I often come back to Neil Postman’s 1985 classic Amusing Ourselves to Death. It’s a penetrating analysis on the cognitive effects of media technology. His focus is mainly on how the format and mode of communication influences the character of content and how that content then trains us, but to a lesser extent also how the discourse and the “atmosphere” of the information exchange affects these issues.
This is almost forty years ago, and the disruptive medium under scrutiny is television. The entire approach seems almost quaint, the 80s in relation to the current period being a comparative golden age of critical thinking, complex exposition and conscious, creative citizens.
Still, the issues Postman emphasizes were already significant way back then. You can summarize his criticism with television’s format having complex, detrimental effects on the content and character of public discourse, as well as on the cognitive abilities of human beings, especially in terms of understanding complex issues and parse arguments and evidence with many layers and branching implications.
The basic issue on Postman’s view is that written exposition and complex oral tradition alike foster and prepare the human mind for the rigors of critical thinking and rational reflection. And to the contrary, that the entertainment media and discourses as exemplified by television in particular, geared towards short-term gratification and the communication of sensational experiences, have rather the opposite effect.
His examples are really glaring, even back then:
Contradiction, in short, requires that statements and events be perceived as interrelated aspects of a continuous and coherent context. Disappear the context, or fragment it, and contradiction disappears. This point is nowhere made more clear to me than in conferences with my younger students about their writing. “Look here,” I say. “In this paragraph you have said one thing. And in that you have said the opposite. Which is it to be?” They are polite, and wish to please, but they are as baffled by the question as I am by the response. “I know,” they will say, “but that is there and this is here.” The difference between us is that I assume “there” and “here,” “now” and “then,” one paragraph and the next to be connected, to be continuous, to be part of the same coherent world of thought. That is the way of typographic discourse, and typography is the universe I’m “coming from,” as they say. But they are coming from a different universe of discourse altogether: the “Now … this” world of television. The fundamental assumption of that world is not coherence but discontinuity. And in a world of discontinuities, contradiction is useless as a test of truth or merit, because contradiction does not exist. My point is that we are by now so thoroughly adjusted to the “Now … this” world of news—a world of fragments, where events stand alone, stripped of any connection to the past, or to the future, or to other events—that all assumptions of coherence have vanished. And so, perforce, has contradiction. In the context of no context, so to speak, it simply disappears. And in its absence, what possible interest could there be in a list of what the President says now and what he said then? It is merely a rehash of old news, and there is nothing interesting or entertaining in that.
– Postman, ibid.
This is not an unfamiliar situation for most of us. I even had a similar experience this morning in an attempted discussion with someone who incredibly enough stated four (!) different, mutually incompatible things within the framework of a couple of short paragraphs, and he of course still kept insisting I was wrong. His stated position contained the following propositions:
- Beliefs are absurd
- Beliefs ought to be held only due to acceptable evidence
- You can hold beliefs for whatever reasons you like
- Beliefs are by definition anchored in emotion and not acceptable evidence
All of these statements are literally incompatible with every single other one.
It’s like a convoluted version of the Liar’s Paradox. If I agree with him, I’m necessarily wrong, and if I disagree, I’m wrong too. But in contrast to the old thought experiment, where my error lies in the direct affirmation of a statement’s opposite, here there’s literally no way to make sense of how I would be wrong if I either agree with or reject his position, since it’s internally incoherent in a complex and not only binary sense.
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