A long time ago (1985) a New York University professor, Neil Postman, published Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. One of the principal ideas is that television is “entertainment,” even when the subject is serious. The “news” becomes just another “show.”
From time to time I have wondered what Professor Postman would have thought about social media. His principal complaint about television was that it turns “news” into “entertainment.” Rational discourse was replaced by video and sound “bites,” with the focus of attention increasingly fleeting and fragmented. I remember the history of television very well. When I was really young, there was no TV. When I was a bit older, I knew kids whose families had TVs. The boxes were big, the screens were small and round, and the colors were dark green and light green. My family didn’t have a TV until I was 13. By that time, the screens were a bit larger with reasonably decent black and white images. Thirty minutes of national news was on TV every night, but most news was delivered and consumed in print format: newspapers, newsweeklies, and monthly publications that focused on specific topics. If you wanted to be well-informed, you had to read.
Things stayed pretty much the same through my high school and college years. A.M. radio was gradually outpaced by higher-quality F.M. The number of TV stations increased, and the number of shows broadcast in color increased. Local TV stations added local news. For those of you who like math, the increases in TV programming were exponential. TV news programs were able to convey some things with greater impact than print. It is one thing to read about battles, for example, and another to watch them on TV, when you know that those being shot and dying are real soldiers rather than actors. At the same time, however, reading tends to promote serious and logical thought about subjects, while television encourages both passive consumption and heightened emotional involvement. The 1960s were a pivotal time for this shift in culture. TV brought the Civil Rights movement and the Vietnam War into people’s living rooms in a real, “bleeding” way. TV also brought coverage of the protest movements into living rooms in a way that included—and perhaps amplified—the emotional content.
Cable TV and the advent of the Internet changed things again. News—local, regional, national, and international—became available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. As Neil Postman implied, as a result of these changes, news coverage became increasingly emotional and less rational. News coverage currently goes from disaster to disaster, emergency to emergency, and “sound bites” have become “scream bites.” The most recent addition to the mix, the “new kid on the block,” is “social media,” typically used as a collective noun. For the most part, print, radio, and TV are “broadcast” media, with “professionals” broadcasting information to an audience of consumers. With an occasional exception of a letter to the editor, the audience doesn’t have the opportunity to “talk” back. Social media channels change that. Postman’s main point was that the shift from writing to TV as the main form of communication made us less rational and more superficial. I wonder what he would say about the shift from TV as he knew it (three main channels: ABC, CBS, and NBC) to the combination of cable TV (hundreds of channels), the Internet (millions of websites), and social media (increasing possibilities every day).
The advent of email was probably the first shift in the direction of what has become an “online life.” The evolution of ARPANET into BITNET and eventually into the Internet, led to the electronic communication in a big way. Email lists arrived to keep groups of people communicating about subjects of common interest. For my last several years of university teaching, I frequently communicated with my students by email. I taught several courses “online,” sometimes supported by broadcast video with two-way audio communication, and sometimes with a combination of Web pages and email. These early communication technologies evolved, and the technologies improved. At this point, almost everyone almost everywhere can be “connected” with almost anyone else almost anywhere else. In more ways than one, connections have become a “World Wide Web,” which is the “www” that used to be required for Web addresses. The Web provides the opportunity for multi-way communication.
Social media are “social,” in that they not only permit, but also encourage participation. I don’t pretend to be familiar with all the various forms of social media. I have accounts on Facebook, Twitter, You-Tube, LinkedIn, and Google+. Facebook tends to be the one I use the most. My posts there are automatically reposted on Twitter. I belong to a few groups on LinkedIn and occasionally receive links to articles that interest me. I haven’t figured out Google+, although I have set up an account and occasionally receive notifications that one of my contacts there has “done something.” Facebook and LinkedIn routinely tell me which of my contacts are having birthdays and which have earned promotions or are having job anniversaries and urge me to wish them well. I also routinely receive notices asking if I know this person or that person who knows someone I know or shares an area of interest with me. I am regularly asked for access to my contacts list so that the social media site can “serve me better.” If I miss a day checking a social media site, I receive a message warning me that I have missed important postings by my contacts. The main social media sites seem to be in an escalating war of competition for member attention.
And, of course, the social media sites I belong to aren’t the only ones. I am also familiar with (have read about) Pin It, Instagram, and Snapchat. Recent articles (see Signs You Should Take a Break From Social Media for an example) suggest that people can become addicted to social media in a way that suggests a disconnection from “real life.” I can remember members of my parents’ generation saying that about TV and suggesting that kids needed to “go outside and play.” It seems to me that something is wrong if the only way you know you have fixed a fancy desert or eaten a wonderful meal in an expensive restaurant is recording it with your cell phone camera and posting it on Facebook, Twitter, and/or Instagram. We prove we exist by taking “Selfies.”
The social media sites also do what they can to promote addiction. Look away, and you might miss something. Even Amazon, not usually thought of as a “social media” site wants viewers to be “involved.” Buyers are asked to rate and review products, shipping, and delivery. Buyers are to “help” others decide what to buy by answering questions about the products. TV can also be addictive, of course. A long time ago I knew a woman who told me that she had nine TVs in her home, and she turned all nine on when she got up in the morning because she didn’t like to be alone. We have probably all known someone who spent far more time watching TV than is healthy. TV has, of course, also discovered social media. A number of shows now encourage text messaging about show content. “Dancing with the Stars,” for example runs viewer submitted texts on screen so that other viewers will know who thought what about a particular dance.
I have wondered whether humans have always been “addicted” to equivalent behaviors. Was neighborhood gossip similar? Did our grandparents (perhaps great grandparents) check for new gossip the same way people now check social media for messages? Even so, electronic social media at least seem more intrusive than back-fence gossiping could have been. I am intrigued by those who take their cell phones to bed with them and wake up regularly to check for new messages. We’ve also seen enough warnings to know that some people are willing to risk sending and receiving text messages while driving. Even texting while walking can be hazardous to your health. I don’t know enough about online gaming to say anything meaningful about it, but my reading suggests that it is every bit as addictive as texting and posting to social media sites.
It remains to be seen, of course, how our increasing obsession with social media will affect our collective well-being. Even with all the time and opportunity we’ve had to observe the changes in culture Neil Postman described, it’s hard to tell whether culture as a whole has benefitted or suffered as a result of the changes in information technology. I suspect that in the U.S., at least, more people have been exposed to more “news” than ever before in history, but it is hard to say how that has influenced us either intellectually or as actors in world affairs. Most of the studies show that those of us in the States have limited knowledge of what’s happening at home and abroad. While we have social media to thank for making that information available, we don’t have equivalent information about previous generations. We can assume that most people in previous generations had less access to information, but we can’t assume that means they actually knew less.
In times past, life moved at a more leisurely pace. Think about how long it took people to go from place to place when they were walking or riding horses. For most people currently alive, all of life is moving at a faster pace than it did for previous generations. We are exposed to more people, places, and information than our ancestors were. It would probably be good for us all to go outside and play from time to time.
