Actually, there is this generation gap between those who grew up from birth
watching TV, and those of us who did not. I was eleven years old when my uncle,
who lived in the apartment above us, bought the first TV in our family, a black
and white, 12 inch screen TV. We went upstairs to watch it on Saturday and
Sunday nights. We got our own TV when I was thirteen. But the programs that I
watched and the amount of time spent watching, were very different from my
daughters' TV experience. Their view of life was formed by TV watching. Their
personalities were influenced by all that those commercials communicated about
values. And although my older daughter reads books, it's only for
entertainment. She doesn't read nonfiction books or magazine articles or even
newspapers. And she has a law degree. Their view of international relations and
our government comes solely from wat they see on TV. There was a short period
of time a few years ago when Debbie was having to commute a longer distance to
work and she stumbled on Democracy Now on the car radio, became interested, and
listened each morning. But then the office changed location, the travel time
shortened drastically, and that was the end of Democracy Now for her, as far as
I know. For answers to any questions that arise in conversation, people turn to
their smart phones where Google has taken the place of God and the Ten
Commandments.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Monday, February 18, 2019 4:48 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Cc: carjar82 <carjar82@xxxxxxxxx>
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Worshipping the Electronic Image
Maybe there's something to the silly SciFi story where the last man and woman
are sitting side by side, each with their own special head gear that enables
them to live in their own make believe world, while these bug eyed monsters are
peering in the apartment window.
On 2/18/19, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Worshipping the Electronic Image
Mr. Fish / Truthdig
Donald Trump, like much of the American public, is entranced by
electronic images. He interprets reality through the distortions of
digital media. His decisions, opinions, political positions,
prejudices and sense of self are reflected back to him on screens. He
views himself and the world around him as a vast television show with
himself as the star. His primary concerns as president are his
ratings, his popularity and his image. He is a creature—maybe the
poster child—of the modern, post-literate culture, a culture that critics
such as Marshall McLuhan, Daniel Boorstin, James W.
Carey and Neil Postman warned us about.
It is not, as some have suggested, merely that Trump speaks at the
level of a seventh-grader or that he harkens back to a preliterate
oral culture. He embodies the incoherence of the modern digital age,
filled with sudden shifts from subject to subject, a roller-coaster
ride of emotional highs and lows punctuated with commercials. There is
nonstop stimulation. Seldom does anything occupy our attention for
more than a few seconds. Nothing has context. Images overwhelm words.
We are perpetually confused, but always entertained. We barely
remember what we saw or heard a few minutes earlier.
This is by design of the elites who manipulate us.
“It is not merely that on the television screen entertainment is the
metaphor for all discourse,” Postman points out. “It is that off the
screen the same metaphor prevails.” Americans, because television
stages their world, “no longer talk to each other, they entertain each
other.” Trump is what is produced when a society severs itself from
print, when it pushes art, ethics, classics, philosophy, history and
the humanities to the margins of the universities and culture, when
its members spend hours sitting inert in front of a screen.
Information, ideas and epistemology are, as Postman writes, given form
today by electronic images.
It is a mistake to see what is happening as cultural regression. It is
worse than that. Oral cultures prized memorization and cultivated the
high art of rhetoric. Leaders, playwrights and poets in oral cultures
did not speak to their publics in Trump’s crude vernacular. More
ominous than the president’s impoverished vocabulary is that he cannot
string together sentences that make sense. This replicates not only
the shoddy vocabulary of television, but more importantly the
incoherence of television. Trump is able to communicate with tens of
millions of Americans, also raised in front of screens, because they
too have been linguistically and intellectually mutated by digital
images. They lack the ability to detect lies or think rationally. They
are part of our post-truth culture.
Nearly any tweet or spoken remark by Trump illustrates this
incoherence. In a Jan. 31 interview with The New York Times he gave
this answer when asked about the gruesome murder of the journalist
Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul:
“
Yeah. Khashoggi. I thought it was a terrible crime. But if you look at
other countries, many other countries. You look at Iran, not so far
away from Saudi Arabia, and take a look at what they’re doing there.
So, you know, that’s just the way I feel. Venezuela is very much in
flux. We’ve been hearing about it for probably 14 years now, between
the two of them. And some terrible things are happening in Venezuela.
So, if I can do something to help people. It’s really helping
humanity, if we can do something to help people, I’d like to do that.
Electronic images are our modern-day idols. We worship the power and
fame they impart. We yearn to become idolized celebrities. We measure
our lives against the fantasies these images disseminate. If something
does not appear on a screen or is proclaimed on a screen its
authenticity is questioned. We fervently build miniature social media
platforms where we daily update our “life the movie,” confusing
self-presentation with genuine communication and friendship. This
yearning to be validated by electronic images and their audiences has
made us an isolated, uninformed, alienated and very unhappy people.
“Now the death of God combined with the perfection of the image has
brought us to a whole new state of expectation,” John Ralston Saul
writes. “We are the image. We are the viewer and the viewed. There is
no other distracting presence. And the image has all the Godly powers.
It kills at will. Kills effortlessly. Kills beautifully. It dispenses
morality. Judges endlessly.
The electronic image is man as God and the ritual involved leads us
not to a mysterious Holy Trinity but back to ourselves. In the absence
of a clear understanding that we are now the only source, these images
cannot help but return to the expression of magic and fear proper to
idolatrous societies.
This in turn facilitates the use of electronic image as propaganda by
whoever can control some part of it.”
The fixation on electronic images by Trump means he and millions of
other American adults—who, according to a 2018 report by the Nielsen
company, on average watch four hours, 46 minutes of TV each day and
spend “over 11 hours per day listening to, watching, reading or
generally interacting with media”—have severed themselves from complex
thought. They have been infantilized. Television, including the news,
reduces all reality to a childish, cartoonish simplicity. News as
presented on screens “provides degenerate photographs or a
pseudo-reality of stereotypes,” James W. Carey writes. “News can
approximate truth only when reality is reducible to a statistical
table: sport scores, stock exchange reports, births, deaths,
marriages, accidents, court decisions, elections, economic
transactions such as foreign trade or balance of payments.” News on
our screens is incapable of imparting complexity and nuance. It is
devoid of historical, social or cultural context. TV news speaks in
easily digestible clichés and political and cultural tropes. It is
sensational and fragmented. The frenetic pace of TV news means that
except when delivering statistics, the programs can trade only in
established stereotypes. TV news is, in essence, divorced from the
real, mindlessly grounded in the ruling elites’ reigning ideology of
neoliberalism, militarism and white supremacy.
Postman, in his book “Amusing Ourselves to Death,” writes that after
the development of the telegraph, “News took the form of slogans, to
be noted with excitement, to be forgotten with dispatch.” Arguing that
the 19th-century invention is the basis for communication in the
digital age, he says, “Its language was also entirely discontinuous.
One message had no connection to that which preceded or followed it.
Each ‘headline’ stood alone as its own context. The receiver of the
news had to provide a meaning if he could. The sender was under no
obligation to do so. And because of all this, the world as depicted by
the telegraph began to appear unmanageable, even undecipherable. The
line-by-line, sequential, continuous form of the printed page slowly
began to lose its resonance as a metaphor of how knowledge was to be
acquired and how the world was to be understood.
‘Knowing’ the facts took on a new meaning, for it did not imply that
one understood implications, background, or connections. Telegraphic
discourse permitted no time for historical perspectives and gave no
priority to the qualitative.”
Those who seek to communicate outside of digital structures to
question or challenge the dominant narrative, to deal in ambiguity and
nuance, to have discussions rooted in verifiable fact and historical
context, are becoming incomprehensible to most of modern society. As
soon as they employ a language that is not grounded in the dominant
clichés and stereotypes, they are not understood. Television,
computers and smartphones have addicted a generation and conditioned
it to talk and think in the irrational, incoherent baby talk it is fed
day after day. This cultural, historical, economic and social
illiteracy delights the ruling elites who design, manage and profit
from these sophisticated systems of social control. Armed with our
personal data and with knowledge of our proclivities, habits and
desires, they adeptly manipulate us as consumers and citizens to
accelerate their amassing of wealth and consolidation of power.
“The only people who grasp the distinction between reality and
appearance, who grasp the laws of conduct and society, are the ruling
groups and those who do their bidding: scientific, technical elites
who elucidate the laws of behavior and the function of society so that
people might be more effectively, albeit unconsciously, governed,”
Carey writes in “Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and
Society.”
Daniel Boorstin in “The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Reality in America”
argues that the fabricated, the inauthentic and the theatrical have
now displaced the natural, the genuine and the spontaneous. Reality
has become stagecraft.
We live in a world, he writes, “where fantasy is more real than reality.”
He
warns:
“
We risk being the first people in history to have been able to make
their illusions so vivid, so persuasive, so ‘realistic,’ that they can
live in them. We are the most illusioned people on earth. Yet we dare
not become disillusioned, because our illusions are the very house in
which we live; they are our news, our heroes, our adventure, our forms
of art, our very experience.
Trump is a product of this cultural decay, not an aberration. The way
he speaks, acts and thinks is the way many Americans speak, act and
think. He will one day disappear, but the cultural degeneracy that
produced him will remain. Academic institutions, which should be the
repositories of culture and literacy, are transforming themselves,
often with corporate money, into adjuncts of the digital age,
expanding departments that deal with technology, engineering and
computer science—the largest major at universities such as Princeton
and Harvard—while diminishing the disciplines that deal with art,
philosophy, ethics, history and politics. These disciplines, rooted in
print, are the only antidotes to cultural death.
Intellectual historian Perry Miller in his essay “The Duty of Mind in
a Civilization of Machines” calls us to build counterweights to
communication technology in order “to resist the paralyzing effects
upon the intellect of the looming nihilism” that defines the era. In
short, the more we turn off our screens and return to the world of
print, the more we seek out the transformative power of art and
culture, the more we re-establish genuine relationships, conducted
face-to-face rather than through a screen, the more we use knowledge
to understand and put the world around us in context, the more we will
be able to protect ourselves from the digital dystopia.
Chris Hedges
Columnist
Chris Hedges is a Truthdig columnist, a Pulitzer Prize-winning
journalist, a New York Times best-selling author, a professor in the
college degree program offered to New Jersey state prisoners by
Rutgers…
