Amusing Ourselves to Death Part II

The Age of Show Business “What is television? What kinds of conversations does it permit? What are the intellectual tendencies it encourages? What sort of culture does it produce?” (84)

The Age of Show Business Attributes of television: –Television is relentless in its display of imagery. –Television requires minimal skill to comprehend. –Television is aimed at emotional gratification.

The Age of Show Business “But what I am claiming here is not that television is entertaining but that it has made entertainment itself the natural format for the representation of all experience. […] The problem is not that television presents us with entertaining subject matter but that all subject matter is presented as entertaining, which is another issue altogether” (87).

The Age of Show Business News/current events as entertainment: –Attractive people and pleasant banter. –Exciting music. –Vivid imagery. –Attractive commercials.

The Age of Show Business “The single most important fact about television is that people watch it… […]. It is the nature of the medium that it must suppress the content of ideas in order to accommodate the requirements of visual interest; that is to say, to accommodate the values of show business” (92).

The Age of Show Business “Television is our cultures principle mode of knowing about itself. Therefore – and this is the critical point – how television stages the world becomes the model for how the world is properly to be staged. It is not merely that on the television screen entertainment is the metaphor for all discourse. It is that off the screen the same metaphor prevails” (92).

The Age of Show Business Television has changed the way we communicate in: –Courtrooms –Classrooms –Operating Rooms –Board Rooms –Houses of Worship

“Now…This” “‘Now…this’ is commonly used on radio and television newscasts to indicate that what one has just heard or seen has no relevance to what one is about to hear or see, or possibly to anything one is ever likely to hear or see” (99).

“Now…This” What are the consequences of the “Now…this” consciousness promoted by television?

Shuffle Off to Bethlehem Two conclusions… –“The first is that on television, religion, like everything else, is presented, quite simply and without apology, as an entertainment. Everything that makes religion an historic, profound and sacred human activity is stripped away; there is no ritual, no dogma, no tradition, no theology, and above all, no sense of spiritual transcendence. On these shows, the preacher is tops. God comes out as second banana” (117).

Shuffle Off to Bethlehem “The second conclusion is that this fact has more to do with the bias of television than with the deficiencies of these electronic preachers, as they are called. […] Most Americans, including preachers, have difficulty accepting the truth, if they think about it at all, that not all forms of discourse can be converted from one medium to another. It is naïve to suppose that something that has been expressed in one form can be expressed in another without significantly changing its meaning, texture or value” (117).

Shuffle Off to Bethlehem Why televised religion doesn’t work: –It is impossible to consecrate space both on the screen and surrounding it. –Television transforms it’s content into entertainment.

Shuffle Off to Bethlehem “There is no great religios leader – from the Buddah to Moses to Jesus to Mohammed to Luther – who offered people what they want. Only what they need. But television is not well suited to offering people what they need. It is ‘user friendly.’ It is too easy to turn off It is at its most alluring when it speaks the language of dynamic visual imagery. It does not accommodate complex language or stringent demands” (121).

Reach Out and Elect Someone The format of political discourse in America has been strongly influenced by the television commercial (today, we can also add the ). By transforming political discourse from a rational enterprise to an emotional one, television (specifically, the television commercial) has reduced democracy to a contest between images and not ideas.

Reach Out and Elect Someone “By substituting images for claims, the pictorial commercial made emotional appeal, not tests of truth, the basis for consumer decisions” (128). –In other words: “One can like or dislike a television commercial…. But one cannot refute it” (128). The shift from product research to market research.

Reach Out and Elect Someone “For on television the politician does not so much offer the audience an image of himself, as offer himself as an image of the audience. And therein lies one of the most powerful influences of the television commercial on political discourse” (134).

Teaching as an Amusing Activity What’s the matter with Sesame Street?

Teaching as an Amusing Activity What’s the matter with Sesame Street? –“‘Sesame Street’ appeared to be an imaginative aid in solving the growing problem of teaching Americans how to read, while, at the same time, encouraging children to love school” (143).

Teaching as an Amusing Activity What’s the matter with Sesame Street? –“We now know that ‘Sesame Street’ encourages children to love school only if school is like ‘Sesame Street.’ Which is to say, we now know that ‘Sesame Street’ undermines what the traditional idea of schooling represents (143).”

Teaching as an Amusing Activity The world of School –Social interaction –Critical thinking –Language –Legal requirement –Punishment –Public decorum –Fun as a means to an end The world of TV –Isolation –Unresponsive to ?s –Images –An act of choice –No risk of punishment –No decorum –Fun as an end in itself

The Huxleyan Warning “For in the end, he (Huxley) was trying to tell us that what afflicted the people in Brave New World was not that they were laughing instead of thinking, but that they did not know what they were laughing about and why they had stopped thinking” (163).