order from eighteenth- or nineteenth-century opinions. It is probably more accurate to call them emotions rather than opinions, which would account from the fact they change from week to week, as the pollsters tell us. What is happening here is that television is altering the meaning of "being informed" by creating a species of information that might properly be called disinformation. I am using this word almost in the precise sense in which it is used by spies[...] It means misleading information—misplaced, irrelevant, fragmented or superficial information—information that creates the illusion of knowing something but which in fact leads one away from knowing[...] I am saying we are losing our sense of what it means to be well informed. Ignorance is always correctable. But what shall we do if we take ignorance to be knowledge?

Here we have the beating heart of Amusing Ourselves to Death, the inevitable conclusion of its worldview.Television as a medium spreads disinformation, not by malice, but via the inevitable causality of its presentation format. People absorb disinformation through television and believe it to be true information, this disconnect then insulating audiences further away from rational and 'real' ways of knowing, until the figure of Truth is buried completely underneath soundbites and summaries. The hypothetical, completely disinformed, human of this reality is Joni Thrombey from Knives Out: "I read a tweet about a New Yorker article about you."This degenerative process, and the concept of disinformation, is what Postman devotes the entire second half of his book to portending. And he does a good job. My man's only solve might be "look around this burning house and notice it's in flames," but he does a hell of a job pulling the fire alarm.The society of Postman's augury is based on a value system of objective reality. News reporting and entertainment melting into each other is primarily terrifying if you believe in the inherent good of news being reported in a clinical, unbiased, sense—while this is complicated by Postman's contradictory disdain for anything other than very very local news (pragmatically useful news), it's still rooted in desiring an 'untainted' experience of truth that is most accurate when emotionless and untouched. Something happened, and it is possible to understand utterly what that thing is, and we should strive to relate this information from one person to another without a single aesthetic device, human error, or other emotional complication.Can you do that? Can you think of a way to phrase something as simple as, "work was fine," that doesn't even suggest a story?Amusing Ourselves to Death is a classic book that forecast the future so precisely that it even predicted the complete trajectory of Bill Nye the Science Guy's career. It is so incisive and brutally accurate in some places that asking it to further generate solutions feels insensitive, like asking an Olympic weightlifter to carry you home after their gold medal ceremony. Or, as Postman put it, "this is an instance in which asking the questions is sufficient." (161)I'm willing to pick up the work of curing what he's diagnosed. So, my personal response to the bleakness within these pages?Directly facing the impossibility of Postman's enlightenment-era halcyon days frees us from a future of scavenging through variously disguised irrelevancies and empowers us to determine what stories are accurate, consistent, useful, and therefore true. In cases of unalignment, how do we make compelling the true but uninteresting? Since everything is entertainment now, what narratives verifiably lead to good health, meaningful relationships, compassionate societies, and great art?Empiricism is dead. Long reign the pragmatists.---------------------The Age of Show Buisness"Each technology has an agenda of its own. It is, as I have suggested, a metaphor waiting to unfold." (85) A particularly clever iteration of an argument he's been sharpening over and over."... one is reminded of George Bernard Shaw's remark on his first seeing the glittering neon signs of Broadway and 42nd Street at night. It must be beautiful, he said, if you cannot read." (86) Annotated in the margins of my copy: SCREAM, with SCREAM underlined."A news show, to put it plainly, is a format for entertainment, not for education, reflection, or catharsis." (88) I'm very interested in the inclusion of 'catharsis' here and do wish Postman pursued that notion further. Nowadays I contend that news shows can be singularly focused on delivering a disinformative false catharsis, the tidiness of which is part of the cushioning entertainment framework."Television is our culture's principal mode of knowing about itself." (92) Raw as fuck thing to say.---------------------"Now... This""['Now... this'] adds to our grammar a new part of speech, a conjunction that does not connect anything to anything but does the opposite: separates everything from everything." (99) BARS? BARS!"What has music to do with the news? Why is it there? It is there, I assume, for the same reason music is used in theater and films—to create a mood and provide a leitmotif for the entertainment. If there were no music[...] viewers would expect something truly alarming, possibly life-altering. But as long as the music is there as a frame for the program, the viewer is comforted to believe that there is nothing to be greatly alarmed about..." (102-3) Here encapsulates a schism between Postman and myself. He refuses to give ground to even the smallest aesthetic consideration, scorning background music as one step away from a baby soother, when I find additional elements to set tone a streamlining of what programs are trying to convey so that more time can be devoted to the actual story. There's an insulting way to do this, absolutely, that looks down on your audience's intelligence, but I see this as efficiency rather than condescension."Film footage justifies itself, as every television producer well knows." (103) Wonderful/succinct/real. 'Just watch the video!' persists today, the context of that video be damned."I should go so far as to say that embedded in the surrealistic frame of a television news show is a theory of anticommunication, featuring a type of discourse that abandons logic, reason, sequence and rules of contradiction. In aesthetics, I believe the name given to this theory is Dadaism; in philosophy, nihilism; in psychiatry, schizophrenia." (105) Dada is fascinating. If you've heard of Duchamp's urinal (which might cameo in Subjectivity In Art, I dunno I haven't watched it), that's Dada. This movement was personality forming for baby Ellen reading Grant Morrison's Doom Patrol for the first time. Yes Dada revels in incoherence, but motivated incoherence, political incoherence, hysterical emotional confrontation on the front lawn incoherence that's trying to find the string tying together all things. It's exactly like Wendy Williams.---------------------Shuffle Off to Bethlehemwhatever if im being Fully honestAnother case of Postman being so ahead of the curve on an observation ("Engagement based technological emotional parasocial media attracting cultlike devotional followers getting irreplaceable religious intensity from a closed circuit feedback loop with someone who's only accountable to their banker, is bad actually,") that the scholars following in his footsteps have since eclipsed him.---------------------Reach Out and Elect Someone"Because the television commercial is the single most voluminous form of public communication in our society, it was inevitable that Americans would accommodate themselves to the philosophy of television commercials. By 'accommodate,' I mean that we accept them as a normal and plausible form of discourse." (130) I think this is changing! Zoomers and UBlock Origin enjoyers have had it up to the ear!"It is difficult to say exactly when politicians began to put themselves forward, intentionally, as sources of amusement." (132) The instant the public swapped over to your definition of credibility, babygirl. As silly as it may sound, I understand it being hard to believe in the sincerity of a man you've never seen laugh after the technology makes the absence of laughter public-relationally notable."To understand how image politics works on television, we may use as an entry point the well-known commercial from which this chapter takes the first half of its title. I refer to the Bell Telephone romances, created by Mr. Steve Horn..." (134) Yeah the Bell Telephone romances of course we've all seen those.---------------------Teaching as an Amusing ActivityThis chapter delivers the one-two punches of what I've been privately thinking of as "Postman's Last Week Tonight rant," and the spectral forefather of a "goddamn your safe space, college campuses are out-of control," rant. Liberal elites who want their cookies. Alright man, we all hate Sesame Street, I don't think this one needed an entire chapter.[Immediately becoming serious] but obviously we all hate fictionalizations of news stories that do not adequately contextualize themselves and misrepresent actual people for narrative purpose without ethically disclosing such alterations were made and then billing themselves as basically documentaries so your sister watches two episodes of that Elizabeth Holmes thing and tries to talk to you about it as if she was in the Carryrou podcast mines with you and you're like okay but I told you to get the book and she's like whatever Amanda Seyfried is great in it and you say Amanda SEYFRIED? From JENNIFER'S BODY? and she says what's that and you're like WHAT'S THAT?!?!I believe Sesame Street and its fellows are sinister primarily in the removal they facilitate between a teacher and their subject matter. Children may have a harder time learning something in class because it wasn't taught to them by the teacher. It was taught by Bill Nye. Talking to their teacher about what they don't understand has an additional relationship barrier now: no rapport exists between the two parties, and the teacher might not even know what the video said, how it explained or what it covered particularly.I do wish Postman went into this, but I'm hardly shocked about a college professor ambivalent on pedagogy.---------------------The Huxleyan WarningReview chapter with no new ideas, which is form typical, but a ton of delightful one liners, which is Postman typical. He landed the plane alright. He closed the portal over New York."The problem, in any case, does not reside in what people watch. The problem is in that we watch. For I believe it may fairly be said that we have yet to learn what television is. And the reason is that there has been no worthwhile discussion, let alone widespread public understanding, of what information is and how it gives direction to a culture." (160) 🔥🔥🔥! The avalanche of questions following this paragraph all the way down the rest of the page really struck me as powerful without being accusative, and clever—discussion questions for the reader to mull over at the end of the book.---------------------So there you go everyone. Sign up for a newspaper and unsubscribe from CJ The X dot YouTube dot com before the damage can no longer be undone.In sad news, there will be no book club next month. We're breaking for a brief autumnal hibernation recuperation situation before getting back into it in October. Nobody is allowed to read ANY books for the next 27 days and I promise you, traitors will be identified.Our program wishes a good night to all the viewers at home. And now, this —