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
