Influential book: Amusing Ourselves to Death, by Neil Postman, Penguin Books (copyright Neil Postman 1975).
“Media” is a reasonably general term. It conjures a number of quite different concepts and images in the mind’s eye. A quite different expression, “couch potato”, is much more specific, especially when it is uttered in the same breath as “media”. Everybody knows what a couch potato does; a couch potato watches television. Potatoes are not considered particularly intelligent or independent-thinkers, so when they subject themselves to television all day every day, it is fair to assume they become even less so. In Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman documents the decline of American literacy, political acumen and, finally, common-sense, as he traces the negative intellectual gradient that represents what American corporations have done with information technology.
The television media in America has forever been shackled to an idea of rampant unscrupulous commercialism, wherein its customers are lied to, exploited and brainwashed, simultaneously. Nothing finds its way onto television screens in America that isn’t entertaining. This includes the news. It is often said of American elections that who has the most money, wins. When political campaigns are covered by the media, there has to be razzamatazz, there has to be glitter; shining white teeth are the order of the day. The traditional cut and thrust of politics has become fiction, indistinguishable from beauty pageants or Super bowls.
From the olden days of the spoken word, where, according to Postman, people were able to recite literally thousands of proverbs (and students were actually examined orally as an accompaniment to their written theses), through the ages of print and telegraphy, technology and information describe a braided course. The first telegrams were not dissimilar to the first emails; short, featureless scraps of relative nonsense, whose lack of substance was more than made up for by their amazing geographical scope. It took a while for people to come down from this novel high-point in communications history, giddied and ready for more of same.
When radio became, in Postman’s words, “an adjunct of the music industry”, the opportunity to hear “sustained, complex talk” in our homes was severely compromised. Television rapidly took control of the situation, and gigantic corporations, with intimate ties to politics, took control of television.