Are We Amusing Ourselves To Death Or Do We Just Hate Fun?
Book Review #1: 'Amusing Ourselves To Death: Public Discourse In The Age of Show Business' by Neil Postman
Today, something a little bit different: some thoughts on a book I read this week!
I’ve been a bit sick this week and have been generally busy with freelance work, so I haven’t had as much time to come up with scalding hot takes that will make my friend Zach say more things like this:
If this blog is about anything, it’s about attention. I think that one of the challenges of modern society, particularly politics, is that we’re bombarded with too much entertainment and media that vie for our attention. If you’re not in do-not-disturb mode while reading this, I bet you will have at least one notification on your phone/tablet/computer. Simply, I think we are pulled in too many different directions.
The internet is often overwhelming, creating the illusion that there are an infinite number of important things to do at all times. It saps my energy and distracts me from what I care about as a finite human being. I suspect that either I am particularly vulnerable or stressed out by this condition or that most people feel this way and aren’t as keyed into it.
That’s why I write posts like “Should You Quit the News?” rather than “Should You Read More Comic Books?” Although the answer is probably yes! Comic books are honest in that they’re art and entertainment, and they will bring you joy. They don’t have the same capacity for addiction as the news and, at this point, most of the internet.
But I think Zach keyed in on something fundamentally correct with this joke: an overemphasis on the dangers of the attention economy, or anything that people like, can make you sound like someone who hates fun.
I’m not even talking about particular people here, although they exist. I’m talking about the general, anthropomorphized feeling you get from a type of reading, watching, writing, or critique. And, more and more, I think people get this feeling from the left. As part of the left, I think it’s an issue we need to solve, or at least minimize, for a return to a shot at governing electoral majorities.
Neil Postman: Hater of Fun?
Forty years ago, Neil Postman wrote Amusing Ourselves To Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. Reading it now makes a lot of people double-check the publishing date.
His thesis: Every media technology encourages assumptions about the way its users understand the world, independent of content.
For the first century of American life, reading was the primary medium through which information traveled. This fostered a “literate society,” which Postman claims encouraged healthy assumptions about political discourse: that rationality was fundamentally important as the means of society, that arguments about political issues of the day were to be listened to carefully and critically, and that politics was to be used as a way of logically defending your interests.
This idealized vision of the early 1800s comes off to me as slightly romanticized. This was when the civil war was brewing, correct?
But, it’s hard to deny that his central idea has some truth in it, especially when you start looking at writings from the time about the invention of the telegraph:
“We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas, but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.”
— Henry David Thoreau, Walden
People like Thoreau were concerned that the invention of the telegraph, providing short “news of the day” segments to local papers, would entertain too much, providing citizens with irrelevant information that would only serve to distract them from their material interests and daily lives.
The telegraph’s assumptions about the world are different than those of long-form reading or communication: the telegraph assumes context is unimportant.
Postman asserts that television, which, in the 1980s, had become America’s dominant media, as opposed to reading in the 18th and 19th centuries, implies a different assumption about how to engage with the world: that everything is entertainment. We had transformed from a primarily literate society to a primarily visual society, one where context had become even less important.
Therefore, while television often provides great joy, it erodes political discourse by deluding the public into thinking that politics is also entertainment.
America got its news through the television, and the “news” had been fluffed up with actors (newscasters) and politicians focused more on visual appeal than talking about subjects of any relevance to you, the citizen. The most notable moment of the 1984 presidential debates was not a piece of insightful policy analysis on behalf of Reagan or Mondale, but Reagan’s joke about Mondale’s “youth and inexperience,” a jab meant to deflect from Reagan’s advancing age.
Compare that to the Lincoln/Douglass debates of 1858, where candidates spoke for hour-long segments, uninterrupted, focused entirely on explaining their ideas on slavery and abolition in length. You come away with a queasy feeling that we have severely misaligned our incentives.
When you look at Postman’s ideas in retrospect, he seems to have accurately assessed our present-day politics. A plurality of the public votes for someone who actively opposes their material interests, but who is fun to watch on television? Whether you think that person is Trump and Bush or Obama, that situation has happened at least twice in the last twenty years. To paraphrase Postman, we have gone from a democracy in which people did not know what the president looked like to only voting for them if they “looked like” a president.
This mostly adds up to me, especially in a time when we are even more “amused” than ever. Television is much less relevant than it was forty years ago, but we all carry around mini-televisions in our pockets that are exponentially better at entertaining us. If television allows you to assume that everything is entertainment, perhaps the internet allows you to assume that you can always be entertained.
But I am not here to convince you of Postman’s argument, or to evaluate his nuances, as he may want me to do in a logical, orderly, long-winded fashion, forcing you to think about if America actually was that much more logical in the 1800s, or if we have always struggled with distraction, and advancing technology has merely exacerbated this problem. I will also not engage with the deeper implications of the first statement, which suggests that we either need to severely reduce entertainment’s availability or redesign our democracy to fit our modified attentional mechanisms.
Instead, I am here to point out one simple, undeniable truth: I like TV. It makes me happy.
I like Seinfeld and Mad Men. I like watching Doctor Who with my dad and my brother. When I was a kid, I liked watching the news with him. Yes, it’s theater. But also, aren’t we capable of understanding that on some base level? Isn’t that why we get so enraged and exhilerated by it?
I would be lying if I said that I didn’t get some sort of comfort from watching Chris Hayes or Rachel Maddow or listening to The Ezra Klein Show. They feel like guys I know.
So, even if I, as a generic citizen, believe that Postman is correct, that these underlying assumptions are degrading our discourse, misaligning our incentives, and causing us to elect leaders who take advantage of our distraction, it still won’t get me to renounce this lifestyle, because it’s asking me to remove something from my life that I like.
In short, it sounds lame.
And if Postman is right about one thing, it’s this: we love to be entertained. And however new it is, that is now our language of politics.
In The End, Fun Probably Wins
Much of left-wing criticism follows the same particular rhetorical pattern: Here is a problem with the world, and to get rid of it, we must stop doing this thing that we like. This is how most writing about the attention economy works. This has become many non-political people’s primary feelings about the left.
Postman assumes that learning and entertainment cannot be the same thing. He believes the mode of entertainment primarily encourages people to just want more entertainment. I think this is a big claim and probably an overreach.
Instead, I think that there are ways to entertain and move your audience toward your preferred ends, particularly on the left.
A successful political movement needs to stand for something more than a set of policies, if it stands for policies at all. It’s why Trump has been successful. He makes people feel something, and that is now our modus operandi in politics.
This does not necessarily mean changing your values, but more so, changing your aesthetics and the way you communicate. In short, when you advocate for something publicly, you need to make it fun.
Communication about politics cannot be centered on taking things away from an audience. Trump’s administration is busy making your food more expensive and the government more inefficient right now, but if you glanced at the headlines, you might think, “Wow! A lot of stuff is happening. Maybe the government is finally working for me.” To a certain kind of person, the fun of it is all they receive.
A liberal strategy of resistance through attention, like the one I am describing, was successfully deployed in Serbia by Srdja Popovic, a leader in the student resistance movement Otpor! that helped topple Serbian dictator Slobodan Milošević.
Popovic is famous for his creative methods of nonviolent resistance.
“All successful movements come with a very low entry bar. You need to offer people the chance to do something meaningful and – crucially – to get away with it. In Chile, against Pinochet, they drove at half speed: not illegal, very low risk, pretty funny, nothing the cops can do. It’s about doing something neat and living to tell everyone.”
— Srdja Popovic1
Popovic’s group used stunts like leaving barrels with Milošević’s face on them on busy streets. They would leave a stick next to the barrel, and people would come up and smash it. The police had the choice of either looking ridiculous and treating this as a serious threat or doing nothing and letting the stunt spread.
This is an old-school example, but the same kind of fun, low-barrier-to-entry activities that the left and left-wing politicians can identify with in the US. To be honest, Trump’s viral video at McDonald’s last year was exactly this—it was so ridiculous that if you tried to point out how dumb and cynical it was, you also looked silly.
These sorts of tactics are just as available to left-wing politicians and movements with some punch in them. The key is requiring little of observers/participants and making the show as entertaining as possible. In the new attention-based world, this requires more creativity and a lot more flexibility than politics used to.
Do I sound cynical? I feel it, a little bit. Buying into this strategy requires undervaluing a classic liberal assumption—that we should just be able to convince a majority of people what we believe based on the facts in front of us. Focusing on entertainment makes it seem like our ideas aren’t worth much. Postman might see this as an implicit acknowledgement that the public no longer engages with rationality in their politics except for when it is entertaining.
Perhaps this is true. But I would like to believe that it is possible to inspire a broader worldview through positive example.
Do you know who was good at this? Charlie Chaplin.
Chaplin is one of my favorite filmmakers, and one of my favorite films of his is The Great Dictator.
Made in 1940, the film was his attempt to rally public support for the war in America before the United States’ entry. In the film, Chaplin plays a Jewish barber who is mistaken for a dictator (who happens to look like Hitler). The film is a comedy, but Chaplin uses his outlandish persona to both mock Hitler and the idea that anyone would ever want to conquer anyone. As an anarchist, Chaplin is using the film as a positive example of his philosophy: why not just…chill out? And it seems pretty fun when he does it.
Again, an old-school example. Here’s another one from Bruce Springsteen, talking about seeing Elvis Presley on TV for the first time:
The kids would want more. More life, more love, more sex, more hope, more truth, more power, more soul, and for me, more rock and roll.
I sat with my mom, my little seven-year-old mind on fire, staring into a blue tube as fun happened. Fun! The real kind. The joyful, life-affirming, hip-shaking, earth-quaking, guitar-playing, mind and heart changing, race-challenging, soul lifting bliss of a freer existence. The world had changed in an instant, in a sweating, wet, orgasm of fun.
People like things that make them feel like that. They want things that make them feel like that. I imagine that to build a durable political majority in this country, it might have to feel like that.
And while I’m no expert at predictions, in part, that’s why I’m skeptical that the Trump stuff is the new normal and that our new, hyper-short attention spans are the new normal too.
Trump’s instability, tariffs, and deportations will catch up with real people’s wallets. Democrats will have an opening to be the opposition, the fun and cool party again. Phones and the internet can only tease you with life satisfaction for so long.
After a while, it just stops being fun, and you go and try something else. So we probably won’t be amusing ourselves to death forever. After all, amusing ourselves to death just isn’t very fun.
Song of The Week: Hawkmoon by Hurray For The Riff Raff
Here’s a silver spoon, so you could gouge out both your eyes,
I couldn’t believe them when they’d say “watch out,”
I’m becoming the kind of girl they warned me about.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/mar/08/srdja-popovic-revolution-serbian-activist-protest