Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business by Neil Postman (reread)

            I decided to reread Amusing Ourselves to Death, which I ranked as the third-best book I read in 2023. I thought it was similarly amazing this time around. Above all, re-reading Amusing Ourselves to Death made me think of the modern era as an age of performance. It’s not a direct conclusion from the book itself, which is focused on the negative effects of TV on public discourse, but I was trying to think of how this book would be updated for the modern era, as I do for all the media books, and what I landed on is that the era we live in is dominated by is a need to perform. That contrasts with Postman’s analysis in the 1980s because he was focused on the negative effects of consumption, but I think the bigger issue today is the effect that constant content creation has on its creators.

            As many of the authors I have read in the “media” unit have detailed, the rise of writing created much more discourse, and the rise of typography amplified it. Postman detailed how the telegraph flooded the world with information, and like Baudrillard in Simulacra and Simulation, discussed how the ratio between information and meaning was becoming bigger and bigger. With the development of photography, it became possible to capture an image, and by the twentieth century, it was possible to capture so many images that people created illusions of moving images: film. By the end of the twentieth century, digital cameras proliferated, and editing tools developed to the point that Hollywood editors could create whole narratives without writers, leading to the development of reality TV. In the last 20 years, two developments have brought us to the present day: the rise of cell phones that place a video camera in everyone’s pocket, and the rise of social media, which gives everyone the ability to access whoever the algorithms let them reach.

            The result is that by 2025, people are performing more than ever. “Performing” is what happens when someone is in front of strangers, and is aware that the stranger’s attention is on them, especially their eyes. In a pre-writing world, occasions to perform would have been rare relative to today, and held by few people. While the average person living 6,000 years ago in modern-day Kansa probably interacted with lots of strangers, those performances were live, and could only be transmitted by word of mouth to others. Basically, if you slipped on a pile of camel shit in ancient Sumeria, nobody saw it but the people who laid eyes on it. Nobody heard about it except the people they knew, and who they knew, and who they knew and so on until everyone lost interest. Today, a video of that could be seen by a billion people in days.

            With the invention of writing, more things could be recorded, but the effect was minimal on the average person’s performance. The greatest effect of writing on performance was for the writer, and that author’s performance was minimal. No one could see him or her in the act of writing or editing, and the reader could only get the thoughts the writer put down to paper, parchment, or papyrus. Few were readers, and few were writers. The printing press enhanced this effect, but writing was and is hardly ever a performance. Reading aloud certainly was, and it was a more formalized act.

            With the rise of film, some people took on the job of performer, and became actors on screen, not just on stage. But with the rise of video, especially the video that can be shot and posted in seconds on social media, all of us have become amateur performers. Photos are a lesser form of video. Right now, millions of people are swiping right and left on apps in which they are judged by their photographs they’ve taken of themselves. For the first time ever, individuals are being viewed by thousands, if not millions, and we are all aware of it. We are surrounded by phone cameras, security cameras, and all the little sensors and X-rays and body scanners that may not see us, but know we are there. The people most embodying this social change are reality stars and influencers who, if they were credited in a film, would “act” as themselves in each performance.

            The result is that we are all learning that what is not written or caught on camera is not real, and so we all learn to perform. “Pics or it didn’t happen.” Now that we are all performing, we are more obsessed than ever with people who do it professionally, and rightly so. Professional actors and influencers and content creators are the only people who get the ultimate validation from their performance—not just the likes and comments of friends, family, and connections, but followings. Their ratios of following to followers are evidence of their value, and can even be how they make their money.

            On the other hand, the internet allows people to live out who they genuinely are like never before. Thanks to the interconnection of people around the globe, people can learn that they aren’t alone in their thoughts that would have once made them unique, if not a pariah, in a small disconnected community years ago. The biggest example of this is probably with sexual orientation, where people have been exposed to the alternative point of view—that it’s okay to be gay—that was suppressed for centuries in most places. Yet even when people are able to be their genuine selves, there is always a background understanding that they have to perform their identity. Just look at people on the internet who criticize bisexual women in relationships with men, because they are not “performing” their sexuality, or at someone who listens to Nirvana grilling someone else on their favorite album to prove they’re properly performing their fandom.

            What is the effect of this performance on all of us? First of all, it creates anxiety. The consequences of our actions are greater than ever. In a pre-industrial world, the average person lived in a community, which had a local sanction and forgiveness for misconduct. Today we live in a society where it is necessary to record individuals’ actions on a permanent record, a no-fly list, or a background check. Now, mistakes are permanent, and accessible by all. Individuals have more life choices than ever thanks to capitalism, and thanks to social media, the outcomes of those choices are broadcastable to the entire world. Now, your social position isn’t just decided by your choices (for better and for worse), but the outcome is more public than ever before. I can go look up anyone from high school to see where they work on LinkedIn (or if they even have a LinkedIn), and that search result reveals whatever they perform on the website.

            Additionally, constant performing requires little lies: smiling for a photo when you weren’t really happy, editing pictures on social media to look a certain way, saying things on dating apps that you would never say to someone face-to-face. There are more job interviews now than 100 years ago—people interview for many jobs and interview several rounds for the same job. At some point, these little lies obscure the truth not only to the audience of this performance but to the performers themselves. Combine this with modern social mobility, and contrast with the life of the medieval peasant. The peasant’s life was materially much worse than almost anyone’s life in modern-day America. But the peasant knew who he was. The modern person may know who they are, but they may not. It is pretty damn common to hear about a “journey of self-discovery,” which often involves a phone detox, or travel to somewhere else. Self-discovery requires a detox from performance. Because the performer who acts every day can’t be sure where the role ends and their true identity begins.

            Performance also leads to a degradation of social trust, because all of us performers can’t be sure how much everyone else is performing. Do we actually like that movie? Or that song? Or that drink? Or are they performing? This line is especially blurred in product placement advertising on podcasts and social media, where influencers hawk a product as a part of their normal influencing. But in our daily lives, we also wonder, “am I enjoying this restaurant because the food tastes good, or am I enjoying it because the reviews were good and the prices were high?” “Am I experiencing pleasure, or performing the experience of pleasure?”

            Performance becomes a necessary adaptation to the mediated world we live in. Modern people are exposed to more stimuli than any humans who ever lived, and our performances in response to those stimuli determine our social relationships. We must have responses to pieces of news, new movies, and college football scores. In the non-social media world, everyone forms their social identity by telling others how they don’t like Kanye West because of his anti-Semitic remarks, or how they vape because they don’t care about the health warnings from the CDC. This helps form social identity. But the same performances also become necessary on social media, where everyone is open to criticism for what they say and don’t say by large groups. To speak is to open yourself up to criticism for what you say, and to not speak is to open yourself up to criticism for what you didn’t say. “Your silence is deafening.” The expectation to perform means that everyone is now expected to have an opinion on the latest conflict in the Middle East. And whereas it used to be in bad taste to offer an uninformed opinion, silence is more likely to be construed in the harshest way possible.

            Anyway, after that rant, I’ll talk about the book itself and what I picked up the second time around.

            I really got a lot out of the focus on the different between a world of the word and world of the image this time around, maybe because I’ve read McLuhan. I thought it was interesting that when Judaism pioneered monotheism, God was a God of the Word, and the religion was especially hostile toward idol worship, iconography based on the image. That’s a pretty fundamental idea: that we should worship words not images. And it is interesting that that ideal is under threat today as society turns more and more towards the image and away from the word. But the image isn’t all bad is Postman’s view. He argues, citing McLuhan, that the television is not good for spreading hate. And there is some vague correlation immediately obvious there. I can think that the TV was at its greatest power in the USA from the 1950s until the 2000s, which was a relatively must more domestically peaceful time than before or after. There were obviously a lot of virulent political debates, but it seems like the polarization that was already growing in the 1990s really took off during the Obama presidency.

            I like the paragraph where Postman writes, citing Richard Hofstadter, that “America was founded by intellectuals,” and is unique among states for being founded by intellectuals. I like that because there’s a lot of talk about how America has an anti-intellectual current, and while that may be true, the origins of the Constitution are definitely in intellectuals. As Hofstadter wrote, “The Founding Fathers were sages, scientists, men of broad cultivation, many of them apt in classical learning, who used their wide reading in history, politics and law to solve the exigent problems of their time.”

            Despite enjoying the pro-intellectual take, I think that the book takes on a pretentious, elitist tone at times. Postman is really scolding people for watching the news, seeing it as a less-valuable medium. And while I basically agree with him, I think he is a little overly harsh. He recounts the story of the Lincoln-Douglas debate to chide modern-day Americans for not having the attention span to sit through eight hours of debate. And while I agree that the modern presidential debate is pathetic by comparison, I also think there are a lot more entertaining things to do today than there were in 1854 Peoria, Illinois, and that level of attention span will never return. That said, it is fascinating to think that they just went all day long. Something interesting that Postman didn’t live to see was the rise of the podcast. That shows that there is still an audience for long form discussion, just not on TV. People will listen to podcasts for hours, and that is probably the basis of a new Lincoln-Douglas debate. Even better, podcasts are now videotaped, not for TV, but for short reels of seconds to a couple of minutes. People will watch several of these, and then often download the podcast. I don’t think most people are watching the whole videos, but the videos serve as a way to tease the podcast content. I am optimistic that podcasts are a sort of “cure” to the dumbing down of TV discourse, where thinking on camera doesn’t make for good TV.

            I continue to find Postman’s analysis of typography versus telegraphy really interesting Typography increased mankind’s ability to analyze information, since people could write, publish, and disseminate long treatises about topics with type. And without having to be a town crier, they could have a crowd focus on just their words, while the rhetorician had to perform his craft. Typography increased analysis relative to information, while telegraphy did the opposite. The telegraph was for short messages delivered fast, which could only be used for the news, not deep analysis of the news.

            Something interesting that Postman says about TV is that it has become a “command center” medium, determining which other media we would consume. That is to say, in 1985, when Postman wrote the book, people would decide what books to read and what music to listen to based on what they saw on TV. The same would be true today of social media/the internet. TV retains some relevance, but the most relevant medium is the internet, in no small part because it determines what other media users consume. Another way the internet has assumed the role of TV is in the way it fulfils Postman’s first commandment of TV: “Thou shalt have no prerequisites.” To go viral, just like to get on TV, a video needs to obtain a wide audience. That means it can’t rely on any base level of knowledge except the lowest common denominator. Of course, the most ad money goes to what is most viral, so, just like on TV, it is most profitable to serve the lowest common denominator.

            One last note that I don’t recall thinking so much of last time is on educational TV. Postman is very critical of educational TV such as Sesame Street because in his view, it seeks to answer, “what would look good on TV?” before answering “what do children need to learn?” It’s just like in schools. Teachers and professors, in order to keep the attention of their classes, try to teach them things that are amusing¸ rather than things that are entertaining. That’s how little kids end up learning so much about dinosaurs, which is all totally useless knowledge. Topics like marine biology are interesting to kids, but not that useful, and are mainly taught as a form of entertainment rather than learning. On the other hand, there is a lot of time in life to be bored, and I can’t be too mad about things being entertaining.

Miscellaneous:

• One of my favorite passages of the book is this one, which is one big reason why I love books:

Imagine what you would think of me, and this book, if I were to pause here, tell you that I will return to my discussion in a moment, and then proceed to write a few words on behalf of United Airlines or the Chase Manhattan Bank. You would rightly think that I had no respect for you and certainly, no respect for the subject.

• “There can be no liberty for a community which lacks the means by which to detect lies.” – Walter Lippmann

Simulacra and Simulation by Jean Baudrillard, translated by Sheila Faria Glaser

    Another challenging book. I had originally planned to read this in French, but after failing miserably with Society and the Spectacle in French, I figured English was better for this. That was a good choice because I could barely read this in English. 

    Here is what I think I understand. Simulation is getting more and more important these days (1980 when the book was written). Simulation is different from dissimulation. Dissimulation hides something that is there, while simulation creates something that is not there. Simulation is different from representation. In representation, the sign/symbol is equal to the real thing. Simulation negates the sign as having any value. I don't really know what they means, but it creates four phases of "the image."

• The image is the reflection of a profound reality;
• The image masks and denatures a profound reality;
• The image masks the absence of a profound reality;
• The image has no relation to any reality whatsoever: it is its own pure simulacrum.

And once again, I am winging this and did not understand this, but I think that those four things, in order, are representation, dissimulation, simulation, and simulacrum. I found an example on the internet that may or may not be accurate:

My understanding is that Baudrillard is identifying a way that society is becoming more and more rootless and alienated from reality. The modern world is a fake world where we have fewer and fewer real, personal experiences, and more and more mediated experiences: mediated through technology. Right there in the name social media you can see it: our socialization is not personal, but is mediated by both the hardware of the phone/computer and the software of the app used for socialization. While in the 1800s the media was a letter, today it is facetime. We might be getting better ways to mediate social interaction, but the result has been an increase in mediated social interaction, and an increase in the tolerable distance for people to live apart from each other. I think it is sort of the opposite of what McLuhan said about an implosion when it comes to close relations. Technology has imploded the world into close interaction through social media, but exploded close relations into living further apart and interacting less than ever. I have no doubt that the average person today lives way further than the average person in 1425 from their friends, family, and loved ones than ever before, and yet it able to interact over social media with people on different continents. This is one part of what Trow was saying in Within the Context of No Context, about how the medium space has disappeared. That also interacts with the Bowling Alone and "third place" discourse.

    Something very interesting is that Baudrillard mentioned the Loud family from the show American Family, which I learned about in the Emily Nussbaum book, Cue the Sun. This unit on the media has been my first real success on these reading units. It feels like one cohesive course as each book references the others previously published. In the same vein, Baudrillard says that we are no longer the "society of the spectacle," thanks to reality TV--now there is a feedback loop. The result, as I understand it, of the advent of reality TV is that there is no more distinction between the real and the fake in the world of art. The participation of the audience is huge now--someone who watches Survivor becomes a contestant on Survivor, bringing their experiences as a viewer to their experience as a contestant performing the art. Then, that same person goes back to being a viewer of the show, but now viewing the art form with the experience of the contestant. Then, the same person starts a podcast, a new art form in a different media, where they criticize and comment on the next season of Survivor, as other viewers/listeners take in that new content, and perhaps become contestants themselves. At this point, can anyone really say that Survivor is just the show that airs on Wednesdays at 8pm Eastern on CBS? I would say that the fandom is now just as big a part of the show as the contestants themselves, because there is no way to separate the two. The same goes for the writing of TV shows and movie series. George RR Martin can sit on the internet and hear all the fan theories about the next Song of Ice and Fire book before he has finished it. He has been able to see the mass reaction to the end of the TV show that adapted his book, and change the ending of the book if he wants to. The artist-to-viewer/reader/listener feedback loop moves faster now than the actual publication of the art.

    

    One other concept I thought was interesting from the book is the discussion of surveillance. Baudrillard writes that surveillance cameras on the wall don't just surveil by videotaping, but surveil by signaling to the shopper at the supermarket that she is being videotaped, even if she is not. Some stores go even further (and I am doubtful this existed in 1980) by videotaping the entrance of the store and showing the captured footage in real time on a TV screen, so a shopper can see herself being taped. Moreover, Baudrillard writes that billboards and ads surveil their viewers, because even though they don't record anything, they inform the viewer that she is not the only viewer, and that she is in a public space, where this ad is meant to reach others. Today it goes even further. Ads have entered the personal sphere, making it a less private one, even more than in Baudrillard's day. Today, the majority of ads we see are on our phones, the most intimate personal objects we have, that we interact with every day. Advertisers are able to send us ads even there, reminding us that nowhere are we truly private or out of the reach of capitalist forces, which need advertising to convince people to buy things they never needed. But on the other hand, lots of the products being advertised are very useful!

    So that's the good part of the book. Then it gets very weird. Just like Society and the Spectacle, it gets all into Marxism that makes no sense whatsoever to me. There is also a CRAZY chapter about a book called Crash, which is apparently all about people who get off on car crashes. That chapter came out of nowhere. I was appalled. He just heavily quoted the book and it was the nastiest stuff I have ever read. Ever. It read like Baudrillard read that shit and now he was making us read it too. I guess it made some impact on him. I could not make heads or tails of it except that it was shocking and gross. A masterwork of nasty work.

    I'll end by saying this was an interesting book. It was short, but could have been shorter without all the weird stuff in the end. It made me think though, so in my mind, that's a good book.

Miscellaneous:

• This line cracked me up, this drama queen: "The contrast with the absolute solitude of the parking lot--a veritable concentration camp--is total." That's somebody who has lost his car in the lot and spent hours looking for it lol.

 

 

Spring Snow by Yukio Mishima, translated by Michael Gallagher

    This was sort of a random book I picked and it was very interesting. I started it and absolutely loved it and then I looked up the author and I just thought what the heck. This guy was a psycho. He tried to stage a coup and committed seppuku? It sounds like he went insane at the end of his life with radical nationalism and this book was a part of it, letting him imagine a time at the height of imperial reverence in Japan. He was also apparently a closeted homosexual, something that is clear from his descriptions of men in the books.

    But he has a really beautiful way of writing, and clearly likes to write about beautiful things and beautiful people. Here are a couple passages I liked from the book:

The butler came in to announce that the carriage was waiting. The horses neighed and their breath flared white from their nostrils, to swirl up into the black, wintry sky. Kiyoaki enjoyed seeing horses proudly displaying their strength in winter, when their usual musky smell was fainter and their hooves rang clearly on the frozen ground. On a warm spring day, a galloping horse was only too clearly a sweating animal of flesh and blood. But a horseracing through a snowstorm became one with the very elements; wrapped in the whirling blast of the north wind, the beast embodied the icy breath of winter.

Iinuma had plenty of time to reflect later, but very often a man's whole life alters course because of a moment's hesitation. That instant is like a fold made down the middle of a sheet of paper. In it, the underside becomes the upmost, and what was once visible is hidden forever.

One hot sultry night, as Kiyoaki was settling into an uneasy sleep, he began to dream. It was quite unlike his previous experiences. If one flounders in the shallows of sleep, wading where the water is tepid and full of all sorts of flotsam that has come in from deeper water to pile up with the land debris in a tangled heap, one is liable to slash one's feet.

Her lovely white hand grew more and more emaciated until she could no longer move it. It lay there as cold and still as a single moonbeam coming in through a window.

    Maybe the biggest theme in the book is the contrast of the East and West, with Japanese embrace of the West usually being considered as an indication of decadence or weakness. In this book all about aristocrats, the best things are the Japanese things. I think that when Mishima writes his flowery descriptions, he focuses them on aspects of Japanese culture and Japanese people's thoughts, usually using Westernness just as a marker of someone's personality. Our principal characters in the book, Kiyoaki and Satoko, don't really do the Western imitation thing that other aristocrats do in the book. Similarly, devotion to the Emperor is a huge theme. All the characters are totally dedicated to protecting the Emperor, even if it means hiding things from the Imperial Family, because it is better to hide the truth from them so that scandal never touches them.

    One thought I had reading about Mishima is that he must have regretted not serving in the Japanese military in World War Two. I read that he faked Typhus to get out of it, and this book makes me think he regretted it, since Kiyoaki, the protagonist, also fakes illness at one point, and looks wistfully at the soldiers he sees. And then Mishima became an ultranationalist later in his life and then committed seppuku. If Kiyoaki is autobiographical, Mishima doesn't seem like a pleasant guy. The protagonist is conniving, cynical, and cruel.