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Amusing Ourselves to Death
by
Neil Postman

PENGUIN books

AMUSING OURSELVES TO DEATH

Neil Postman--critic, writer, educator, and communications theorist--is
chairman of the Department of Communication Arts at New York University
and founder of its program in Media Ecology. Educated at the State
University of New York and Columbia University, he is holder of the
Christian Lindback Award for Excellence in Teaching and is also editor
of Et Cetera, the journal of general semantics. His books include
Technopoly and How To Watch TV News (with Steve Powers).

He is married and has three children and lives in Flushing, New York.

Amusing Ourselves to Death

Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

Nell Postman

PENGUIN books

PENGUIN books Published by the Penguin Group Penguin books USA Inc., 375
Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

Penguin books Ltd, 27 Wrights Lane, London W8 5TZ, England

Penguin books Australia Ltd, Ringwood, Victoria, Australia

Penguin books Canada Lid, I0 AIcom Avenue, Toronto. Ontario, Canada M4V
3B2

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Penguin books Ltd, Registered Offices: Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England

First published in the United States of America by Viking Penguin Inc.
1985 Published in Penguin books 1986

23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30

Copyright stman, 1985 All rights reserved.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the New York Times Company for
permission to reprint from "Combining the books, Computers" by Edward
Fiske, which appeared in the August 7, 1984, issue of the New York
Times. Copyright the New York times Company.

A section of this book was supported by a commission from the Annenberg
Scholars Program, Annenberg School of Communications, University of
Southern California.

Specifically, portions of chapters six and seven formed part of a paper
delivered at the Scholars Conference, "Creating Meaning: Literacies of
Our Time," February 1984.

Library of Congress Catalog Information Postman, Neill..

Amusing ourselves to death.

Bibliography: p.

Includes index.

1. Mass media -- Influence. I. Title.

P94.P63 1986 302.2'34 86-9513

ISBN 0 14 00.9438 5

Printed in the United States of America

Set in Linotron Meridien

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the
condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent,
re-sold, hired out, or otherwise distributed without the publisher's
prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which
it is published and without a similar condition including this condition
being imposed on the subsequent purchase

Contents

Foreword

Part I

the Medium Is the Metaphor

Media as Epistemology

Typographic America

the Typographic Mind

the Peek-a-Boo World

Part II

the Age of Show Business

"Now... This"

Shuffle Off to Bethlehem

Reach Out and Elect Someone

Teaching as an Amusing Activity

the Huxleyan Warning

Notes Bibliography

Foreword

We were keeping our eye on .1984. When the year came and the prophecy
didn't, thoughtful Americans sang softly in praise of themselves. the
roots of liberal democracy had held. Wherever else the terror had
happened, we, at least, had not been visited by Orwellian nightmares.

But we had forgotten that alongside Orwell's dark vision, there was
another--slightly older, slightly less well known, equally chilling:
Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Contrary to common belief even among
the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell
warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But
in Huxley's vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of
their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to
love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their
capacities to think.

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared
was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no
one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of
information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we
would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth
would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in
a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture.
Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some
equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal
bumblepuppy. As Huxley re

marked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and
rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny "failed to take
into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions." In 1984,
Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New
World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell
feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love
will ruin us.

This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right.

Part I.

the Medium Is the Metaphor

At different times in our historY, different cities have been the focal
point of a radiating American spirit. In the late eighteenth centurY,
for example, Boston was the center of a political radicalism that
ignited a shot heard round the world--a shot that could not have been
fired any other place but the suburbs of Boston. At its report, all
Americans, including Virginians,, became Bostonians at heart. In the
mid-nineteenth centurY, New York became the symbol of the idea of a
melting-pot America--or at least a non-English one--as the wretched
refuse from all over the world disembarked at Ellis Island and spread
over the land their strange languages and even stranger ways. In the
early twentieth centurY, Chicago, the city of big shoulders and heavy
winds, came to symbolize the industrial energy and dynamism of America.
If there is-a statue of a hog butcher somewhere in Chicago, then it
stands as a reminder of the time when America was railroads, cattle,
steel mills and entrepreneurial adventures. If there is no such statue,
there ought to be, just as there is a statue of a Minute Man to recall
the Age of Boston, as the Statue of Liberty recalls the Age of New York.
Today, we must look to the city of Las Vegas, Nevada, as a metaphor of
our national character and aspiration, its symbol a thirty-foot-high
cardboard picture of a slot machine and a chorus girl. For Las Vegas is
a city entirely devoted to the idea of entertainment, and as such
proclaims the spirit of a culture in which all public discourse
increasingly takes the form of entertainment. Our politics, religion,
news, athletics, education and

commerce have been transformed into congenial adjuncts of show business,
largely without protest or even much popular notice. the result is that
we are a people on the verge of amusing ourselves to death. As I write,
the President of the United States is a former Hollywood movie actor.
One of his principal challengers in 1984 was once a featured player on
television's most glamorous show of the 1960s that is to say, an
astronaut. Naturally, a movie has been made about his extraterrestrial
adventure. Former nominee George McGovern has hosted the popular
television show "Saturday Night Live." So has a candidate of more recent
vintage, the Reverend Jesse Jackson. Meanwhile, former President Richard
Nixon, who once claimed he lost an election because he was sabotaged by
makeup men, has offered Senator Edward Kennedy advice on how to make a
serious run for the presidency: lose twenty pounds. Although the
Constitution makes no mention of it, it would appear that fat people are
now effectively excluded from running for high political office.
Probably bald people as well. Almost certainly those whose looks are
not significantly enhanced by the cosmetician's art. Indeed, we may
have reached the point where cosmetics has replaced ideology as the
field of expertise over which a politician must have competent control.
America's journalists, i.e., television newscasters, have not missed the
point. Most spend more time with their hair dryers than with their
scripts, with the result that they comprise the most glamorous group of
people this side of Las Vegas. Although the Federal Communications Act
makes no mention of it, those without camera appeal are excluded from
addressing the public about what is called "the news of the day." Those
with camera appeal can command salaries exceeding one million dollars a
year. American businessmen discovered, long before the rest of us, that
the quality and usefulness of their goods are subordinate to the
artifice of their display; that, in fact, half the principles of

the Medium Is the Metaphor

capitalism as praised by Adam Smith or condemned by Karl Marx are
irrelevant. Even the Japanese, who are said to make better cars than
the Americans, know that economics is less a science than a performing
art, as Toyota's yearly advertising budget confirms. Not long ago, I saw
Billy Graham join with Shecky Green Red Buttons, Dionne Warwick, Milton
Berle and other theologians in a tribute to George Burns, who was
celebrating himself for surviving eighty years in show business. the
Reverend Graham exchanged one-liners with Burns about making
preparations for Eternity. Although the Bible makes no mention of it,
the Reverend Graham assured the audience that God loves those who make
people laugh. It was an honest mistake. He merely mistook NBC for God.
Dr. Ruth Westheimer is a psychologist who has a popular radio program
and a nightclub act in which she informs her audiences about sex in all
of its infinite variety and in language once reserved for the bedroom
and street corners. She is almost as entertaining as the Reverend Billy
Graham, and has been quoted as saying, "I don't start out to be funny.
But if it comes out that way, I use it. If they call me an entertainer,
I say that's great. When a professor teaches with a sense of humor,
people walk away remembering." She did not say what they remember or of
what use their remembering is. But she has a point: It's great to be an
entertainer. Indeed, in America God favors all those who possess both a
talent and a format to amuse, whether they be preachers, athletes,
entrepreneurs, politicians, teachers or journalists. In America, the
least amusing people are its professional entertainers. Culture watchers
and worriers--those of the type who read books like this one--will know
that the examples above are not aberrations but, in fact, clichs. There
is no shortage of critics who have observed and recorded the dissolution
of public discourse in America and its conversion into the arts of show
business. But most of them, I believe, have barely begun to tell the

story of the origin and. meaning of this descent into a vast
triviality. Those who have written vigorously on the matter tell us, for
example, that what is happening is the residue of an exhausted
capitalism; or, on the contrary, that it is the tasteless fruit of the
maturing of capitalism; or that it is the neurotic aftermath of the Age
of Freud; or the retribution of our allowing God to perish; or that it
all comes from the old stand-bys, greed and ambition. I have attended
carefully to these explanations, and I do not say there is nothing to
learn from them. Marxists, Freudians, Levi-Straussians, even Creation
Scientists are not to be taken lightly. And, in any case, I should be
very surprised if the story I have to tell is anywhere near the whole
truth. We are all, as Huxley says someplace, Great Abbreviators,
meaning that none of us has the wit to know the whole truth, the time to
tell it if we believed we did, or an audience so gullible as to accept
it. But you will find an argument here that presumes a clearer grasp of
the matter than many that have come before. Its value, such as it is,
resides in the directness of its perspective, which has its origins in
observations made 2,300 years ago by Plato. It is an argument that
fixes its attention on the forms of human conversation, and postulates
that how we are obliged to conduct such conversations will have the
strongest possible influence on what ideas we can conveniently express.
And what ideas are convenient to express inevitably become the important
content of a culture.

I use the word "conversation" metaphorically to refer not only to speech
but to all techniques and technologies that permit people of a
particular culture to exchange messages. In this sense, all culture is
a conversation or, more precisely, a corporation of conversations,
conducted in a variety of symbolic modes. Our attention here is on how
forms of public discourse regulate and even dictate what kind of content
can issue from such fOrmS. To take a simple example of what this means,
consider the

primitive technology of smoke signals. While I do not know exactly what
content was once carried in the smoke signals of American Indians, I can
safely guess that it did not include philosophical argument. Puffs of
smoke are insufficiently complex to express ideas on the nature of
existence, and even if they were not, a Cherokee philosopher would run
short of either wood or blankets long before he reached his second
axiom. You cannot use smoke to do philosophy. Its form excludes the
content. To take an example closer to home: As I suggested earlier, it
is implausible to imagine that anyone like our twenty-seventh President,
the multi-chinned, three-hundred-pound William Howard Taft, could be put
forward as a presidential candidate in today's world. the shape of a
man's body is largely irrelevant to the shape of his ideas when he is
addressing a public in writing or on the radio or, for that matter, in
smoke signals. But it is quite relevant on television. the grossness
of a three-hundred-pound image, even a talking one, would easily
Overwhelm any logical or spiritual subtleties conveyed by speech. For
on television, discourse is conducted largely through visual imagery,
which is to say that television gives us a conversation in images, not
words. the emergence of the image-manager in the political arena and
the concomitant decline of the speech writer attest to the fact that
television demands a different kind of content from other media. You
cannot do political philosophy on television. Its form works against the
content. To give still another example, one of more complexity: the
information, the content, or, if you will, the "stuff" that makes up
what is called "the news of the day" did not exist--could not exist--in
a world that lacked the media to give it expression. I do not mean that
things like fires, wars, murders and love affairs did not, ever and
always, happen in places all over the world. I mean that lacking a
technology to advertise them, people could not attend to them, could not
include them in their daily business. Such information simply could not
exist as

part of the content of culture. This idea--that there is a content
called "the news of the day"--was entirely created by the telegraph (and
since amplified by newer media), which made it possible to move
decontextualized information over vast spaces at incredible speed. the
news of the day is a figment of our technological imagination. It is,
quite precisely, a media event. We attend to fragments of events from
all over the world because we have multiple media whose forms are well
suited to fragmented conversation. Cultures without speed-of-light
media-let us say, cultures in which smoke signals are the most efficient
space-conquering tool available--do not have news of the day. Without a
medium to create its form, the news of the day does not exist. To say
it, then, as plainly as I can, this book is an inquiry into and a
lamentation about the most significant American cultural fact of the
second half of the twentieth century: the decline of the Age of
Typography and the ascendancy of the Age of Television. This change-over
has dramatically and irreversibly shifted the content and meaning of
public discourse, since two media so vastly different cannot accommodate
the same ideas. As the influence of print wanes, the content of
politics, religion, education, and anything else that comprises public
business must change and be recast in terms that are most suitable to
television. If all of this sounds suspiciously like Marshall McLuhan's
aphorism, the medium is the message, I will not disavow the association
(although it is fashionable to do so among respectable scholars who,
were it not for McLuhan, would today be mute). I met McLuhan thirty
years ago when I was a graduate student and he an unknown English
professor. I believed then, as I believe now, that he spoke in the
tradition of Orwell and Huxley--that is, as a prophesier, and I have
remained steadfast to his teaching that the clearest way to see through
a culture is to attend to its tools for conversation. I might add that
my interest in this point of view was first stirred by a prophet far
more

formidable than McLuhan, more ancient than Plato. In studying the Bible
as a young man, I found intimations of the idea that forms of media
favor particular kinds of content and therefore are capable of taking
command of a culture. I refer specifically to the Decalogue, the Second
Commandment of which prohibits the Israelites from making concrete
images of anything. "Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, any
likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth
beneath, or that is in the water beneath the earth." I wondered then, as
so many others have, as to why the God of these people would have
included instructions on how they were to symbolize, or not symbolize,
their experience. It is a strange injunction to include as part of an
ethical system unless its author assumed a connection between forms of
human communication and the quality of a culture. We may hazard a guess
that a people who are being asked to embrace an abstract, universal
deity would be rendered unfit to do so by the habit of drawing pictures
or making statues or depicting their ideas in any concrete,
icono-graphic forms. the God of the Jews was to exist in the Word and
through the Word, an unprecedented conception requiring the highest
order of abstract thinking. Iconography thus became blasphemy so that a
new kind of God could enter a culture. People like ourselves who are in
the process of converting their culture from word-centered to
image-centered might profit by reflecting on this Mosaic injunction. But
even if I am wrong in these conjectures, it is, I believe, a wise and
particularly relevant supposition that the media of communication
available to a culture are a dominant influence on the formation of the
culture's intellectual and social preoccupations. Speech, of course, is
the primal and indispensable medium. It made us human, keeps us human,
and in fact defines what human means. This is not to say that if there
were no other means of communication all humans would find it equally
convenient to speak about the same things in the same way. We know
enough about language to understand that variations in the

structures of languages will result in variations in what may be called
"world view." How people think about time and space, and about things
and processes, will be greatly influenced by the grammatical features of
their language. We dare not suppose therefore that all human minds are
unanimous in understanding how the world is put together. But how much
more divergence there is in world view among different cultures can be
imagined when we consider the great number and variety of tools for
conversation that go beyond speech. For although culture is a creation
of speech, it is recreated anew by every medium of communication--from
painting to hieroglyphs to the alphabet to television. Each medium,
like language itself, makes possible a unique mode of discourse by
providing a new orientation for thought, for expression, for
sensibility. Which, of course, is what McLuhan meant in saying the
medium is the message. His aphorism, however, is in need of amendment
because, as it stands, it may lead one to confuse a message with a
metaphor. A message denotes a specific, concrete statement about the
world. But the forms of our media, including the symbols through which
they permit conversation, do not make such statements. They are rather
like metaphors, working by unobtrusive but powerful implication to
enforce their special definitions of reality. Whether we are
experiencing the world through the lens of speech or the printed word or
the television camera, our media-metaphors classify the world for us,
sequence it, frame it, enlarge it, reduce it, color it, argue a case for
what the world is like. As Ernst Cassirer remarked:

Physical reality seems to recede in proportion as man's symbolic
activity advances. Instead of dealing with the things themselves man is
in a sense constantly conversing with himself. He has so enveloped
himself in linguistic forms, in artistic images, in mythical symbols or
religious rites that he cannot see or know anything except by the
interposition of [an] artificial medium.

What is peculiar about such interpositions of media is that their role
in directing what we will see or know is so rarely noticed. A person
who reads a book or who watches television or who glances at his watch
is not usually interested in how his mind is organized and controlled by
these events, still less in what idea of the world is suggested by a
book, television, or a watch. But there are men and women who have
noticed these things, especially in our own times. Lewis Mumford, for
example, has been one of our great noticers. He is not the sort of a
man who looks at a clock merely to see what time it is. Not that he
lacks interest in the content of clocks, which is of concern to everyone
from moment to moment, but he is far more interested in how a clock
creates the idea of "moment to moment." He attends to the philosophy of
clocks, to clocks as metaphor, about which our education has had little
to say and clock makers nothing at all. "the clock," Mumford has
concluded, "is a piece of power machinery whose 'product' is seconds and
minutes." In manufacturing such a product, the clock has the effect of
disassociating time from human events and thus nourishes the belief in
an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences. Moment to
moment, it turns out, is not God's conception, or nature's. It is man
conversing with himself about and through a piece of machinery he
created. In Mumford's great book Technics and Civilization, he shows
how, beginning in the fourteenth century, the clock made us into
time-keepers, and then time-savers, and now time-servers. In the
process, we have learned irreverence toward the sun and the seasons, for
in a world made up of seconds and minutes, the authority of nature is
superseded. Indeed, as Mumford points out, with the invention of the
clock, Eternity ceased to serve as the measure and focus of human
events. And thus, though few would have imagined the connection, the
inexorable ticking of the clock may have had more to do with the
weakening of God's supremacy than all the treatises produced by the phi-

losophers of the Enlightenment; that is to' say, the clock introduced a
new form of conversation between man and God, in which God appears to
have been the loser. Perhaps Moses should have included another
Commandment: Thou shalt not make mechanical representations of time.
That the alphabet introduced a new form of conversation between man and
man is by now a commonplace among scholars. To be able to see one's
utterances rather than only to hear them is no small matter, though our
education, once again, has had little to say about this. Nonetheless,
it is clear that phonetic writing created a new conception of knowledge,
as well as a new sense of intelligence, of audience and of posterity,
all of which Plato recognized at an early stage in the development of
texts. "No man of intelligence," he wrote in his Seventh Letter, "will
venture to express his philosophical views in language, especially not
in language that is unchangeable, which is true of that which is set
down in written characters." This notwithstanding, he wrote voluminously
and understood better than anyone else that the setting down of views in
written characters would be the beginning of philosophy, not its end.
Philosophy cannot exist without criticism, and writing makes it possible
and convenient to subject thought to a continuous and concentrated
scrutiny. Writing freezes speech and in so doing gives birth to the
grammarian, the logician, the rhetorician, the historian, the
scientist--all those who must hold language before them so that they can
see what it means, where it errs, and where it is leading. Plato knew
all of this, which means that he knew that writing would bring about a
perceptual revolution: a shift from the ear to the eye as an organ of
language processing. Indeed, there is a legend that to encourage such a
shift Plato insisted that his students study geometry before entering
his Academy. If true, it was a sound idea, for as the great literary
critic Northrop Frye has remarked, "the written word is far more
powerful than simply a reminder: it re-creates the past in the present,
and gives

us, not the familiar remembered thing, but the glittering intensity of
the summoned-up hallucination." 3 All that Plato surmised about the
consequences of writing is now well understood by anthropologists,
especially those who have studied cultures in which speech is the only
source of complex conversation. Anthropologists know that the written
word, as Northrop Frye meant to suggest, is not merely an echo of a
speaking voice. It is another kind of voice altogether, a conjurer's
trick of the first order. It must certainly have appeared that way to
those who invented it, and that is why we should not be surprised that
the Egyptian god Thoth, who is alleged to have brought writing to the
King Thamus, was also the god of magic. People like ourselves may see
nothing wondrous in writing, but our anthropologists know how strange
and magical it appears to a purely oral people--a conversation with no
one and yet with everyone. What could be stranger than the silence one
encounters when addressing a question to a text? What could be more
metaphysically puzzling than addressing an unseen audience, as every
writer of books must do? And correcting oneself because one knows that
an unknown reader will disapprove or misunderstand? I bring all of this
up because what my book is about is how our own tribe is undergoing a
vast and trembling shift from the magic of writing to the magic of
electronics. What I mean to point out here is that the introduction
into a culture of a technique such as writing or a clock is not merely
an extension of man's power to bind time but a transformation of his way
of thinking--and, of course, of the content of his culture. And that is
what I mean to say by calling a medium a metaphor. We are told in
school, quite correctly, that a metaphor suggests what a thing is like
by comparing it to something else. And by the power of its suggestion,
it so fixes a conception in our minds that we cannot imagine the one
thing without the other: Light is a wave; language, a tree; God, a wise
and venerable man; the mind, a dark cavern illuminated by knowledge. And
if these

metaphors no longer serve us, we must, in the nature of the matter, find
others that will. Light is a particle; language, a river; God (as
Bertrand Russell proclaimed), a differential equation; the mind, a
garden that yearns to be cultivated. But our media-metaphors are not so
explicit or so vivid as these, and they are far more complex. In
understanding their metaphorical function, we must take into account the
symbolic forms of their information, the source of their information,
the quantity and speed of their information, the context in which their
information is experienced. Thus, it takes some digging to get at them,
to grasp, for example, that a clock recreates time as an independent,
mathematically precise sequence; that writing recreates the mind as a
tablet on which experience is written; that the telegraph recreates news
as a commodity. And yet, such digging becomes easier if we start from
the assumption that in every tool we create, an idea is embedded that
goes beyond the function of the thing itself. It has been pointed out,
for example, that the invention of eyeglasses in the twelfth century not
only made it possible to improve defective vision but suggested the idea
that human beings need not accept as final either the endowments of
nature or the ravages of time. Eyeglasses refuted the belief that
anatomy is destiny by putting forward the idea that our bodies as well
as our minds are improvable. I do not think it goes too far to say that
there is a link between the invention of eyeglasses in the twelfth
century and gene-splitting research in the twentieth. Even such an
instrument as the microscope, hardly a tool of everyday use, had
embedded within it a quite astonishing idea, not about biology but about
psychology. By revealing a world hitherto hidden from view, the
microscope suggested a possibility about the structure of the mind. If
things are not what they seem, if microbes lurk, unseen, on and under
our skin, if the invisible controls the visible, then is it not possible
that ids and egos and superegos also lurk somewhere unseen? What else
is psychoanalysis but a microscope of

the mind? Where do our notions of mind come from if not from metaphors
generated by our tools? What does it mean to say that someone has an IQ
of 126? There are no numbers in people's heads. Intelligence does not
have quantity or magnitude, except as we believe that it does. And why
do we believe that it does? Because we have tools that imply that this
is what the mind is like. Indeed, our tools for thought suggest to us
what our bodies are like, as when someone refers to her "biological
clock," or when we talk of our "genetic codes," or when we read
someone's face like a book, or when our facial expressions telegraph our
intentions. When Galileo remarked that the language of nature is written
in mathematics, he meant it only as a metaphor. Nature itself does not
speak. Neither do our minds or our bodies or, more to the point of this
book, our bodies politic. Our conversations about nature and about
ourselves are conducted in whatever "languages" we find it possible and
convenient to employ. We do not see nature or intelligence or human
motivation or ideology as "it" is but only as our languages are. And
our languages are our media. Our media are our metaphors. Our
metaphors create the content of our culture.

Media as Epistemology

It is my intention in this book to show that a great media-metaphor
shift has taken place in America, with the result that the content of
much of our public discourse has become dangerous nonsense. With this
in view, my task in the chapters ahead is straightforward. I must,
first, demonstrate how, under the governance of the printing press,
discourse in America was different from what it is now--generally
coherent, serious and rational; and then how, under the governance of
television, it has become shriveled and absurd. But to avoid the
possibility that my analysis will be interpreted as standard-brand
academic whimpering, a kind of elitist complaint against "junk" on
television, I must first explain that my focus is on epistemology, not
on aesthetics or literary criticism. Indeed, I appreciate junk as much
as the next fellow, and I know full well that the printing press has
generated enough of it to fill the Grand Canyon to overflowing.
Television is not old enough to have matched printing's output of junk.

And so, I raise no objection to television's junk. the best things on
television are its junk, and no one and nothing is seriously threatened
by it. Besides, we do not measure a culture by its output of
undisguised trivialities but by what it claims as significant. Therein
is our problem, for television is at its most trivial and, therefore,
most dangerous when its aspirations are high, when it presents itself as
a carrier of important cultural conversations. the irony here is that
this is what intellectuals and critics are constantly urging television
to do. the trouble

with such people is that they do not take television seriously enough.
For, like the printing press, television is nothing less than a
philosophy of rhetoric. To talk seriously about television, one must
therefore talk of epistemology. All other commentary is in itself
trivial. Epistemology is a complex and usually opaque subject concerned
with the origins and nature of knowledge. the part of its subject
matter that is relevant here is the interest it takes in definitions of
truth and the sources from which such definitions come. In particular,
I want to show that definitions of truth are derived, at least in part,
from the character of the media of communication through which
information is conveyed. I want to discuss how media are implicated in
our epistemologies. In the hope of simplifying what I mean by the title
of this chapter, media as epistemology, I find it helpful to borrow a
word from Northrop Frye, who has made use of a principle he calls
resonance. "Through resonance," he writes, "a particular statement in a
particular context acquires a universal significance." Frye offers as an
opening example the phrase "the grapes of wrath," which first appears in
Isaiah in the context of a celebration of a prospective massacre of
Edomites. But the phrase, Frye continues, "has long ago flown away from
this context into many new contexts, contexts that give dignity to the
human situation instead of merely reflecting its bigotries." 2 Having
said this, Frye extends the idea of resonance so that it goes beyond
phrases and sentences. A character in a play or story--Hamlet, for
example, or Lewis Carroll's Alice--may have resonance. Objects may have
resonance, and so may countries: "the smallest details of the geography
of two tiny chopped-up countries, Greece and Israel, have imposed
themselves on our consciousness until they have become part of the map
of our own imaginative world, whether we have ever seen these countries
or not." 3 In addressing the question of the source of resonance, Frye
concludes that metaphor is the generative force--that is, the

power of a phrase, a book, a character, or a history to unify and invest
with meaning a variety of attitudes or experiences. Thus, Athens
becomes a metaphor of intellectual excellence, wherever we find it;
Hamlet, a metaphor of brooding indecisiveness; Alice's wanderings, a
metaphor of a search for order in a world of semantic nonsense.

I now depart from Frye (who, I am certain, would raise no objection) but
I take his word along with me. Every medium of communication, I am
claiming, has resonance, for resonance is metaphor writ large. Whatever
the original and limited context of its use may have been, a medium has
the power to fly far beyond that context into new and unexpected ones.
Because of the way it directs us to organize our minds and integrate our
experience of the world, it imposes itself on our consciousness and
social institutions in myriad forms. It sometimes has the power to
become implicated in our concepts of piety, or goodness, or beauty. And
it is always implicated in the ways we define and regulate our ideas of
truth.

To explain how this happens--how the bias of a medium sits heavy, felt
but unseen, over a culture--I offer three cases of truth-telling.

the first is drawn from a tribe in western Africa that has no writing
system but whose rich oral tradition has given form to its ideas of
civil law.4 When a dispute arises, the complainants come before the
chief of the tribe and state their grievances. With no written law to
guide him, the task of the chief is to search through his vast
repertoire of proverbs and sayings to find one that suits the situation
and is equally satisfying to both complainants. That accomplished, all
parties are agreed that justice has been done, that the truth has been
served. You will recognize, of course, that this was largely the method
of Jesus and other Biblical figures who, living in an essentially oral
culture, drew upon all of the resources of speech, including mnemonic
devices, formulaic expressions and parables, as a means of discovering
and revealing truth. As Walter Ong points out, in

oral cultures proverbs and sayings are not occasional devices: "They are
incessant. They form the substance of thought itself. Thought in any
extended form is impossible without them, for it consists in them."

To people like ourselves any reliance on proverbs and sayings is
reserved largely for resolving disputes among or with children.
"Possession is nine-tenths of the law."

"First come, first served."

"Haste makes waste." These are forms of speech we pull out in small
crises with our young but would think ridiculous to produce in a
courtroom where "serious" matters are to be decided. Can you imagine a
bailiff asking a jury if it has reached a decision and receiving the
reply that "to err is human but to forgive is divine"? Or even better,
"Let us render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's and to God that which
is God's"? For the briefest moment, the judge might be charmed but if a
"serious" language form is not immediately forthcoming, the jury may end
up with a longer sentence than most guilty defendants.

Judges, lawyers and defendants do not regard proverbs or sayings as a
relevant response to legal disputes. In this, they are separated from
the tribal chief by a media-metaphor. For in a print-based courtroom,
where law books, briefs, citations and other written materials define
and organize the method of finding the truth, the oral tradition has
lost much of its resonance--but not all of it. Testimony is expected to
be given orally, on the assumption that the spoken, not the written,
word is a truer reflection of the state of mind of a witness. Indeed,
in many courtrooms jurors are not permitted to take notes, nor are they
given written copies of the judge's explanation of the law. Jurors are
expected to hear the truth, or its opposite, not to read it. Thus, we
may say that there is a clash of resonances in our concept of legal
truth. On the one hand, there is a residual belief in the power of
speech, and speech alone, to carry the truth; on the other hand, there
is a much stronger belief in the authenticity of writing and, in
particular, printing. This second belief

has little tolerance for poetry, proverbs, sayings, parables or any
other expressions of oral wisdom. the law is what legislators and
judges have written. In our culture, lawyers do not have to be wise;
they need to be well briefed.

A similar paradox exists in universities, and with roughly the same
distribution of resonances; that is to say, there are a few residual
traditions based on the notion that speech is the primary carrier of
truth. But for the most part, university conceptions of truth are
tightly bound to the structure and logic of the printed word. To
exemplify this point, I draw here on a personal experience that occurred
during a still widely practiced medieval ritual known as a "doctoral
oral." I use the word medieval literally, for in the Middle Ages
students were always examined orally, and the tradition is carried
forward in the assumption that a candidate must be able to talk
competently about his written work. But, of course, the written work
matters most.

In the case I have in mind, the issue of what is a legitimate form of
truth-telling was raised to a level of consciousness rarely achieved.
the candidate had included in his thesis a footnote, intended as
documentation of a quotation, which read: "Told to the investigator at
the Roosevelt Hotel on January 18, 1981, in the presence of Arthur
Lingeman and Jerrold Gross." This citation drew the attention of no
fewer than four of the five oral examiners, all of whom observed that it
was hardly suitable as a form of documentation and that it ought to be
replaced by a citation from a book or article. "You are not a
journalist," one professor remarked. "You are supposed to be a
scholar." Perhaps because the candidate knew of no published statement
of what he was told at the Roosevelt Hotel, he defended himself
vigorously on the grounds that there were witnesses to what he was told,
that they were available to attest to the accuracy of the quotation, and
that the form in which an idea is conveyed is irrelevant to its truth.
Carried away on the wings of his eloquence, the candidate argued further
that there were more than three hundred references to published works in
his thesis and

that it was extremely unlikely that any of them would be checked for
accuracy by the examiners, by which he meant to raise the question, Why
do you assume the accuracy of a print-referenced citation but not a
speech-referenced one?

the answer he received took the following line: You are mistaken in
believing that the form in which an idea is conveyed is irrelevant to
its truth. In the academic world, the published word is invested with
greater prestige and authenticity than the spoken word. What people say
is assumed to be more casually uttered than what they write. the
written word is assumed to have been reflected upon and revised by its
author, reviewed by authorities and editors. It is easier to verify or
refute, and it is invested with an impersonal and objective character,
which is why, no doubt, you have referred to yourself in your thesis as
"the investigator" and not by your name; that is to say, the written
word is, by its nature, addressed to the world, not an individual. the
written word endures, the spoken word disappears; and that is why
writing is closer to the truth than speaking. Moreover, we are sure you
would prefer that this commission produce a written statement that you
have passed your examination (should you do so) than for us merely to
tell you that you have, and leave it at that. Our written statement
would represent the "truth." Our oral agreement would be only a rumor.

the candidate wisely said no more on the matter except to indicate that
he would make whatever changes the commission suggested and that he
profoundly wished that should he pass the "oral," a written document
would attest to that fact. He did pass, and in time the proper words
were written.

A third example of the influence of media on our epistemol-ogies can be
drawn from the trial of the great Socrates. At the opening of Socrates'
defense, addressing a jury of five hundred, he apologizes for not having
a well-prepared speech. He tells his Athenian brothers that he will
falter, begs that they not interrupt him on that account, asks that they
regard him as they

would a stranger from another city, and promises that he will tell them
the truth, without adornment or eloquence. Beginning this way was, of
course, characteristic of Socrates, but it was not characteristic of the
age in which he lived. For, as Socrates knew full well, his Athenian
brothers did not regard the principles of rhetoric and the expression of
truth to be independent of each other. People like ourselves find great
appeal in Socrates' plea because we are accustomed to thinking of
rhetoric as an ornament of speech--most often pretentious, superficial
and unnecessary. But to the people who invented it, the Sophists of
fifth-century B.c. Greece and their heirs, rhetoric was not merely an
opportunity for dramatic performance but a near indispensable means of
organizing evidence and proofs, and therefore of communicating truth. It
was not only a key element in the education of Athenians (far more
important than philosophy) but a preeminent art form. To the Greeks,
rhetoric was a form of spoken writing. Though it always implied oral
performance, its power to reveal the truth resided in the written word's
power to display arguments in orderly progression. Although Plato
himself disputed this conception of truth (as we might guess from
Socrates' plea), his contemporaries believed that rhetoric was the
proper means through which "right opinion" was to be both discovered and
articulated. To disdain rhetorical rules, to speak one's thoughts in a
random manner, without proper emphasis or appropriate passion, was
considered demeaning to the audience's intelligence and suggestive of
falsehood. Thus, we can assume that many of the 280 jurors who cast a
guilty ballot against Socrates did so because his manner was not
consistent with truthful matter, as they understood the connection. the
point I am leading to by this and the previous examples is that the
concept of truth is intimately linked to the biases of forms of
expression. Truth does not, and never has, come unadorned. It must
appear in its proper clothing or it is not acknowledged, which is a way
of saying that the "truth" is a kind

of cultural prejudice. Each culture conceives of it as being most
authentically expressed in certain symbolic forms that another culture
may regard as trivial or irrelevant. Indeed, to the Greeks of
Aristotle's time, and for two thousand years afterward, scientific truth
was best discovered and expressed by deducing the nature of things from
a set of self-evident premises, which accounts for Aristotle's believing
that women have fewer teeth than men, and that babies are healthier if
conceived when the wind is in the north. Aristotle was twice married
but so far as we know, it did not occur to him to ask either of his
wives if he could count her teeth. And as for his obstetric opinions,
we are safe in assuming he used no questionnaires and hid behind no
curtains. Such acts would have seemed to him both vulgar and
unnecessary, for that was not the way to ascertain the truth of things.
the language of deductive logic provided a surer road. We must not be
too hasty in mocking Aristotle's prejudices. We have enough of our own,
as for example, the equation we moderns make of truth and
quantification. In this prejudice, we come astonishingly close to the
mystical beliefs of Pythagoras and his followers who attempted to submit
all of life to the sovereignty of numbers. Many of our psychologists,
sociologists, economists and other latter-day cabalists will have
numbers to tell them the truth or they will have nothing. Can you
imagine, for example, a modern economist articulating truths about our
standard of living by reciting a poem? Or by telling what happened to
him during a late-night walk through East St. Louis? Or by offering a
series of proverbs and parables, beginning with the saying about a rich
man, a camel, and the eye of a needle? the first would be regarded as
irrelevant, the second merely anecdotal, the last childish. Yet these
forms of language are certainly capable of expressing truths about
economic relationships, as well as any other relationships, and indeed
have been employed by various peoples. But to the modern mind,
resonating with different media-metaphors, the truth in economics is
believed to be best discovered and expressed in numbers. Perhaps it is.
I will not argue the point. I mean only to call attention to the fact
that there is a certain measure of arbitrariness in the forms that
truth-telling may take. We must remember that Galileo merely said that
the language of nature is written in mathematics. He did not say
everything is. And even the truth about nature need not be expressed in
mathematics. For most of human history, the language of nature has been
the language of myth and ritual. These forms, one might add, had the
virtues of leaving nature unthreatened and of encouraging the belief
that human beings are part of it. It hardly befits a people who stand
ready to blow up the planet to praise themselves too vigorously for
having found the true way to talk about nature.

In saying this, I am not making a case for epistemological relativism.
Some ways of truth-telling are better than others, and therefore have a
healthier influence on the cultures that adopt them. Indeed, I hope to
persuade you that the decline of a print-based epistemology and the
accompanying rise of a television-based epistemology has had grave
consequences for public life, that we are getting sillier by the minute.
And that is why it is necessary for me to drive hard the point that the
weight assigned to any form of truth-telling is a function of the
influence of media of communication. "Seeing is believing" has always
had a preeminent status as an epistemological axiom, but "saying is
believing,"

"reading is believing,"

"counting is believing,"

"deducing is believing," and "feeling is believing" are others that have
risen or fallen in importance as cultures have undergone media change.
As a culture moves from orality to writing to printing to televising,
its ideas of truth move with it. Every philosophy is the philosophy of
a stage of life, Nietzsche remarked. To which we might add that every
epistemology is the epistemology of a stage of media development. Truth,
like time itself, is a product of a conversation man has with himself
about and through the techniques of communication he has invented.

Since intelligence is primarily defined as one's capacity to

grasp the truth of things, it follows that what a culture means by
intelligence is derived from the character of its important forms of
communication. In a purely oral culture, intelligence is often
associated with aphoristic ingenuity, that is, the power to invent
compact sayings of wide applicability. the wise Solomon, we are told in
First Kings, knew three thousand proverbs. In a print culture, people
with such a talent are thought to be quaint at best, more likely pompous
bores. In a purely oral culture, a high value is always placed on the
power to memorize, for where there are no written words, the human mind
must function as a mobile library. To forget how something is to be
said or done is a danger to the community and a' gross form of
stupidity. In a print culture, the memorization of a poem, a menu, a
law or most anything else is merely charming. It is almost always
functionally irrelevant and certainly not considered a sign of high
intelligence.

Although the general character of print-intelligence would be known to
anyone who would be reading this book, you may arrive at a reasonably
detailed definition of it by simply considering what is demanded of you
as you read this book. You are required, first of all, to remain more
or less immobile for a fairly long time. If you cannot do this (with
this or any other book), our culture may label you as anything from
hyperkinetic to undisciplined; in any case, as suffering from some sort
of intellectual deficiency. the printing press makes rather stringent
demands on our bodies as well as our minds. Controlling your body is,
however, only a minimal requirement. You must also have learned to pay
no attention to the shapes of the letters on the page. You must see
through them, so to speak, so that you can go directly to the meanings
of the words they form. If you are preoccupied with the shapes of the
letters, you will be an intolerably inefficient reader, likely to be
thought stupid. If you have learned how to get to meanings without
aesthetic distraction, you are required to assume an attitude of
detachment and objectivity. This includes your bringing to the task
what

Bertrand Russell called an "immunity to eloquence," meaning that you are
able to distinguish between the sensuous pleasure, or charm, or
ingratiating tone (if such there be) of the words, and the logic of
their argument. But at the same time, you must be able to tell from the
tone of the language what is the author's attitude toward the subject
and toward the reader. You must, in other words, know the difference
between a joke and an argument. And in judging the quality of an
argument, you must be able to do several things at once, including
delaying a verdict until the entire argument is finished, holding in
mind questions until you have determined where, when or if the text
answers them, and bringing to bear on the text all of your relevant
experience as a counterargument to what is being proposed. You must
also be able to withhold those parts of your knowledge and experience
which, in fact, do not have a bearing on the argument. And in preparing
yourself to do all of this, you must have divested yourself of the
belief that words are magical and, above all, have learned to negotiate
the world of abstractions, for there are very few phrases and sentences
in this book that require you to call forth concrete images. In a
print-culture, we are apt to say of people who are not intelligent that
we must "draw them pictures" so that they may understand. Intelligence
implies that one can dwell comfortably without pictures, in a field of
concepts and generalizations. To be able to do all of these things, and
more, constitutes a primary definition of intelligence in a culture
whose notions of truth are organized around the printed word. In the
next two chapters I want to show that in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries, America was such a place, perhaps the most print-oriented
culture ever to have existed. In subsequent chapters, I want to show
that in the twentieth century, our notions of truth and our ideas of
intelligence have changed as a result of new media displacing the old.
But I do not wish to oversimplify the matter more than is necessary. In
particular, I want to conclude by making three

points that may serve as a defense against certain counterargu-ments
that careful readers may have already formed. the first is that at no
point do I care to claim that changes in media bring about changes in
the structure of people's minds or changes in their cognitive
capacities. There are some who make this claim, or come close to it
(for example, Jerome Bruner, Jack Goody, Walter Ong, Marshall McLuhan,
Julian Jaynes, and Eric Havelock). 7 I am inclined to think they are
right, but my argument does not require it. Therefore, I will not
burden myself with arguing the possibility, for example, that oral
people are less developed intellectually, in some Piagetian sense, than
writing people, or that "television" people are less developed
intellectually than either. My argument is limited to saying that a
major new medium changes the structure of discourse; it does so by
encouraging certain uses of the intellect, by favoring certain
definitions of intelligence and wisdom, and by demanding a certain kind
of content--in a phrase, by creating new forms of truth-telling. I will
say once again that I am no relativist in this matter, and that I
believe the epistemology created by television not only is inferior to a
print-based epistemology but is dangerous and absurdist. the second
point is that the epistemological shift I have intimated, and will
describe in detail, has not yet included (and perhaps never will
include) everyone and everything. While some old media do, in fact,
disappear (e.g., pictographic writing and illuminated manuscripts) and
with them, the institutions and cognitive habits they favored, other
forms of conversation will always remain. Speech, for example, and
writing. Thus the epistemology of new forms such as television does not
have an entirely unchallenged influence. I find it useful to think of
the situation in this way: Changes in the symbolic environment are like
changes in the natural environment; they are both gradual and additive
at first, and then, all at once, a critical mass is achieved, as the
physicists say. A river that has slowly been polluted suddenly becomes

toxic; most of the fish perish; swimming becomes a danger to health. But
even then, the river may look the same and one may still take a boat
ride on it. In other words, even when life has been taken from it, the
river does not disappear, nor do all of its uses, but its value has been
seriously diminished and its degraded condition will have harmful
effects throughout the landscape. It is this way with our symbolic
environment. We have reached, I believe, a critical mass in that
electronic media have decisively and irreversibly changed the character
of our symbolic environment. We are now a culture whose information,
ideas and epistemology are given form by television, not by the printed
word. To be sure, there are still readers and there are many books
published, but the uses of print and reading are not the same as they
once were; not even in schools, the last institutions where print was
thought to be invincible. They delude themselves who believe that
television and print coexist, for coexistence implies parity. There is
no parity here. Print is now merely a residual epistemology, and it
will remain so, aided to some extent by the computer, and newspapers and
magazines that are made to look like television screens. Like the fish
who survive a toxic river and the boatmen who sail on it, there still
dwell among us those whose sense of things is largely influenced by
older and clearer waters. the third point is that in the analogy I have
drawn above, the river refers largely to what we call public
discourse--our political, religious, informational and commercial forms
of conversation. I am arguing that a television-based epistemology
pollutes public communication and its surrounding landscape, not that it
pollutes everything. In the first place, I am constantly reminded of
television's value as a source of comfort and pleasure to the elderly,
the infirm and, indeed, all people who find themselves alone in motel
rooms. I am also aware of television's potential for creating a theater
for the masses (a subject which in my opinion has not been taken
seriously enough). There are also claims that whatever power television
might have to-

undermine rational discourse, its emotional power is so great that it
could arouse sentiment against the Vietnam War or against more virulent
forms of racism. These and other beneficial possibilities are not to be
taken lightly. But there is still another reason why I should not like
to be understood as making a total assault on television. Anyone who is
even slightly familiar with the history of communications knows that
every new technology for thinking involves a tradeoff. It giveth and
taketh away, although not quite in equal measure. Media change does not
necessarily result in equilibrium. It sometimes creates more than it
destroys. Sometimes, it is the other way around. We must be careful in
praising or condemning because the future may hold surprises for us. the
invention of the printing press itself is a paradigmatic example.
Typography fostered the modern idea of individuality, but it destroyed
the medieval sense of community and integration. Typography created
prose but made poetry into an exotic and elitist form of expression.
Typography made modern science possible but transformed religious
sensibility into mere superstition. Typography assisted in the growth
of the nation-state but thereby made patriotism into a sordid if not
lethal emotion. Obviously, my point of view is that the
four-hundred-year imperial dominance of typography was of far greater
benefit than deficit. Most of our modern ideas about the uses of the
intellect were formed by the printed word, as were our ideas about
education, knowledge, truth and information. I will try to demonstrate
that as typography moves to the periphery of our culture and television
takes its place at the center, the seriousness, clarity and, above all,
value of public discourse dangerously declines. On what benefits may
come from other directions, one must keep an open mind.

Typographic America

In the Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, there appears a remarkable
quotation attributed to Michael Welfare, one of the founders of a
religious sect known as the Dunkers and a longtime acquaintance of
Franklin. the statement had its origins in Welfare's complaint to
Franklin that zealots of other religious persuasions were spreading lies
about the Dunkers, accusing them of abominable principles to which, in
fact, they were utter strangers. Franklin suggested that such abuse
might be diminished if the Dunkers published the articles of their
belief and the rules of their discipline. Welfare replied that this
course of action had been discussed among his co-religionists but had
been rejected. He then explained their reasoning in the following
words:

When we were first drawn together as a society, it had pleased God to
enlighten our minds so far as to see that some doctrines, which we once
esteemed truths, were errors, and that others, which we had esteemed
errors, were real truths. From time to time He has been pleased to
afford us farther light, and our principles have been improving, and our
errors diminishing. Now we are not sure that we are arrived at the end
of this progression, and at the perfection of spiritual or theological
knowledge; and we fear that, if we should feel ourselves as if bound and
confined by it, and perhaps be unwilling to receive further improvement,
and our successors still more so, as conceiving what we their elders and
founders had done, to be something sacred, never to be departed from.

Franklin describes this sentiment as a singular instance in the history
of mankind of modesty in a sect. Modesty is certainly the word for it,
but the statement is extraordinary for other reasons, too. We have here
a criticism of the epistemology of the written word worthy of Plato.
Moses himself might be interested although he could hardly approve. the
Dunkers came close here to formulating a commandment about religious
discourse: Thou shalt not write down thy principles, still less print
them, lest thou shall be entrapped by them for all time. We may, in any
case, consider it a significant loss that we have no record of the
deliberations of the Dunkers. It would certainly shed light on the
premise of this book, i.e., that the form in which ideas are expressed
affects what those ideas will be. But more important, their
deliberations were in all likelihood a singular instance in Colonial
America of a distrust of the printed word. For the Americans among whom
Franklin lived were as committed to the printed word as any group of
people who have ever lived. Whatever else may be said of those
immigrants who came to settle in New England, it is a paramount fact
that they and their heirs were dedicated and skillful readers whose
religious sensibilities, political ideas and social life were embedded
in the medium of typography. We know that on the Mayflower itself
several books were included as cargo, most importantly, the Bible and
Captain John Smith's Description of New England. (For immigrants headed
toward a largely uncharted land, we may suppose that the latter book was
as carefully read as the former.) We know, too, that in the very first
days of colonization each minister was given ten pounds with which to
start a religious library. And although literacy rates are notoriously
difficult to assess, there is sufficient evidence (mostly drawn from
signatures) that between 1640 and 1700, the literacy rate for men in
Massachusetts and Connecticut was somewhere between 89 percent and 95
percent, quite probably the highest concentration of literate males to
be found anywhere in the world at that time.2 (the literacy rate for

women in those colonies is estimated to have run as high as 62 percent
in the years 1681-1697.3) It is to be understood that the Bible was the
central reading matter in all households, for these people were
Protestants who shared Luther's belief that printing was "God's highest
and ex-tremest act of Grace, whereby the business of the Gospel is
driven forward." Of course, the business of the Gospel may be driven
forward in books other than the Bible, as for example in the famous Bay
Psalm Book, printed in 1640 and generally regarded as America's first
best seller. But it is not to be assumed that these people confined
their reading to religious matters. Probate records indicate that 60
percent of the estates in Middlesex County between the years 1654 and
1699 contained books, all but 8 percent of them including more than the
Bible? In fact, between 1682 and 1685, Boston's leading bookseller
imported 3,421 books from one English dealer, most of these nonreligious
books. the meaning of this fact may be appreciated when one adds that
these books were intended for consumption by approximately 75,000 people
then living in the northern colonies. the modern equivalent would be
ten million books. Aside from the fact that the religion of these
Calvinist Puritans demanded that they be literate, three other factors
account for the colonists' preoccupation with the printed word. Since
the male literacy rate in seventeenth-century England did not exceed 40
percent, we may assume, first of all, that the migrants to New England
came from more literate areas of England or from more literate segments
of the population, or both.6 In other words, they came here as readers
and were certain to believe that reading was as important in the New
World as it was in the Old. Second, from 1650 onward almost all New
England towns passed laws requiring the maintenance of a "reading and
writing" school, the large communities being required to maintain a
grammar school, as well. In all such laws, reference is made to Satan,
whose evil designs, it was supposed, could be

thwarted at every turn by education. But there were other reasons why
education was required, as suggested by the following ditty, popular in
the seventeenth century:

From public schools shall general knowledge flow, For 'tis the people's
sacred right to know.

These people, in other words, had more than the subjection of Satan on
their minds. Beginning in the sixteenth century, a great
epistemological shift had taken place in which knowledge of every kind
was transferred to, and made manifest through, the printed page. "More
than any other device," Lewis Mumford wrote of this shift, "the printed
book released people from the domination of the immediate and the
local;... print made a greater impression than actual events .... To
exist was to exist in print: the rest of the world tended gradually to
become more shadowy. Learning became book-learning." 9 In light of
this, we may assume that the schooling of the young was understood by
the colonists not only as a moral duty but as an intellectual
imperative. (the England from which they came was an island of schools.
By 1660, for example, there were schools in England, one school
approximately every twelve miles. And it is clear that growth in
literacy was closely connected to schooling. Where schooling was not
required (as in Rhode Island) or weak school laws prevailed (as in New
Hampshire), literacy rates increased more slowly than elsewhere.
Finally, these displaced Englishmen did not need to print their own
books or even nurture their own writers. They imported, whole, a
sophisticated literary tradition from their Motherland. In 1736,
booksellers advertised the availability of the Spectator, the Tatler,
and Steele's Guardian. In 1738, advertisements appeared for Locke's
Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Pope's Homer, Swift's A Tale of a
Tub and Dryden's

Fables. 1 1 Timothy Dwight, president of Yale University, described the
American situation succinctly:

books of almost every kind, on almost every subject, are already written
to our hands. Our situation in this respect is singular. As we speak
the same language with the people of Great Britain, and have usually
been at peace with that country; our commerce with it brings to us,
regularly, not a small part of the books with which it is deluged. In
every art, science, and path of literature, we obtain those, which to a
great extent supply our wants.

de-

One significant implication of this situation is that no literary
aristocracy emerged in Colonial America. Reading was not regarded as an
elitist activity, and printed matter was spread evenly among all kinds
of people. A thriving, classless reading culture developed because, as
Daniel Boorstin writes, "It was diffuse. Its center was everywhere
because it was nowhere. Every man was close to what [printed matter]
talked about. Everyone could speak the same language. It was the
product of a busy, mobile, public society." 3 By 1772, Jacob Duch could
write: "the poorest labourer upon the shore of the Delaware thinks
himself entitled to deliver his sentiment in matters of religion or
politics with as much freedom as the gentleman or scholar .... Such is
the prevailing taste for books of every kind, that almost every man is a
reader." 14 Where such a keen taste for books prevailed among the
general population, we need not be surprised that Thomas Paine's Common
Sense, published on January 10, 1776, sold more than 100,000 copies by
March of the same year.5 In 1985, a book would have to sell eight
million copies (in two months) to match the proportion of the population
Paine's book attracted. If we go beyond March, 1776, a more awesome set
of figures is given by Howard Fast: "No one knows just how many copies
were actually printed. the most conservative sources place the figure
at something over 300,000 copies. Others place it just

under half a million. Taking a figure of 400,000 in a population of
3,000,000, a book published today would have to sell 24,000,000 copies
to do as well." 16 the only communication event that could produce such
collective attention in today's America is the Superbowl. It is worth
pausing here for a moment to say something of Thomas Paine, for in an
important way he is a measure of the high and wide level of literacy
that existed in his time. In particular, I want to note that in spite
of his lowly origins, no question has ever been raised, as it has with
Shakespeare, about whether or not Paine was, in fact, the author of the
works attributed to him. It is true that we know more of Paine's life
than Shakespeare's (although not more of Paine's early periods), but it
is also true that Paine had less formal schooling than Shakespeare, and
came from the lowest laboring class before he arrived in America. In
spite of these disadvantages, Paine wrote political philosophy and
polemics the equal in lucidity and vitality (although not quantity) of
Voltaire's, Rousseau's, and contemporary English philosophers',
including Edmund Burke. Yet no one asked the question, How could an
unschooled stay-maker from England's impoverished class produce such
stunning prose? From time to time Paine's lack of education was pointed
out by his enemies (and he, himself, felt inferior because of this
deficiency), but it was never doubted that such powers of written
expression could originate from a common man. It is also worth
mentioning that the full title of Paine's most widely read book is
Common Sense, Written by an Englishman. the tagline is important here
because, as noted earlier, Americans did not write many books in the
Colonial period, which Benjamin Franklin tried to explain by claiming
that Americans were too busy doing other things. Perhaps so. But
Americans were not too busy to make use of the printing press, even if
not for books they themselves had written. the first printing press in
America was established in 1638 as an adjunct of Harvard

University, which was two years old at the time. 7 Presses were
established shortly thereafter in Boston and Philadelphia without
resistance by the Crown, a curious fact since at this time presses were
not permitted in Liverpool and Birmingham, among other English cities.
the earliest use of the press was for the printing of newsletters,
mostly done on cheap paper. It may well be that the development of an
American literature was retarded not by the industry of the people or
the availability of English literature but by the scarcity of quality
paper. As late as Revolutionary days, George Washington was forced to
write to his generals on unsightly scraps of paper, and his dispatches
were not enclosed in envelopes, paper being too scarce for such use. Yet
by the late seventeenth century, there was a beginning to a native
literature that turned out to have as much to do with the typographic
bias of American culture as books. I refer, of course, to the
newspaper, at which Americans first tried their hand on September 25,
1690, in Boston, when Benjamin Harris printed the first edition of a
three-page paper he called Publick Occurrences Both Foreign and
Domestick. Before he came to America, Harris had played a role in
"exposing" a nonexistent conspiracy of Catholics to slaughter
Protestants and burn London. His London newspaper, Domestick
Intelligence, revealed the "Popish plot," with the result that Catholics
were harshly persecuted.2 Harris, no stranger to mendacity, indicated in
his prospectus for Publick Occurrences that a newspaper was necessary to
combat the spirit of lying which then prevailed in Boston and, I am
told, still does. He concluded his prospectus with the following
sentence: "It is supposed that none will dislike this Proposal but such
as intend to be guilty of so villainous a crime." Harris was right about
who would dislike his proposal. the second issue of Publick Occurrences
never appeared. the Governor and Council suppressed it, complaining
that Harris had printed "reflections of a very high nature,"21 by which
they meant that they had no intention of admitting any impediments to
whatever villainy they wished to pursue. Thus, in the New World began
the struggle for freedom of information which, in the Old, had begun a
century before. Harris' abortive effort inspired other attempts at
newspaper publication: for example, the Boston News-Letter, published in
1704, generally regarded as the first continuously published American
newspaper. This was followed by the Boston Gazette (in 1719) and the
New-England Courant (in 1721 ), whose editor, James Franklin, was the
older brother of Benjamin. By 1730, there were seven newspapers
published regularly in four colonies, and by 1800 there were more than
180. In 1770, the New York Gazette congratulated itself and other
papers by writing (in part):

'Tis truth (with deference to the college) Newspapers are the spring of
Knowledge, the general source throughout the nation, Of every modern
conversation.

At the end of the eighteenth century, the Reverend Samuel Miller boasted
that the United States had more than two-thirds the number of newspapers
available in England, and yet had only half the population of England.
In 1786, Benjamin Franklin observed that Americans were so busy reading
newspapers and pamphlets that they scarcely had time for books. (One
book they apparently always had time for was Noah Webster's American
Spelling Book, for it sold more than 24 million copies between 1783 and
1843.)24 Franklin's reference to pamphlets ought not to go unnoticed.
the proliferation of newspapers in all the Colonies was accompanied by
the rapid diffusion of pamphlets and broadsides. Alexis de Tocque-ville
took note of this fact in his Democracy in America, published in 1835:
"In America," he wrote, "parties do not write books to combat each
other's opinions, but pamphlets, which are circulated for a day with
incredible rapidity and then expire." 25 And

38 Typegraphic America

he referred to both newspapers and pamphlets when he observed, "the
invention of firearms equalized the vassal and the noble on the field of
battle; the art of printing opened the same resources to the minds of
all classes; the post brought knowledge alike to the door of the cottage
and to the gate of the palace." 26 At the time Tocqueville was making
his observations of America, printing had already spread to all the
regions of the country. the South had lagged behind the North not only
in the formation of schools (almost all of which were private rather
than public) but in its uses of the printing press. Virginia, for
example, did not get its first regularly published newspaper, the
Virginia Gazette, until 1736. But toward the end of the eighteenth
century, the movement of ideas via the printed word was relatively
rapid, and something approximating a national conversation emerged. For
example, the Federalist Papers, an out-pouring of eighty-five essays
written by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay (all under
the name of Publius) originally appeared in a New York newspaper during
1787 and 1788 but were read almost as widely in the South as the North.
As America moved into the nineteenth century, it did so as a fully
print-based culture in all of its regions. Between 1825 and 1850, the
number of subscription libraries trebled.27 What were called "mechanics'
and apprentices' libraries"--that is, libraries intended for the working
class--also emerged as a force for literacy. In 1829, the New York
Apprentices' Library housed ten thousand volumes, of which 1,600
apprentices drew books. By 1857, the same library served three-quarters
of a million people?8 Aided by Congress' lowering of the postal rates in
1851, the penny newspaper, the periodical, the Sunday school tract, and
the cheaply bound book were abundantly available. Between 1836 and
1890, 107 million copies of the McGuffey Reader were distributed to the
schools.29 And although the reading of novels was not considered an
altogether reputable use of time, Americans devoured them. Of Walter
Scott's novels, published

between 1814 and 1832, Samuel Goodrich wrote: "the appearance of a new
novel from his pen caused a greater sensation in the United States than
did some of the battles of Napoleon. . . Everybody read these works;
everybody--the refined and the simple." 3o Publishers were so anxious to
make prospective best sellers available, they would sometimes dispatch
messengers to incoming packet boats and "within a single day set up,
printed and bound in paper covers the most recent novel of Bulwer or
Dickens." 3 There being no international copy-right laws, "pirated"
editions abounded, with no complaint from the public, or much from
authors, who were lionized. When Charles Dickens visited America in
1842, his reception equaled the adulation we offer today to television
stars, quarterbacks, and Michael Jackson. "I can give you no conception
of my welcome," Dickens wrote to a friend. "There never was a King or
Emperor upon earth so cheered and followed by the crowds, and
entertained at splendid balls and dinners and waited upon by public
bodies of all kinds .... If I go out in a carriage, the crowd surrounds
it and escorts me home; if I go to the theater, the whole house... rises
as one man and the timbers ring again." 32 A native daughter, Harriet
Beecher Stowe, was not offered the same kind of adoring attention--and,
of course, in the South, had her carriage been surrounded, it would not
have been for the purpose of escorting her home--but her Uncle Tom's
Cabin sold 305,000 copies in its first year, the equivalent of four
million in today's America. Alexis de Tocqueville was not the only
foreign visitor to be impressed by the Americans' immersion in printed
matter. During the nineteenth century, scores of Englishmen came to
America to see for themselves what had become of the Colonies. All were
impressed with the high level of literacy and in particular its
extension to all classes.33 In addition, they were astounded by the near
universality of lecture halls in which stylized oral performance
provided a continuous reinforcement of the print tradition. Many of
these lecture halls originated as a result of the Lyceum Movement, a
form of adult education. Usually associated with the efforts of Josiah
Holbrook, a New England farmer, the Lyceum Movement had as its purpose
the diffusion of knowledge, the promotion of common schools, the
creation of libraries and, especially, the establishment of lecture
halls. By 1835, there were more than three thousand Lyceums in fifteen
states.3' Most of these were located east of the Alleghenies, but by
1840, they were to be found at the edges of the frontier, as far west as
Iowa and Minnesota. Alfred Bunn, an Englishman on an extensive tour
through America, reported in 1853 that "practically every village had
its lecture hall." 35 He added: "It is a matter of wonderment... to
witness the youthful workmen, the overtired artisan, the worn-out
factory girl... rushing... after the toil of the day is over, into the
hot atmosphere of a crowded lecture room." 36 Bunn's countryman J. F.
W. Johnston attended lectures at this time at the Smithsonian
Institution and "found the lecture halls jammed with capacity audiences
of 1200 and 1500 people." 57 Among the lecturers these audiences could
hear were the leading intellectuals, writers and humorists (who were
also writers) of their time, including Henry Ward Beecher, Horace
Greeley, Louis Agassiz and Ralph Waldo Emerson (whose fee for a lecture
was fifty dollars).38 In his autobiography, Mark Twain devotes two
chapters to his experiences as a lecturer on the Lyceum circuit. "I
began as a lecturer in 1866 in California and Nevada," he wrote. "[I]
lectured in New York once and in the Mississippi Valley a few times; in
1868 [I] made the whole Western circuit; and in the two or three
following seasons added the Eastern circuit to my route." 39 Apparently,
Emerson was underpaid since Twain remarks that some lecturers charged as
much as $250 when they spoke in towns and $400 when they spoke in cities
(which is almost as much, in today's terms, as the going price for a
lecture by a retired television newscaster). the point all this is
leading to is that from its beginning until

well into the nineteenth century, America was as dominated by the
printed word and an oratory based on the printed word as any society we
know of. This situation was only in part a legacy of the Protestant
tradition. As Richard Hofstadter reminds us, America was founded by
intellectuals, a rare occurrence in the history of modern nations. "the
Founding Fathers," he writes, "were sages, scientists, men of broad
cultivation, many of them apt in classical learning, who used their wide
reading in history, politics, and law to solve the exigent problems of
their time." A society shaped by such men does not easily move in
contrary directions. We might even say that America was founded by
intellectuals, from which it has taken us two centuries and a
communications revolution to recover. Hofstadter has written
convincingly of our efforts to "recover," that is to say, of the
anti-intellectual strain in American public life, but he concedes that
his focus distorts the general picture. It is akin to writing a history
of American business by concentrating on the history of bankruptcies.
the influence of the printed word in every arena of public discourse was
insistent and powerful not merely because of the quantity of printed
matter but because of its monopoly. This point cannot be stressed
enough, especially for those who are reluctant to acknowledge profound
differences in the media environments of then and now. One sometimes
hears it said, for example, that there is more printed matter available
today than ever before, which is undoubtedly true. But from the
seventeenth century to the late nineteenth century, printed matter was
virtually all that was available. There were no movies to see, radio to
hear, photographic displays to look at, records to play. There was no
television. Public business was channeled into and expressed through
print, which became the model, the metaphor and the measure of all
discourse. the resonances of the lineal, analytical structure of print,
and in particular, of expository prose, could be felt everywhere. For
example, in how people talked. Tocqueville remarks on this in Democracy
in

America. "An American," he wrote, "cannot converse, but he can discuss,
and his talk falls into a dissertation. He speaks to you as if he was
addressing a meeting; and if he should chance to become warm in the
discussion, he will say 'Gentlemen' to the person with whom he is
conversing." 42 This odd practice is less a reflection of an American's
obstinacy than of his modeling his conversational style on the structure
of the printed word. Since the printed word is impersonal and is
addressed to an invisible audience, what Tocqueville is describing here
is a kind of printed orality, which was observable in diverse forms of
oral discourse. On the pulpit, for example, sermons were usually
written speeches delivered in a stately, impersonal tone consisting
"largely of an impassioned, coldly analytical cataloguing of the
attributes of the Deity as revealed to man through Nature and Nature's
Laws."43 And even when the Great Awakening came--a revivalist movement
that challenged the analytical, dispassionate spirit of Deism--its
highly emotional preachers used an oratory that could be transformed
easily to the printed page. the most charismatic of these men was the
Reverend George Whitefield, who beginning in 1739 preached all over
America to large crowds. In Philadelphia, he addressed an audience of
ten thousand people, whom he deeply stirred and alarmed by assuring them
of eternal hellfire if they refused to accept Christ. Benjamin Franklin
witnessed one of Whitefield's performances and responded by offering to
become his publisher. In due time, Whitefield's journals and sermons
were published by B. Franklin of Philadelphia.

But obviously I do not mean to say that print merely influenced the form
of public discourse. That does not say much unless one connects it to
the more important idea that form will determine the nature of content.
For those readers who may believe that this idea is too "McLuhanesque"
for their taste, I offer Karl Marx from the German Ideology. "Is the
Iliad possible," he asks rhetorically, "when the printing press and even
printing machines exist? Is it not inevitable that with the emergence
of the press, the singing and the telling and the muse cease; that is,
the conditions necessary for epic poetry disappear?"45 Marx understood
well that the press was not merely a machine but a structure for
discourse, which both rules out and insists upon certain kinds of
content and, inevitably, a certain kind of audience. He did not,
himself, fully explore the matter, and others have taken up the task. I
too must try my hand at it--to explore how the press worked as a
metaphor and an epistemology to create a serious and rational public
conversation, from which we have now been so dramatically separated.

the Typographic Mind

the first of the seven famous debates between Abraham Lincoln and
Stephen A. Douglas took place on August 21, 1858, in Ottowa, Illinois.
Their arrangement provided that Douglas would speak first, for one hour;
Lincoln would take an hour and a half to reply; Douglas, a half hour to
rebut Lincoln's reply. This debate was considerably shorter than those
to which the two men were accustomed. In fact, they had tangled several
times before, and all of their encounters had been much lengthier and
more exhausting. For example, on October 16, 1854, in Peoria, Illinois,
Douglas delivered a three-hour address to which Lincoln, by agreement,
was to respond. When Lincoln's turn came, he reminded the audience that
it was already 5 p.m., that he would probably require as much time as
Douglas and that Douglas was still scheduled for a rebuttal. He
proposed, therefore, that the audience go home, have dinner, and return
refreshed for four more hours of talk. the audience amiably agreed, and
matters proceeded as Lincoln had outlined. What kind of audience was
this? Who were these people who could so cheerfully accommodate
themselves to seven hours of oratory? It should be noted, by the way,
that Lincoln and Douglas Were not presidential candidates; at the time
of their encounter in Peoria they were not even candidates for the
United States Senate. But their audiences were not especially concerned
with their official status. These were people who regarded such events
as essential to their political education, who took them to be an
integral part of their social lives, and who

were quite accustomed to extended oratorical performances. Typically at
county or state fairs, programs included many speakers, most of whom
were allotted three hours for their arguments. And since it was
preferred that speakers not go unanswered, their opponents were allotted
an equal length of time. (One might add that the speakers were not
always men. At one fair lasting several days in Springfield, "Each
evening a woman [lectured] in the courtroom on 'Woman's Influence in the
Great Progressive Movements of the Day." "2) Moreover, these people did
not rely on fairs or special events to get their fill of oratory. the
tradition of the "stump" speaker was widely practiced, especially in the
western states. By the stump of a felled tree or some equivalent open
space, a speaker would gather an audience, and, as the saying had it,
"take the stump" for two or three hours. Although audiences were mostly
respectful and attentive, they were not quiet or unemotional. Throughout
the Lincoln-Douglas debates, for example, people shouted encouragement
to the speakers ("You tell 'em, Abe!") or voiced terse expressions of
scorn ("Answer that one, if you can"). Applause was frequent, usually
reserved for a humorous or elegant phrase or a cogent point. At the
first debate in Ottowa, Douglas responded to lengthy applause with a
remarkable and revealing statement. "My friends," he said, "silence
will be more acceptable to me in the discussion of these questions than
applause. I desire to address myself to your judgment, your
understanding, and your consciences, and not to your passions or your
enthusiasms." 3 As to the conscience of the audience, or even its
judgment, it is difficult to say very much. But as to its
understanding, a great deal can be assumed. For one thing, its attention
span would obviously have been extraordinary by current standards. Is
there any audience of Americans today who could endure seven hours of
talk? or five? or three? Especially without pictures of any kind?
Second, these audiences must have had an equally extraordinary capacity
to comprehend lengthy and complex sentences aurally. In

Douglas' Ottowa speech he included in his one-hour address three long,
legally phrased resolutions of the Abolition platform. Lincoln, in his
reply, read even longer passages from a published speech he had
delivered on a previous occasion. For all of Lincoln's celebrated
economy of style, his sentence structure in the debates was intricate
and subtle, as was Douglas'. In the second debate, at Freeport,
Illinois, Lincoln rose to answer Douglas in the following words:

It will readily occur to you that I cannot, in half an hour, notice all
the things that so able a man as Judge Douglas can say in an hour and a
half; and I hope, therefore, if there be anything that he has said upon
which you would like to hear something from me, but which I omit to
comment upon, you will bear in mind that it would be expecting an
impossibility for me to cover his whole ground.

It is hard to imagine the present occupant of the White House being
capable of constructing such clauses in similar circumstances. And if he
were, he would surely do so at the risk of burdening the comprehension
or concentration of his audience. People of a television culture need
"plain language" both aurally and visually, and will even go so far as
to require it in some circumstances by law. the Gettysburg Address
would probably have been largely incomprehensible to a 1985 audience.
the Lincoln-Douglas audience apparently had a considerable grasp of the
issues being debated, including knowledge of historical events and
complex political matters. At Ottowa, Douglas put seven interrogatives
to Lincoln, all of which would have been rhetorically pointless unless
the audience was familiar with the Dred Scott decision, the quarrel
between Douglas and President Buchanan, the disaffection of some
Democrats, the Abolition platform, and Lincoln's famous "House divided"
speech at Cooper Union. Further, in answering Douglas' questions in a
later debate, Lincoln made a subtle distinction between what he was, or
was not, "pledged" to uphold and what he actually believed, which he
surely would not have attempted unless he assumed the audience could
grasp his point. Finally, while both speakers employed some of the more
simple-minded weapons of argumentative language (e.g., name-calling and
bombastic generalities), they consistently drew upon more complex
rhetorical resources--sarcasm, irony, paradox, elaborated metaphors,
fine distinctions and the exposure of contradiction, none of which would
have advanced their respective causes unless the audience was fully
aware of the means being employed. It would be false, however, to give
the impression that these 1858 audiences were models of intellectual
propriety. All of the Lincoln-Douglas debates were conducted amid a
carnival-like atmosphere. Bands played (although not during the
debates), hawkers sold their wares, children romped, liquor was
available. These were important social events as well as rhetorical
performances, but this did not trivialize them. As I have indicated,
these audiences were made up of people whose intellectual lives and
public business were fully integrated into their social world. As
Winthrop Hudson has pointed out, even Methodist camp meetings combined
picnics with opportunities to listen to oratory. Indeed, most of the
camp grounds originally established for religious
inspiration--Chautauqua, New York; Ocean Grove, New Jersey; Bayview,
Michigan; Junaluska, North Carolina--were eventually transformed into
conference centers, serving educational and intellectual functions. In
other words, the use of language as a means of complex argument was an
important, pleasurable and common form of discourse in almost every
public arena. To understand the audience to whom Lincoln and Douglas
directed their memorable language, we must remember that these people
were the grandsons and granddaughters of the Enlightenment (American
version). They were the progeny of Franklin, Jefferson, Madison and Tom
Paine, the inheritors of

the Empire of Reason, as Henry Steele Commager has called
eighteenth-century America. It is true that among their number were
frontiersmen, some of whom were barely literate, and immigrants to whom
English was still strange. It is also true that by 1858, the photograph
and telegraph had been invented, the advance guard of a new epistemology
that would put an end to the Empire of Reason. But this would not
become evident until the twentieth century. At the time of the
Lincoln-Douglas debates, America was in the middle years of its most
glorious literary outpouring. In 1858, Edwin Markham was six years old;
Mark Twain was twenty-three; Emily Dickinson, twenty-eight; Whitman and
James Russell Lowell, thirty-nine; Thoreau, forty-one; Melville,
forty-five; Whittier and Longfellow, fifty-one; Hawthorne and Emerson,
fifty-four and fifty-five; Poe had died nine years before. I choose the
Lincoln-Douglas debates as a starting point for this chapter not only
because they were the preeminent example of political discourse in the
mid-nineteenth century but also because they illustrate the power of
typography to control the character of that discourse. Both the
speakers and their audience were habituated to a kind of oratory that
may be described as literary. For all of the hoopla and socializing
surrounding the event, the speakers had little to offer, and audiences
little to expect, but language. And the language that was offered was
clearly modeled on the style of the written word. To anyone who has
read what Lincoln and Douglas said, this is obvious from beginning to
end. the debates opened, in fact, with Douglas making the following
introduction, highly characteristic of everything that was said
afterward:

Ladies and Gentlemen: I appear before you today for the purpose of
discussing the leading political topics which now agitate the public
mind. By an arrangement between Mr. Lincoln and myself, we are present
here today for the purpose of having a joint discussion, as the
representatives of the two great political parties of the

State and Union, upon the principles in issue between those parties, and
this vast concourse of people shows the deep feeling which pervades the
public mind in regard to the questions dividing us.

This language is pure print. That the occasion required it to be spoken
aloud cannot obscure that fact. And that the audience was able to
process it through the ear is remarkable only to people whose culture no
longer resonates powerfully with the printed word. Not only did Lincoln
and Douglas write all their speeches in advance, but they also planned
their rebuttals in writing. Even the spontaneous interactions between
the speakers were expressed in a sentence structure, sentence length and
rhetorical organization which took their form from writing. To be sure,
there were elements of pure orality in their presentations. After all,
neither speaker was indifferent to the moods of the audiences.
Nonetheless, the resonance of typography was ever-present. Here was
argument and counterargument, claim and counterclaim, criticism of
relevant texts, the most careful scrutiny of the previously uttered
sentences of one's opponent. In short, the Lincoln-Douglas debates may
be described as expository prose lifted whole from the printed page.
That is the meaning of Douglas' reproach to the audience. He claimed
that his appeal was to understanding and not to passion, as if the
audience were to be silent, reflective readers, and his language the
text which they must ponder. Which brings us, of course, to the
questions, What are the implications for public discourse of a written,
or typographic, metaphor? What is the character of its content? What
does it demand of the public? What uses of the mind does it favor? One
must begin, I think, by pointing to the obvious fact that the written
word, and an oratory based upon it, has a content: a semantic,
paraphrasable, propositional content. This may sound odd, but since I
shall be arguing soon enough that much of our discourse today has only a
marginal propositional content, I must stress the point here. Whenever
language is the principal medium of communication--especially language
controlled by the rigors of print--an idea, a fact, a claim is the
inevitable result. the idea may be banal, the fact irrelevant, the
claim false, but there is no escape from meaning when language is the
instrument guiding one's thought. Though one may accomplish it from
time to time, it is very hard to say nothing when employing a written
English sentence. What else is exposition good for? Words have very
little to recommend them except as carriers of meaning. the shapes of
written words are not especially interesting to look at. Even the
sounds of sentences of spoken words are rarely engaging except when
composed by those with extraordinary poetic gifts. If a sentence
refuses to issue forth a fact, a request, a question, an assertion, an
explanation, it is nonsense, a mere grammatical shell. As a consequence
a language-centered discourse such as was characteristic of eighteenth-
and nineteenth-century America tends to be both content-laden and
serious, all the more so when it takes its form from print. It is
serious because meaning demands to be understood. A written sentence
calls upon its author to say something, upon its reader to know the
import of what is said. And when an author and reader are struggling
with semantic meaning, they are engaged in the most serious challenge to
the intellect. This is especially the case with the act of reading, for
authors are not always trustworthy. They lie, they become confused,
they over-generalize, they abuse logic and, sometimes, common sense. the
reader must come armed, in a serious state of intellectual readiness.
This is not easy because he comes to the text alone. In reading, one's
responses are isolated, one's intellect thrown back on its own
resources. To be confronted by the cold abstractions of printed
sentences is to look upon language bare, without the assistance of
either beauty or community. Thus, reading is by its nature a serious
business. It is also, of course, an essentially rational activity.

From Erasmus in the sixteenth century to Elizabeth Eiseno stein in the
twentieth, almost every scholar who has grappled with the question of
what reading does to one's habits of mind has concluded that the process
encourages rationality; that the sequential, propositional character of
the written word fosters what Walter Ong calls the "analytic management
of knowledge." To engage the written word means to follow a line of
thought, which requires considerable powers of classifying,
inference-making and reasoning. It means to uncover lies, confusions,
and overgeneralizations, to detect abuses of logic and common sense. It
also means to weigh ideas, to compare and contrast assertions, to
connect one generalization to another. To accomplish this, one must
achieve a certain distance from the words themselves, which is, in fact,
encouraged by the isolated and impersonal text. That is why a good
reader does not cheer an apt sentence or pause to applaud even an
inspired paragraph. Analytic thought is too busy for that, and too
detached. I do not mean to imply that prior to the written word analytic
thought was not possible. I am referring here not to the potentialities
of the individual mind but to the predispositions of a cultural
mind-set. In a culture dominated by print, public discourse tends to be
characterized by a coherent, orderly arrangement of facts and ideas. the
public for whom it is intended is generally competent to manage such
discourse. In a print culture, writers make mistakes when they lie,
contradict themselves, fail to support their generalizations, try to
enforce illogical connections. In a print culture, readers make
mistakes when they don't notice, or even worse, don't care. In the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, print put forward a definition of
intelligence that gave priority to the objective, rational use of the
mind and at the same time encouraged forms of public discourse with
serious, logically ordered content. It is no accident that the Age of
Reason was coexistent with the growth of a print culture, first in
Europe and then in America. the spread of typography kindled the hope
that the world and

its manifold mysteries could at least be comprehended, predicted,
controlled. It is in the eighteenth century that the scientific method
preeminent example of the analytic management of knowledge--begins its
refashioning of the world. It is in the eighteenth century that
capitalism is demonstrated to be a rational and liberal system of
economic life, that religious superstition comes under furious attack,
that the divine right of kings is shown to be a mere prejudice, that the
idea of continuous progress takes hold, and that the necessity of
universal literacy through education becomes apparent. Perhaps the most
optimistic expression of everything that typography implied is contained
in the following paragraph from John Stuart Mill's autobiography:

So complete was my father's reliance on the influence of mankind,
wherever [literacy] is allowed to reach them, that he felt as if all
would be gained if the whole population were taught to read, if all
sorts of opinions were allowed to be addressed to them by word and in
writing, and if, by means of the suffrage, they could nominate a
legislature to give effect to the opinion they adopted.

This was, of course, a hope never quite realized. At no point in the
history of England or America (or anyplace else) has the dominion of
reason been so total as the elder Mill imagined typography would allow.
Nonetheless, it is not difficult to demonstrate that in the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries, American public discourse, being rooted in the
bias of the printed word, was serious, inclined toward rational argument
and presentation, and, therefore, made up of meaningful content. Let us
take religious discourse as an illustration of this point. In the
eighteenth century believers were as much influenced by the rationalist
tradition as anyone else. the New World offered freedom of religion to
all, which implied that no force other than reason itself could be
employed to bring light to the unbeliever. "Here Deism will have its
full chance," said Ezra Stiles

in one of his famous sermons in 1783. "Nor need libertines [any] more
to complain of being overcome by any weapons but the gentle, the
powerful ones of argument and truth." Leaving aside the libertines, we
know that the Deists were certainly given their full chance. It is
quite probable, in fact, that the first four presidents of the United
States were Deists. Jefferson, certainly, did not believe in the
divinity of Jesus Christ and, while he was President, wrote a version of
the Four Gospels from which he removed all references to "fantastic"
events, retaining only the ethical content of Jesus' teaching. Legend
has it that when Jefferson was elected President, old women hid their
Bibles and shed tears. What they might have done had Tom Paine become
President or been offered some high post in the government is hard to
imagine. In the Age of Reason, Paine attacked the Bible and all
subsequent Christian theology. Of Jesus Christ, Paine allowed that he
was a virtuous and amiable man but charged that the stories of his
divinity were absurd and profane, which, in the way of the rationalist,
he tried to prove by a close textual analysis of the Bible. "All
national institutions of churches," he wrote, "whether Jewish, Christian
or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to
terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit." 9 Because
of the Age of Reason, Paine lost his standing among the pantheon of
Founding Fathers (and to this day is treated ambiguously in American
history textbooks). But Ezra Stiles did not say that libertines and
Deists would be loved: only that with reason as their jury, they would
have their say in an open court. As indeed they did. Assisted by the
initial enthusiasms evoked by the French Revolution, the Deist attack on
churches as enemies of progress and on religious superstition as enemy
of rationality became a popular movement.s fought back, of course, and
when Deism ceased to attract interest, they fought among themselves.
Toward the mid-eighteenth century, Theodore Frelinghuysen and William
Tennent led a revivalist movement among Presbyterians. They were
followed by the

three great figures associated with religious "awakenings" in
America--Jonathan Edwards, George Whitefield, and, later in the
nineteenth century, Charles Finney. These men were spectacularly
successful preachers, whose appeal reached regions of consciousness far
beyond where reason rules. Of Whitefield, it was said that by merely
pronouncing the word "Mesopotamia," he evoked tears in his audience.
Perhaps that is why Henry Coswell remarked in 1839 that "religious mania
is said to be the prevailing form of insanity in the United States." Yet
it is essential to bear in mind that quarrels over doctrine between the
revivalist movements of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the
established churches fiercely opposed to them were argued in pamphlets
and books in largely rational, logically ordered language. It would be
a serious mistake to think of Billy Graham or any other television
revivalist as a latter-day Jonathan Edwards or Charles Finney. Edwards
was one of the most brilliant and creative minds ever produced by
America. His contribution to aesthetic theory was almost as important
as his contribution to theology. His interests were mostly academic; he
spent long hours each day in his study. He did not speak to his
audiences extemporaneously. He read his sermons, which were tightly
knit and closely reasoned expositions of theological doctrine. Audiences
may have been moved emotionally by Edwards' language, but they were,
first and foremost, required to understand it. Indeed Edwards' fame was
largely a result of a book, Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of
God in the Conversion of Many Hundred Souls in Northampton, published in
1737. A later book, A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections,
published in 1746, is considered to be among the most remarkable
psychological studies ever produced in America. Unlike the principal
figures in today's "great awakening"--Oral Roberts, Jerry Falwell, Jimmy
Swaggart, et all.--yesterday's leaders of revivalist movements in
America were men of learning, faith in reason, and generous expository
gifts. Their

disputes with the religious establishments were as much about theology
and the nature of consciousness as they were about religious
inspiration. Finhey, for example, was no "backcountry rustic," as he
was sometimes characterized by his doctrinal opponents. 3 He had been
trained as a lawyer, wrote an important book on systematic theology, and
ended his career as a professor at and then president of Oberlin
College. the doctrinal disputes among religionists not only were argued
in carefully drawn exposition in the eighteenth century, but in the
nineteenth century Were settled by the extraordinary expedient of
founding colleges. It is sometimes forgotten that the churches in
America laid the foundation of our system of higher education. Harvard,
of course, was established early--in 1636--for the purpose of providing
learned ministers to the Congregational Church. And, sixty-five years
later, when Congregationalists quarreled among themselves over doctrine,
Yale College was founded to correct the lax influences of Harvard (and,
to this day, claims it has the same burden). the strong intellectual
strain of the Congregationalists was matched by other denominations,
certainly in their passion for starting colleges. the Presbyterians
founded, among other schools, the University of Tennessee in 1784,
Washington and Jefferson in 1802 and Lafayette in 1826. the Baptists
founded, among others, Colgate (1817), George Washington (1821), Furman
(1826), Denison (1832) and Wake Forest (1834). the Episcopalians
founded Hobart (1822), Trinity (1823) and Kenyon (1824). the Methodists
founded eight colleges between 1830 and 1851, including Wesleyan, Emory,
and Depauw. In addition to Harvard and Yale, the Congregationalists
founded Williams (1793), Middlebury (1800), Amherst ( 1821 ) and Oberlin
(1833). If this preoccupation with literacy and learning be a "form of
insanity," as Coswell said of religious life in America, then let there
be more of it. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, religious
thought and institutions in America were dominated

by an austere, learned, and intellectual form of discourse that is
largely absent from religious life today. No clearer example of the
difference between earlier and modern forms of public discourse can be
found than in the contrast between the theological arguments of Jonathan
Edwards and those of, say, Jerry Falwell, or Billy Graham, or Oral
Roberts. the formidable content to Edwards' theology must inevitably
engage the intellect; if there is such a content to the theology of the
television evangelicals, they have not yet made it known. the
differences between the character of discourse in a print-based culture
and the character of discourse in a television-based culture are also
evident if one looks at the legal system. In a print-based culture,
lawyers tended to be well educated, devoted to reason, and capable of
impressive expositional argument. It is a matter frequently overlooked
in histories of America that in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,
the legal profession represented "a sort of privileged body in the scale
of intellect," as Tocqueville remarked. Folk heroes were made of some
of those lawyers, like Sergeant Prentiss of Alabama, or "Honest" Abe
Lincoln of Illinois, whose craftiness in manipulating juries was highly
theatrical, not unlike television's version of a trial lawyer. But the
great figures of American juris-prudence-John Marshall, Joseph Story,
James Kent, David Hoffman, William Wirt and Daniel Webster--were models
of intellectual elegance and devotion to rationality and scholarship.
They believed that democracy, for all of its obvious virtues, posed the
danger of releasing an undisciplined individualism. Their aspiration was
to save civilization in America by "creating a rationality for the law."
4 As a consequence of this exalted view, they believed that law must not
be merely a learned profession but a liberal one. the famous law
professor Job Tyson argued that a lawyer must be familiar with the works
of Seneca, Cicero, and Plato.5 George Sharswood, perhaps envisioning the
degraded state of legal education in the twentieth century, remarked in
1854 that to read law exclusively will damage the

mind, "shackle it to the technicalities with which it has become so
familiar, and disable it from taking enlarged and comprehensive views
even of topics falling within its compass." 16 the insistence on a
liberal, rational and articulate legal mind was reinforced by the fact
that America had a written constitution, as did all of its component
states, and that law did not grow by chance but was explicitly
formulated. A lawyer needed to be a writing and reading man par
excellence, for reason was the principal authority upon which legal
questions were to be decided. John Marshall was, of course, the great
"paragon of reason, as vivid a symbol to the American imagination as
Natty Bumppod. He was the preeminent example of Typographic
Man--detached, analytical, devoted to logic, abhorring contradiction.

It was said of him that he never used analogy as a principal support of
his arguments. Rather, he introduced most of his decisions with the
phrase "It is admitted .... "Once one admitted his premises, one was
usually forced to accept his conclusion. To an extent difficult to
imagine today, earlier Americans were familiar not only with the great
legal issues of their time but even with the language famous lawyers had
used to argue their cases. This was especially true of Daniel Webster,
and it was only natural that Stephen Vincent Bent in his famous short
story would have chosen Daniel Webster to contend with the Devil. How
could the Devil triumph over a man whose language, described by Supreme
Court Justice Joseph Story, had the following characteristics?

. his clearness and downright simplicity of statement, his vast
comprehensiveness of topics, his fertility in illustrations drawn from
practical sources; his keen analysis, and suggestion of difficulties;
his power of disentangling a complicated proposition, and resolving it
in elements so plain as to reach the most common minds; his vigor in
generalizations, planting his own arguments behind the whole battery of
his opponents; his wariness and caution not to betray himself by heat
into untenable positions, or to spread his forces over useless ground.

I quote this in full because it is the best nineteenth-century
description I know of the character of discourse expected of one whose
mind is formed by the printed word. It is exactly the ideal and model
James Mill had in mind in prophesying about the wonders of typography.
And if the model was somewhat unreachable, it stood nonetheless as an
ideal to which every lawyer aspired. Such an ideal went far beyond the
legal profession or the ministry in its influence. Even in the everyday
world of commerce, the resonances of rational, typographic discourse
were to be found. If we may take advertising to be the voice of
commerce, then its history tells very clearly that in the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries those with products to sell took their customers to
be not unlike Daniel Webster: they assumed that potential buyers were
literate, rational, analytical. Indeed, the history of newspaper
advertising in America may be considered, all by itself, as a metaphor
of the descent of the typographic mind, beginning, as it does, with
reason, and ending, as it does, with entertainment. In Frank Presbrey's
classic study the History and Development of Advertising, he discusses
the decline of typography, dating its demise in the late 1860's and
early 1870's. He refers to the period before then as the "dark ages" of
typographical display. the dark ages to which he refers began in 1704
when the first paid advertisements appeared in an American newspaper,
the Boston News-Letter. These were three in number, occupying
altogether four inches of single-column space. One of them offered a
reward for the capture of a thief; another offered a reward for the
return of an anvil that was "taken up" by some unknown party. the third
actually offered something for sale, and, in fact, is not unlike real
estate advertisements one might see in today's New York Times:

At Oysterbay, on Long Island in the Province of N. York. There is a
very good Fulling-Mill, to be Let or Sold, as also a Plantation, having
on it a large new Brick house, and another good house by it for a
Kitchen & workhouse, with a Barn, Stable a young Orchard and 20 acres
clear land. the Mill is to be Let with or without the Plantation;
Enquire of Mr. William Bradford Printer in N. York, and know further.

For more than a century and a half afterward, advertisements took this
form with minor alterations. For example, sixty-four years after Mr.
Bradford advertised an estate in Oyster Bay, the legendary Paul Revere
placed the following advertisement in the Boston Gazette:

Whereas many persons are so unfortunate as to lose their Fore-Teeth by
Accident, and otherways, to their great Detriment, not only in Looks,
but Speaking both in Public and Private:--This is to inform all such,
that they may have them re-placed with false Ones, that look as well as
the Natural, and Answers the End of Speaking to all Intents, by PauL
REVERE, Goldsmith, near the Head of Dr. Clarke's Wharf, Boston.

Revere went on to explain in another paragraph that those whose false
teeth had been fitted by John Baker, and who had suffered the indignity
of having them loosen, might come to Revere to have them tightened. He
indicated that he had learned how to do this from John Baker himself.
Not until almost a hundred years after Revere's announcement were there
any serious attempts by advertisers to overcome the lineal, typographic
form demanded by publishers.22 And not until the end of the nineteenth
century did advertising move fully into its modern mode of discourse. As
late as 1890, advertising, still understood to consist of words, was
regarded as an essentially serious and rational enterprise whose purpose
was to convey information and make claims in propositional

form. Advertising was, as Stephen Douglas said in another context,
intended to appeal to understanding, not to passions. This is not to
say that during the period of typographic display, the claims that were
put forward were true. Words cannot guarantee their truth content.
Rather, they assemble a context in which the question, Is this true or
false? is relevant. In the 1890's that context was shattered, first by
the massive intrusion of illustrations and photographs, then by the
nonpropositional use of language. For example, in the 1890's
advertisers adopted the technique of using slogans. Presbrey contends
that modern advertising can be said to begin with the use of two such
slogans: "You press the button; we do the rest" and "See that hump." At
about the same time, jingles started to be used, and in 1892, Procter
and Gamble invited the public to submit rhymes to advertise Ivory Soap.
In 1896, HoO employed, for the first time, a picture of a baby in a high
chair, the bowl of cereal before him, his spoon in hand, his face
ecstatic. By the turn of the century, advertisers no longer assumed
rationality on the part of their potential customers. Advertising
became one part depth psychology, one part aesthetic theory. Reason had
to move itself to other arenas. To understand the role that the printed
word played in pro-riding an earlier America with its assumptions about
intelligence, truth and the nature of discourse, one must keep in view
that the act of reading in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had
an entirely different quality to it than the act of reading does today.
For one thing, as I have said, the printed word had a monopoly on both
attention and intellect, there being no other means, besides the oral
tradition, to have access to public knowledge. Public figures were
known largely by their written words, for example, not by their looks or
even their oratory. It is quite likely that most of the first fifteen
presidents of the United States would not have been recognized had they
passed the average citizen in the street. This would have been the case
as well of the great lawyers, ministers and scientists of that era. To

think about those men was to think about what they had written, to judge
them by their public positions, their arguments, their knowledge as
codified in the printed word. You may get some sense of how we are
separated from this kind of consciousness by thinking about any of our
recent presidents; or even preachers, lawyers and scientists who are or
who have recently been public figures. Think of Richard Nixon or Jimmy
Carter or Billy Graham, or even Albert Einstein, and what will come to
your mind is an image, a picture of a face, most likely a face on a
television screen (in Einstein's case, a photograph of a face). Of
words, almost nothing will come to mind. This is the difference between
thinking in a word-centered culture and thinking in an image-centered
culture. It is also the difference between living in a culture that
provides little opportunity for leisure, and one that provides much. the
farm boy following the plow with book in hand, the mother reading aloud
to her family on a Sunday afternoon, the merchant reading announcements
of the latest clipper arrivals --these were different kinds of readers
from those of today. There would have been little casual reading, for
there was not a great deal of time for that. Reading would have had a
sacred element in it, or if not that, would have at least occurred as a
daily or weekly ritual invested with special meaning. For we must also
remember that this was a culture without electricity. It would not have
been easy to read by either candlelight or, later, gaslight. Doubtless,
much reading was done between dawn and the start of the day's business.
What reading would have been done was done seriously, intensely, and
with steadfast purpose. the modern idea of testing a reader's
"comprehension," as distinct from something else a reader may be doing,
would have seemed an absurdity in 1790 or 1830 or 1860. What else was
reading but comprehending? As far as we know, there did not exist such
a thing as a "reading problem," except, of course, for those who could
not attend school. To attend school meant to learn to read, for without
that capacity,

one could not participate in the culture's conversations. But most
people could read and did participate. To these people, reading was
both their connection to and their model of the world. the printed page
revealed the world, line by line, page by page, to be a serious,
coherent place, capable of management by reason, and of improvement by
logical and relevant criticism.

Almost anywhere one looks in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,
then, one finds the resonances of the printed word and, in particular,
its inextricable relationship to all forms of public expression. It may
be true, as Charles Beard wrote, that the primary motivation of the
writers of the United States Constitution was the protection of their
economic interests. But it is also true that they assumed that
participation in public life required the capacity to negotiate the
printed word. To them, mature citizenship was not conceivable without
sophisticated literacy, which is why the voting age in most states was
set at twenty-one, and why Jefferson saw in universal education
America's best hope. And that is also why, as Allan Nevins and Henry
Steele Commager have pointed out, the voting restrictions against those
who owned no property were frequently overlooked, but not one's
inability to read.

It may be true, as Frederick Jackson Turner wrote, that the spirit that
fired the American mind was the fact of an ever-expanding frontier. But
it is also true, as Paul Anderson has written, that "it is no. mere
figure of speech to say that farm boys followed the plow with book in
hand, be it Shakespeare, Emerson, or Thoreau." 23 For it was not only a
frontier mentality that led Kansas to be the first state to permit women
to vote in school elections, or Wyoming the first state to grant
complete equality in the franchise. Women were probably more adept
readers than men, and even in the frontier states the principal means of
public discourse issued from the printed word. Those who could read
had, inevitably, to become part of the conversation.

It may also be true, as Perry Miller has suggested, that the religious
fervor of Americans provided much of their energy; or, as earlier
historians told it, that America was created by an idea whose time had
come. I quarrel with none of these explanations. I merely observe that
the America they try to explain was dominated by a public discourse
which took its form from the products of the printing press. For two
centuries, America declared its intentions, expressed its ideology,
designed its laws, sold its products, created its literature and
addressed its deities with black squiggles on white Paper. It did its
talking in typography, and with that as the main feature of its symbolic
environment rose to prominence in world civilization.

the name I give to that period of time during which the American mind
submitted itself to the sovereignty of the printing press is the Age of
Exposition. Exposition is a mode of thought, a method of learning, and
a means of expression. Almost all of the characteristics we associate
with mature discourse were amplified by typography, which has the
strongest possible bias toward exposition: a sophisticated ability to
think conceptually, deductively and sequentially; a high valuation of
reason and order; an abhorrence of contradiction; a large capacity for
detachment and objectivity; and a tolerance for delayed response. Toward
the end of the nineteenth century, for reasons I am most anxious to
explain, the Age of Exposition began to pass, and the early signs of its
replacement could be discerned. Its replacement was to be the Age of
Show Business.

the Peek-a-Boo World

Toward the middle years of the nineteenth century, two ideas came
together whose convergence provided twentieth-century America with a new
metaphor of public discourse. Their partnership overwhelmed the Age of
Exposition, and laid the foundation for the Age of Show Business. One
of the ideas was quite new, the other as old as the cave paintings of
Altamira. We shall come to the old idea presently. the new idea was
that transportation and communication could be disengaged from each
other, that space was not an inevitable constraint on the movement of
information. Americans of the 1800's were very much concerned with the
problem of "conquering" space. By the mid-nineteenth century, the
frontier extended to the Pacific Ocean, and a rudimentary railroad
system, begun in the 1830s had started to move people and merchandise
across the continent. But until the 1840's, information could move only
as fast as a human being could carry it; to be precise, only as fast as
a train could travel, which, to be even more precise, meant about
thirty-five miles per hour. In the face of such a limitation, the
development of America as a national community was retarded. In the
1840's, America was still a composite of regions, each conversing in its
own ways, addressing its own interests. A continentwide conversation
was not yet possible. the solution to these problems, as every school
child used to know, was electricity. To no one's surprise, it was an
American who found a practical way to put electricity in the service of

communication and, in doing so, eliminated the problem of space once and
for all. I refer, of course, to Samuel Finley Breese Morse, America's
first true "spaceman." His telegraph erased state lines, collapsed
regions, and, by wrapping the continent in an information grid, created
the possibility of a unified American discourse. But at a considerable
cost. For telegraphy did something that Morse did not foresee when he
prophesied that telegraphy would make "one neighborhood of the whole
country." It destroyed the prevailing definition of information, and in
doing so gave a new meaning to public discourse. Among the few who
understood this consequence was Henry David Thoreau, who remarked in
Walden that "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 .... We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic
and bring the old world some weeks nearer to the new; but perchance the
first news that will leak through into the broad flapping American ear
will be that Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough." Thoreau, as it
turned out, was precisely correct. He grasped that the telegraph would
create its own definition of discourse; that it would not only permit
but insist upon a conversation between Maine and Texas; and that it
would require the content of that conversation to be different from what
Typographic Man was accustomed to. the telegraph made a three-pronged
attack on typography's definition of discourse, introducing on a large
scale irrelevance, impotence, and incoherence. These demons of
discourse were aroused by the fact that telegraphy gave a form of
legitimacy to the idea of context-free information; that is, to the idea
that the value of information need not be tied to any function it might
serve in social and political decision-making and action, but may attach
merely to its novelty, interest, and curiosity. the telegraph made
information into a commodity, a "thing" that could be bought and sold
irrespective of its uses or meaning.

But it did not do so alone. the potential of the telegraph to transform
information into a commodity might never have been realized, except for
the partnership between the telegraph and the press. the penny
newspaper, emerging slightly before telegraphy, in the 1830's, had
already begun the process of elevating irrelevance to the status of
news. Such papers as Benjamin Day's New York Sun and James Bennett's
New York Herald turned away from the tradition of news as reasoned (if
biased) political opinion and urgent commercial information and filled
their pages with accounts of sensational events, mostly concerning crime
and sex. While such "human interest news" played little role in shaping
the decisions and actions of readers, it was at least local--about
places and people within their experience-and it was not always tied to
the moment. the human-interest stories of the penny newspapers had a
timeless quality; their power to engage lay not so much in their
currency as in their transcendence. Nor did all newspapers occupy
themselves with such content. For the most part, the information they
provided was not only local but largely functional--tied to the problems
and decisions readers had to address in order to manage their personal
and community affairs. the telegraph changed all that, and with
astonishing speed. Within months of Morse's first public demonstration,
the local and the timeless had lost their central position in
newspapers, eclipsed by the dazzle of distance and speed. In fact, the
first known use of the telegraph by a newspaper occurred one day after
Morse gave his historic demonstration of telegraphy's workability. Using
the same Washington-to-Baltimore line Morse had constructed, the
Baltimore Patriot gave its readers information about action taken by the
House of Representatives on the Oregon issue. the paper concluded its
report by noting: "... we are thus enabled to give our readers
information from Washington up to two o'clock. This is indeed the
annihilation of space." 2 For a brief time, practical problems (mostly
involving the

scarcity of telegraph lines) preserved something of the old definition
of news as functional information. But the foresighted among the
nation's publishers were quick to see where the future lay, and
committed their full resources to the wiring of the continent. William
Swain, the owner of the Philadelphia Public Ledger, not only invested
heavily in the Magnetic Telegraph Company, the first commercial
telegraph corporation, but became its president in 1850. It was not long
until the fortunes of newspapers came to depend not on the quality or
utility of the news they provided, but on how much, from what distances,
and at what speed. James Bennett of the New York Herald boasted that in
the first week of 1848, his paper contained 79,000 words of telegraphic
content 3--of what relevance to his readers, he didn't say. Only four
years after Morse opened the nation's first telegraph line on May 24,
1844, the Associated Press was founded, and news from nowhere, addressed
to no one in particular, began to crisscross the nation. Wars, crimes,
crashes, fires, floods--much of it the social and political equivalent
of Adelaide's whooping cough--became the content of what people called
"the news of the day." As Thoreau implied, telegraphy made relevance
irrelevant. the abundant flow of information had very little or nothing
to do with those to whom it was addressed; that is, with any social or
intellectual context in which their lives were embedded. Coleridge's
famous line about water everywhere without a drop to drink may serve as
a metaphor of a decontextualized information environment: In a sea of
information, there was very little of it to use. A man in Maine and a
man in Texas could converse, but not about anything either of them knew
or cared very much about. the telegraph may have made the country into
"one neighborhood," but it was a peculiar one, populated by strangers
who knew nothing but the most superficial facts about each other. Since
we live today in just such a neighborhood (now some-

times called a "global village"), you may get a sense of what is meant
by context-free information by asking yourself the following question:
How often does it occur that information provided you on morning radio
or television, or in the morning newspaper, causes you to alter your
plans for the day, or to take some action you would not otherwise have
taken, or provides insight into some problem you are required to solve?
For most of us, news of the weather will sometimes have such
consequences; for investors, news of the stock market; perhaps an
occasional story about a crime will do it, if by chance the crime
occurred near where you live or involved someone you know. But most of
our daily news is inert, consisting of information that gives us
something to talk about but cannot lead to any meaningful action. This
fact is the principal legacy of the telegraph: By generating an
abundance of irrelevant information, it dramatically altered what may be
called the "information-action ratio."

In both oral and typographic cultures, information derives its
importance from the possibilities of action. Of course, in any
communication environment, input (what one is informed about) always
exceeds output (the possibilities of action based on information). But
the situation created by telegraphy, and then exacerbated by later
technologies, made the relationship between information and action both
abstract and remote. For the first time in human history, people were
faced with the problem of information glut, which means that
simultaneously they were faced with the problem of a diminished social
and political potency.

You may get a sense of what this means by asking yourself another series
of questions: What steps do you plan to take to reduce the conflict in
the Middle East? Or the rates of inflation, crime and unemployment?
What are your plans for preserving the environment or reducing the risk
of nuclear war? What do you plan to do about NATO, OPEC, the CIA,
affirmative action, and the monstrous treatment of the Baha'is in Iran?
I shall take

the liberty of answering for you: You plan to do nothing about them. You
may, of course, cast a ballot for someone who claims to have some plans,
as well as the power to act. But this you can do only once every two or
four years by giving one hour of your time, hardly a satisfying means of
expressing the broad range of opinions you hold. Voting, we might even
say, is the next to last refuge of the politically impotent. the last
refuge is, of course, giving your opinion to a pollster, who will get a
version of it through a desiccated question, and then will submerge it
in a Niagara of similar opinions, and convert them into--what
else?--another piece of news. Thus, we have here a great loop of
impotence: the news elicits from you a variety of opinions about which
you can do nothing except to offer them as more news, about which you
can do nothing.

Prior to the age of telegraphy, the information-action ratio was
sufficiently close so that most people had a sense of being able to
control some of the contingencies in their lives. What people knew
about had action-value. In the information world created by telegraphy,
this sense of potency was lost, precisely because the whole world became
the context for news. Everything became everyone's business. For the
first time, we were sent information which answered no question we had
asked, and which, in any case, did not permit the right of reply.

We may say then that the contribution of the telegraph to public
discourse was to dignify irrelevance and amplify impotence. But this was
not all: Telegraphy also made public discourse essentially incoherent.
It brought into being a world of broken time and broken attention, to
use Lewis Mumford's phrase. the principal strength of the telegraph was
its capacity to move information, not collect it, explain it or analyze
it. In this respect, telegraphy was the exact opposite of typography.
books, for example, are an excellent container for the accumulation,
quiet scrutiny and organized analysis of information and ideas. It
takes time to write a book, and to read one; time to discuss its
contents and to make judgments about their merit,

including the form of their presentation. A book is an attempt to make
thought permanent and to contribute to the great conversation conducted
by authors of the past. Therefore, civilized people everywhere consider
the burning of a book a vile form of anti-intellectualism. But the
telegraph demands that we burn its contents. the value of telegraphy is
undermined by applying the tests of permanence, continuity or coherence.
the telegraph is suited only to the flashing of messages, each to be
quickly replaced by a more up-to-date message. Facts push other facts
into and then out of consciousness at speeds that neither permit nor
require evaluation. the telegraph introduced a kind of public
conversation whose form had startling characteristics: Its language was
the language of headlines--sensational, fragmented, impersonal. News
took the form of slogans, to be noted with excitement, to be forgotten
with dispatch. Its language was also entirely discontinuous. One
message had no connection to that which preceded or followed it. Each
"headline" stood alone as its own context. the receiver of the news had
to provide a meaning if he could. the sender was under no obligation to
do so. And because of all this, the world as depicted by the telegraph
began to appear unmanageable, even undecipherable. the line-by-line,
sequential, continuous form of the printed page slowly began to lose its
resonance as a metaphor of how knowledge was to be acquired and how the
world was to be understood. "Knowing" the facts took on a new meaning,
for it did not imply that one understood implications, background, or
connections. Telegraphic discourse permitted no time for historical
perspectives and gave no priority to the qualitative. To the telegraph,
intelligence meant knowing of lots of things, not knowing about them.
Thus, to the reverent question posed by Morse--What hath God wrought?--a
disturbing answer came back: a neighborhood of strangers and pointless
quantity; a world of fragments and discontinuities. God, of course, had
nothing to do with it.

And yet, for all of the power of the telegraph, had it stood alone as a
new metaphor for discourse, it is likely that print culture would have
withstood its assault; would, at least, have held its ground. As it
happened, at almost exactly the same time Morse was reconceiving the
meaning of information, Louis Daguerre was reconceiving the meaning of
nature; one might even say, of reality itself. As Daguerre remarked in
1838 in a notice designed to attract investors, "the daguerreotype is
not merely an instrument which serves to draw nature... [it] gives her
the power to reproduce herself." 4 Of course both the need and the power
to draw nature have always implied reproducing nature, refashioning it
to make it comprehensible and manageable. the earliest cave paintings
were quite possibly visual projections of a hunt that had not yet taken
place, wish fulfillments of an anticipated subjection of nature.
Reproducing nature, in other words, is a very old idea. But Daguerre did
not have this meaning of "reproduce" in mind. He meant to announce that
the photograph would invest everyone with the power to duplicate nature
as often and wherever one liked. He meant to say he had invented the
world's first "cloning" device, that the photograph was to visual
experience what the printing press was to the written word. In point of
fact, the daguerreotype was not quite capable of achieving such an
equation. It was not until William Henry Fox Talbot, an English
mathematician and linguist, invented the process of preparing a negative
from which any number of positives could be made that the mass printing
and publication of photographs became possible. the name "photography"
was given to this process by the famous astronomer Sir John F. W.
Herschel. It is an odd name since it literally means "writing with
light." Perhaps Herschel meant the name to be taken ironically, since it
must have been clear from the beginning that photography and writing (in
fact, language in any form) do not inhabit the same universe of
discourse. Nonetheless, ever since the process was named it has been

the custom to speak of photography as a "language." the metaphor is
risky because it tends to obscure the fundamental differences between
the two modes of conversation. To begin with, photography is a language
that speaks only in particularities. Its vocabulary of images is
limited to concrete representation. Unlike words and sentences, the
photograph does not present to us an idea or concept about the world,
except as we use language itself to convert the image to idea. By
itself, a photograph cannot deal with the unseen, the remote, the
internal, the abstract. It does not speak of "man," only of a man; not
of "tree," only of a tree. You cannot produce a photograph of "nature,"
any more than a photograph of "the sea." You can only photograph a
particular fragment of the here-and-now--a cliff of a certain terrain,
in a certain condition of light; a wave at a moment in time, from a
particular point of view. And just as "nature" and "the sea" cannot be
photographed, such larger abstractions as truth, honor, love, falsehood
cannot be talked about in the lexicon of pictures. For "showing of" and
"talking about" are two very different kinds of processes. "Pictures,"
Gavriel Salomon has written, "need to be recognized, words need to be
understood." 6 By this he means that the photograph presents the world
as object; language, the world as idea. For even the simplest act of
naming a thing is an act of thinking--of comparing one thing with
others, selecting certain features in common, ignoring what is
different, and making an imaginary category. There is no such thing in
nature as "man" or "tree." the universe offers no such categories or
simplifications; only flux and infinite variety. the photograph
documents and celebrates the particularities of this infinite variety.
Language makes them comprehensible.

the photograph also lacks a syntax, which deprives it of a capacity to
argue with the world. As an "objective" slice of space-time, the
photograph testifies that someone was there or something happened. Its
testimony is powerful but it offers no opinions--no "should-have-beens"
or "might-have-beens."

Photography is preeminently a world of fact, not of dispute about facts
or of conclusions to be drawn from them. But this is not to say
photography lacks an epistemological bias. As Susan Sontag has
observed, a photograph implies "that we know about the world if we
accept it as the camera records it." ? But, as she further observes,
all understanding begins with our not accepting the world as it appears.
Language, of course, is the medium we use to challenge, dispute, and
cross-examine what comes into view, what is on the surface. the words
"true" and "false" come from the universe of language, and no other.
When applied to a photograph, the question, Is it true? means only, Is
this a reproduction of a real slice of space-time? If the answer is
"Yes," there are no grounds for argument, for it makes no sense to
disagree with an unfaked photograph. the photograph itself makes no
arguable propositions, makes no extended and unambiguous commentary. It
offers no assertions to refute, so it is not refutable.

the way in which the photograph records experience is also different
from the way of language. Language makes sense only when it is
presented as a sequence of propositions. Meaning is distorted when a
word or sentence is, as we say, taken out of context; when a reader or
listener is deprived of what was said before, and after. But there is
no such thing as a photograph taken out of context, for a photograph
does not require one. In fact, the point of photography is to isolate
images from context, so as to make them visible in a different way. In
a world of photographic images, his. Sontag writes, "all borders...
seem arbitrary. Anything can be separated, can be made discontinuous,
from anything else: All that is necessary is to frame the subject
differently." 8 She is remarking on the capacity of photographs to
perform a peculiar kind of dismembering of reality, a wrenching of
moments out of their contexts, and a juxtaposing of events and things
that have no logical or historical connection with each other. Like
telegraphy, photography recreates the world as a series of idiosyncratic
events. There is no

beginning, middle, or end in a world of photographs, as there is none
implied by telegraphy. the world is atomized. There is only a present
and it need not be part of any story that can be told. That the image
and the word have different functions, work at different levels of
abstraction, and require different modes of response will not come as a
new idea to anyone. Painting is at least three times as old as writing,
and the place of imagery in the repertoire of communication instruments
was quite well understood in the nineteenth century. What was new in
the mid-nineteenth century was the sudden and massive intrusion of the
photograph and other iconographs into the symbolic environment. This
event is what Daniel Boorstin in his pioneering book the Image calls
"the graphic revolution." By this phrase, Boorstin means to call
attention to the fierce assault on language made by forms of
mechanically reproduced imagery that spread unchecked throughout
American culture--photo-graphs, prints, posters, drawings,
advertisements. I choose the word "assault" deliberately here, to
amplify the point implied in Boorstin's "graphic revolution." the new
imagery, with photography at its forefront, did not merely function as a
supplement to language, but bid to replace it as our dominant means for
construing, understanding, and testing reality. What Boorstin implies
about the graphic revolution, I wish to make explicit here: the new
focus on the image undermined traditional definitions of information, of
news, and, to a large extent, of reality itself. First in billboards,
posters, and advertisements, and later in such "news" magazines and
papers as Life, Look, the New York Daily Mirror and Daily News, the
picture forced exposition into the background, and in some instances
obliterated it altogether. By the end of the nineteenth century,
advertisers and newspapermen had discovered that a picture was not only
worth a thousand words, but, where sales were concerned, was better. For
countless Americans, seeing, not reading, became the basis for
believing.

In a peculiar way, the photograph was the perfect complement to the
flood of telegraphic news from nowhere that threatened to submerge
readers in a sea of facts from unknown places about strangers with
unknown faces. For the photograph gave a concrete reality to the
strange-sounding datelines, and attached faces to the unknown names.
Thus it provided the illusion, at least, that "the news" had a
connection to something within one's sensory experience. It created an
apparent context for the "news of the day." And the "news of the day"
created a context for the photograph. But the sense of context created
by the partnership of photograph and headline was, of course, entirely
illusory. You may get a better sense of what I mean here if you imagine
a stranger's informing you that the illyx is a subspecies of vero miform
plant with articulated leaves that flowers biannually on the island of
Aldononjes. And if you wonder aloud, "Yes, but what has that to do with
anything?" imagine that your informant replies, "But here is a
photograph I want you to see," and hands you a picture labeled Illyx on
Aldononjes. "Ah, yes," you might murmur, "now I see." It is true enough
that the photograph provides a context for the sentence you have been
given, and that the sentence provides a context of sorts for the
photograph, and you may even believe for a day or so that you have
learned something. But if the event is entirely self-contained, devoid
of any relationship to your past knowledge or future plans, if that is
the beginning and end of your encounter with the stranger, then the
appearance of context provided by the conjunction of sentence and image
is illusory, and so is the impression of meaning attached to it. You
will, in fact, have "learned" nothing (except perhaps to avoid strangers
with photographs), and the illyx will fade from your mental landscape as
though it had never been. At best you are left with an amusing bit of
trivia, good for trading in cocktail party chatter or solving a
crossword puzzle, but nothing more. It may be of some interest to note,
in this connection, that the

crossword puzzle became a popular form of diversion in America at just
that point when the telegraph and the photograph had achieved the
transformation of news from functional information to decontextualized
fact. This coincidence suggests that the new technologies had turned
the age-old problem of information on its head: Where people once sought
information to manage the real contexts of their lives, now they had to
invent contexts in which otherwise useless information might be put to
some apparent use. the crossword puzzle is one such pseudo-context; the
cocktail party is another; the radio quiz shows of the 1930's and 1940's
and the modern television game show are still others; and the ultimate,
perhaps, is the wildly successful "Trivial Pursuit." In one form or
another, each of these supplies an answer to the question, "What am I to
do with all these disconnected facts?" And in one form or another, the
answer is the same: Why not use them for diversion? for entertainment?
to amuse yourself, in a game? In the Image, Boorstin calls the major
creation of the graphic revolution the "pseudo-event," by which he means
an event specifically staged to be reported--like the press conference,
say. I mean to suggest here that a more significant legacy of the
telegraph and the photograph may be the pseudo-context. A
pseudo-context is a structure invented to give fragmented and irrelevant
information a seeming use. But the use the pseudo-context provides is
not action, or problem-solving, or change. It is the only use left for
information with no genuine connection to our lives. And that, of
course, is to amuse. the pseudo-context is the last refuge, so to say,
of a culture overwhelmed by irrelevance, incoherence, and impotence. Of
course, photography and telegraphy did not strike down at one blow the
vast edifice that was typographic culture. the habits of exposition, as
I have tried to show, had a long history, and they held powerful sway
over the minds of turn-of-the-century Americans. In fact, the early
decades of the twentieth century were marked by a great outpouring of
brilliant language and

literature. In the pages of magazines like the American Mercury and the
New Yorker, in the novels and stories of Faulkner, Fitzgerald,
Steinbeck, and Hemingway, and even in the columns of the newspaper
giants--the Herald Tribune, the Times-- prose thrilled with a vibrancy
and intensity that delighted ear and eye. But this was exposition's
nightingale song, most brilliant and sweet as the singer nears the
moment of death. It told, for the Age of Exposition, not of new
beginnings, but of an end. Beneath its dying melody, a new note had been
sounded, and photography and telegraphy set the key. Theirs was a
"language" that denied interconnectedness, proceeded without context,
argued the irrelevance of history, explained nothing, and offered
fascination in place of complexity and coherence. Theirs was a duet of
image and instancy, and together they played the tune of a new kind of
public discourse in America. Each of the media that entered the
electronic conversation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries followed the lead of the teleaph and the photograph, and
amplified their biases. Some, such as film, were by their nature
inclined to do so. Others, whose bias was rather toward the
amplification of rational speech--like radio--were overwhelmed by the
thrust of the new epistemology and came in the end to support it.
Together, this ensemble of electronic techniques called into being a new
world--a peek-a-boo world, where now this event, now that, pops into
view for a moment, then vanishes again. It is a world without much
coherence or sense; a world that does not ask us, indeed, does not
permit us to do anything; a world that is, like the child's game of
peek-a-boo, entirely self-contained. But like peek-a-boo, it is also
endlessly entertaining. Of course, there is nothing wrong with playing
peek-a-boo. And there is nothing wrong with entertainment. As some
psychiatrist once put it, we all build castles in the air. the problems
come when we try to live in them. the communications media of the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with telegraphy and
photography at their center, called the peek-a-boo world into existence,
but we did not come to live there until television. Television gave the
epistemological biases of the telegraph and the photograph their most
potent expression, raising the interplay of image and instancy to an
exquisite and dangerous perfection. And it brought them into the home.
We are by now well into a second generation of children for whom
television has been their first and most accessible teacher and, for
many, their most reliable companion and friend. To put it plainly,
television is the command center of the new epistemology. There is no
audience so young that it is barred from television. There is no poverty
so abject that it must forgo television. There is no education so
exalted that it is not modified by television. And most important of
all, there is no subject of public interest--politics, news, education,
religion, science, sports--that does not find its way to television.
Which means that all public understanding of these subjects is shaped by
the biases of television.

Television is the command center in subtler ways as well. Our use of
other media, for example, is largely orchestrated by television. Through
it we learn what telephone system to use, what movies to see, what
books, records and magazines to buy, what radio programs to listen to.
Television arranges our communications environment for us in ways that
no other medium has the power to do.

As a small, ironic example of this point, consider this: In the past few
years, we have been learning that the computer is the technology of the
future. We are told that our children will fail in school and be left
behind in life if they are not "computer literate." We are told that we
cannot run our businesses, or compile our shopping lists, or keep our
checkbooks tidy unless we own a computer. Perhaps some of this is true.
But the most important fact about computers and what they mean to our
lives is that we learn about all of this from television. Television
has achieved the status of "meta-medium"--an instrument

that directs not only our knowledge of the world, but our knowledge of
ways of knowing as well.

At the same time, television has achieved the status of "myth," as
Roland Barthes uses the word. He means by myth a way of understanding
the world that is not problematic, that we are not fully conscious of,
that seems, in a word, natural. A myth is a way of thinking so deeply
embedded in our consciousness that it is invisible. This is now the way
of television. We are no longer fascinated or perplexed by its
machinery. We do not tell stories of its wonders. We do not confine
our television sets to special rooms. We do not doubt the reality of
what we see on television, are largely unaware of the special angle of
vision it affords. Even the question of how television affects us has
receded into the background. the question itself may strike some of us
as strange, as if one were to ask how having ears and eyes affects us.
Twenty years ago, the question, Does television shape culture or merely
reflect it? held considerable interest for many scholars and social
critics. the question has largely disappeared as television has
gradually become our culture. This means, among other things, that we
rarely talk about television, only about what is on television--that is,
about its content. Its ecology, which includes not only its physical
characteristics and symbolic code but the conditions in which we
normally attend to it, is taken for granted, accepted as natural.

Television has become, so to speak, the background radiation of the
social and intellectual universe, the all-but-imperceptible residue of
the electronic big bang of a century past, so familiar and so thoroughly
integrated with American culture that we no longer hear its faint
hissing in the background or see the flickering gray light. This, in
turn, means that its epistemology goes largely unnoticed. And the
peek-a-boo world it has constructed around us no longer seems even
strange.

There is no more disturbing consequence of the electronic and graphic
revolution than this: that the world as given to us through television
seems natural, not bizarre. For the loss of the

sense of the strange is a sign of adjustment, and the extent to which we
have adjusted is a measure of the extent to which we have been changed.
Our culture's adjustment to the epistemology of television is by now all
but complete; we have so thoroughly accepted its definitions of truth,
knowledge, and reality that irrelevance seems to us to be filled with
import, and incoherence seems eminently sane. And if some of our
institutions seem not to fit the template of the times, why it is they,
and not the template, that seem to us disordered and strange.

It is my object in the rest of this book to make the epistemology of
television visible again. I will try to demonstrate by concrete example
that television's way of knowing is uncompromisingly hostile to
typography's way of knowing; that television's conversations promote
incoherence and triviality; that the phrase "serious television" is a
contradiction in terms; and that television speaks in only one
persistent voice--the voice of entertainment. Beyond that, I will try
to demonstrate that to enter the great television conversation, one
American cultural institution after another is learning to speak its
terms. Television, in other words, is transforming our culture into one
vast arena for show business. It is entirely possible, of course, that
in the end we shall find that delightful, and decide we like it just
fine. That is exactly what Aldous Huxley feared was coming, fifty years
ago.

Parr II.

the Age of Show Business

A dedicated graduate student i know returned to his small apartment the
night before a major examination only to discover that his solitary lamp
was broken beyond repair. After a whiff of panic, he was able to
restore both his equanimity and his chances for a satisfactory grade by
turning on the television set, turning off the sound, and with his back
to the set, using its light to read important passages on which he was
to be tested. This is one use of television--as a source of illuminating
the printed page. But the television screen is more than a light source.
It is also a smooth, nearly flat surface on which the printed word may
be displayed. We have all stayed at hotels in which the TV set has had
a special channel for describing the day's events in letters rolled
endlessly across the screen. This is another use of television-as an
electronic bulletin board. Many television sets are also large and
sturdy enough to bear the weight of a small library. the top of an
old-fashioned RCA console can handle as many as thirty books, and I know
one woman who has securely placed her entire collection of Dickens,
Flaubert, and Turgenev on the top of a 21-inch Westinghouse. Here is
still another use of television--as bookcase. I bring forward these
quixotic uses of television to ridicule the hope harbored by some that
television can be used to support the literate tradition. Such a hope
represents exactly what Marshall McLuhan used to call "rear-view mirror"
thinking: the assumption that a new medium is merely an extension or

amplification of an older one; that an automobile, for example, is only
a fast horse, or an electric light a powerful candle. To make such a
mistake in the matter at hand is to misconstrue entirely how television
redefines the meaning of public discourse. Television does not extend or
amplify literate culture. It attacks it. If television is a
continuation of anything, it is of a tradition begun by the telegraph
and photograph in the mid-nineteenth century, not by the printing press
in the fifteenth. What is television? What kinds of conversations does
it permit? What are the intellectual tendencies it encourages? What
sort of culture does it produce? These are the questions to be addressed
in the rest of this book, and to approach them with a minimum of
confusion, I must begin by making a distinction between a technology and
a medium. We might say that a technology is to a medium as the brain is
to the mind. Like the brain, a technology is a physical apparatus. Like
the mind, a medium is a use to which a physical apparatus is put. A
technology becomes a medium as it employs a particular symbolic code, as
it finds its place in a particular social setting, as it insinuates
itself into economic and political contexts. A technology, in other
words, is merely a machine. A medium is the social and intellectual
environment a machine creates. Of course, like the brain itself, every
technology has an inherent b ias. It has within its physical form a
predisposition toward being used in certain ways and not others. Only
those who know nothing of the history of technology believe that a
technology is entirely neutral. There is an old joke that mocks that
naive belief. Thomas Edison, it goes, would have revealed his discovery
of the electric light much sooner than he did except for the fact that
every time he turned it on, he held it to his mouth and said, "Hello?
Hello?" Not very likely. Each technology has an agenda of its own. It
is, as I have suggested, a metaphor waiting to unfold. the printing
press, for example, had a clear bias toward being used as a

the Ae of Show Business

linguistic medium. It is conceivable to use it exclusively for the
reproduction of pictures. And, one imagines, the Roman Catholic Church
would not have objected to its being so used in the sixteenth century.
Had that been the case, the Protestant Reformation might not have
occurred, for as Luther contended, with the word of God on every
family's kitchen table, Christians do not require the Papacy to
interpret it for them. But in fact there never was much chance that the
press would be used solely, or even very much, for the duplication of
icons. From its beginning in the fifteenth century, the press was
perceived as an extraordinary opportunity for the display and mass
distribution of written language. Everything about its technical
possibilities led in that direction. One might even say it was invented
for that purpose. the technology of television has a bias, as well. It
is conceivable to use television as a lamp, a surface for texts, a
bookcase, even as radio. But it has not been so used and will not be so
used, at least in America. Thus, in answering the question, What is
television?, we must understand as a first point that we are not talking
about television as a technology but television as a medium. There are
many places in the world where television, though the same technology as
it is in America, is an entirely different medium from that which we
know. I refer to places where the majority of people do not have
television sets, and those who do have only one; where only one station
is available; where television does not operate around the clock; where
most programs have as their purpose the direct furtherance of government
ideology and policy; where commercials are unknown, and "talking heads"
are the principal image; where television is mostly used as if it were
radio. For these reasons and more television will not have the same
meaning or power as it does in America, which is to say, it is possible
for a technology to be so used that its potentialities are prevented
from developing and its social consequences kept to a minimum.

But in America, this has not been the case. Television has found in
liberal democracy and a relatively free market economy a nurturing
climate in which its full potentialities as a technology of images could
be exploited. One result of this has been that American television
programs are in demand all over the world. the total estimate of U.S.
television program exports is approximately 100,000 to 200,000 hours,
equally divided among Latin America, Asia and Europe. Over the years,
programs like "Gunsmoke,"

"Bonanza,"

"Mission: Impossible," "Star Trek,"

"Kojak," and more recently, "Dallas" and "Dynasty" have been as popular
in England, Japan, Israel and Norway as in Omaha, Nebraska. I have
heard (but not verified) that some years ago the Lapps postponed for
several days their annual and, one supposes, essential migratory journey
so that they could find out who shot J.R. All of this has occurred
simultaneously with the decline of America's moral and political
prestige, worldwide. American television programs are in demand not
because America is loved but because American television is loved.

We need not be detained too long in figuring out why. In watching
American television, one is reminded of George Bernard Shaw's remark on
his first seeing the glittering neon signs of Broadway and 42nd Street
at night. It must be beautiful, he said, if you cannot read. American
television is, indeed, a beautiful spectacle, a visual delight, pouring
forth thousands of images on any given day. the average length of a
shot on network television is only 3.5 seconds, so that the eye never
rests, always has something new to see. Moreover, television offers
viewers a variety of subject matter, requires minimal skills to
comprehend it, and is largely aimed at emotional gratification. Even
commercials, which some regard as an annoyance, are exquisitely crafted,
always pleasing to the eye and accompanied by exciting music. There is
no question but that the best photography in the world is presently seen
on television commercials. American

television, in other words, is devoted entirely to supplying its
audience with entertainment.

Of course, to say that television is entertaining is merely banal. Such
a fact is hardly threatening to a culture, not even worth writing a book
about. It may even be a reason for rejoicing. Life, as we like to say,
is not a highway strewn with flowers. the sight of a few blossoms here
and there may make our journey a trifle more endurable. the Lapps
undoubtedly thought so. We may surmise that the ninety million
Americans who watch television every night also think so. 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. Our television set keeps us in constant communion with
the world, but it does so with a face whose smiling countenance is
unalterable. 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.

To say it still another way: Entertainment is the supra-ideology of all
discourse on television. No matter what is depicted or from what point
of view, the overarching presumption is that it is there for our
amusement and pleasure. That is why even on news shows which provide us
daily with fragments of tragedy and barbarism, we are urged by the
newscasters to "join them tomorrow." What for? One would think that
several minutes of murder and mayhem would suffice as material for a
month of sleepless nights. We accept the newscasters' invitation
because we know that the "news" is not to be taken seriously, that it is
all in fun, so to say. Everything about a news show tells us this--the
good looks and amiability of the cast, their pleasant banter, the
exciting music that opens and closes the show, the vivid film footage,
the attractive commercials--all these and more suggest that what we have
just seen is no cause for weeping. A news show, to put it plainly, is a
format for entertainment, not for education, reflection or catharsis.
And we must not judge too harshly those who have framed it in this way.
They are not assembling the news to be read, or broadcasting it to be
heard. They are televising the news to be seen. They must follow where
their medium leads. There is no conspiracy here, no lack of
intelligence, only a straightforward recognition that "good television"
has little to do with what is "good" about exposition or other forms of
verbal communication but everything to do with what the pictorial images
look like. I should like to illustrate this point by offering the case
of the eighty-minute discussion provided by the ABC network on November
20, 1983, following its controversial movie the Day After. Though the
memory of this telecast has receded for most, I choose this case
because, clearly, here was television taking its most "serious" and
"responsible" stance. Everything that made up this broadcast recommended
it as a critical test of television's capacity to depart from an
entertainment mode and rise to the level of public instruction. In the
first place, the subject was the possibility of a nuclear holocaust.
Second, the film itself had been attacked by several influential bodies
politic, including the Reverend Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority. Thus,
it was important that the network display television's value and serious
intentions as a medium of information and coherent discourse. Third, on
the program itself no musical theme was used as background-a significant
point since almost all television programs are embedded in music, which
helps to tell the audience what emotions are to be called forth. This
is a standard theatrical device, and its absence on television is always
ominous. Fourth, there were no commercials during the discussion, thus
elevating the tone of the event to the state of reverence usually
reserved for the funerals of assassinated Presidents. And finally, the
participants included Henry Kissinger, Robert McNamara, and Elie Wiesel,
each of whom is a symbol of sorts of serious discourse. Although
Kissinger, somewhat later, made an appearance on the hit show "Dynasty,"
he was then and still is a

paradigm of intellectual sobriety; and Wiesel, practically a walking
metaphor of social conscience. Indeed, the other members of the
cast--Carl Sagan, William Buckley and General Brent Scowcroft--are, each
in his way, men of intellectual bearing who are not expected to
participate in trivial public matters. the program began with Ted
Koppel, master of ceremonies, so to speak, indicating that what followed
was not intended to be a debate but a discussion. And so those who are
interested in philosophies of discourse had an excellent opportunity to
observe what serious television means by the word "discussion." Here is
what it means: Each of six men was given approximately five minutes to
say something about the subject. There was, however, no agreement on
exactly what the subject was, and no one felt obliged to respond to
anything anyone else said. In fact, it would have been difficult to do
so, since the participants were called upon seriatim, as if they were
finalists in a beauty contest, each being given his share of minutes in
front of the camera. Thus, if Mr. Wiesel, who was called upon last,
had a response to Mr. Buckley, who was called upon first, there would
have been four commentaries in between, occupying about twenty minutes,
so that the audience (if not Mr. Wiesel himself) would have had
difficulty remembering the argument which prompted his response. In
fact, the participants--most of whom were no strangers to
television--largely avoided addressing each other's points. They used
their initial minutes and then their subsequent ones to intimate their
position or give an impression. Dr. Kissinger, for example, seemed
intent on making viewers feel sorry that he was no longer their
Secretary of State by reminding everyone of books he had once written,
proposals he had once made, and negotiations he had once conducted. Mr.
McNamara informed the audience that he had eaten lunch in Germany that
very afternoon, and went on to say that he had at least fifteen
proposals to reduce nuclear arms. One would have thought that the
discussion would turn on this

issue, but the others seemed about as interested in it as they were in
what he had for lunch in Germany. (Later, he took the initiative to
mention three of his proposals but they were not discussed.) Elie
Wiesel, in a series of quasi-parables and paradoxes, stressed the tragic
nature of the human condition, but because he did not have the time to
provide a context for his remarks, he seemed quixotic and confused,
conveying an impression of an itinerant rabbi who has wandered into a
coven of Gentiles.

In other words, this was no discussion as we normally use the word. Even
when the "discussion" period began, there were no arguments or
counterarguments, no scrutiny of assumptions, no explanations, no
elaborations, no definitions. Carl Sagan made, in my opinion, the most
coherent statement--a four-minute rationale for a nuclear freeze--but it
contained at least two questionable assumptions and was not carefully
examined. Apparently, no one wanted to take time from his own few
minutes to call attention to someone else's. Mr. Koppel, for his part,
felt obliged to keep the "show" moving, and though he occasionally
pursued what he discerned as a line of thought, he was more concerned to
give each man his fair allotment of time.

But it is not time constraints alone that produce such fragmented and
discontinuous language. When a television show is in process, it is
very nearly impermissible to say, "Let me think about that" or "I don't
know" or "What do you mean when you say... ?" or "From what sources
does your information come?" This type of discourse not only slows down
the tempo of the show but creates the impression of uncertainty or lack
of finish. It tends to reveal people in the act of thinking, which is
as disconcerting and boring on television as it is on a Las Vegas stage.
Thinking does not play well on television, a fact that television
directors discovered long ago. There is not much to see in it. It is,
in a phrase, not a performing art. But television demands a performing
art, and so what the ABC network gave us was a picture of men of
sophisticated verbal skills and political

understanding being brought to heel by a medium that requires them to
fashion performances rather than ideas. Which accounts for why the
eighty minutes were very entertaining, in the way of a Samuel Beckett
play: the intimations of gravity hung heavy, the meaning passeth all
understanding. the performances, of course, were highly professional.
Sagan abjured the turtle-neck sweater in which he starred when he did
"Cosmos." He even had his hair cut for the event. His part was that of
the logical scientist speaking in behalf of the planet. It is to be
doubted that Paul Newman could have done better in the role, although
Leonard Nimoy might have. Scowcroft was suitably military in his
bearing--terse and distant, the unbreakable defender of national
security. Kissinger, as always, was superb in the part of the knowing
world statesman, weary of the sheer responsibility of keeping disaster
at bay. Koppel played to perfection the part of a moderator,
pretending, as it were, that he was sorting out ideas while, in fact, he
was merely directing the performances. At the end, one could only
applaud those performances, which is what a good television program
always aims to achieve; that is to say, applause, not reflection.

I do not say categorically that it is impossible to use television as a
carrier of coherent language or thought in process. William Buckley's
own program, "Firing Line," occasionally shows people in the act of
thinking but who also happen to have television cameras pointed at them.
There are other programs, such as "Meet the Press" or "the Open Mind,"
which clearly strive to maintain a sense of intellectual decorum and
typographic tradition, but they are scheduled so that they do not
compete with programs of great visual interest, since otherwise, they
will not be watched. After all, it is not unheard of that a format will
occasionally go against the bias of its medium. For example, the most
popular radio program of the early 1940's featured a ventriloquist, and
in those days, I heard more than once the feet of a tap dancer on the
"Major Bowes' Amateur Hour." (Indeed, if I am not mistaken, he even once
featured a pantomimist.) But

ventriloquism, dancing and mime do not play well on radio, just as
sustained, complex talk does not play well on television. It can be made
to play tolerably well if only one camera is used and the visual image
is kept constant--as when the President gives a speech. But this is not
television at its best, and it is not television that most people will
choose to watch. the single most important fact about television is
that people watch it, which is why it is called "television." And what
they watch, and like to watch, are moving pictures--millions of them, of
short duration and dynamic variety. It is in 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.

Film, records and radio (now that it is an adjunct of the music
industry) are, of course, equally devoted to entertaining the culture,
and their effects in altering the style of American discourse are not
insignificant. But television is different because it encompasses all
forms of discourse. No one goes to a movie to find out about government
policy or the latest scientific advances. No one buys a record to find
out the baseball scores or the weather or the latest murder. No one
turns on radio anymore for soap operas or a presidential address (if a
television set is at hand). But everyone goes to television for all
these things and more, which is why television resonates so powerfully
throughout the culture. Television is our culture's principal 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. As typography once dictated the
style of conducting politics, religion, business, education, law and
other important social matters, television now takes command. In
courtrooms, classrooms, operating rooms, board rooms, churches and even
airplanes, Americans no longer talk to each other, they entertain each
other. They do

not exchange ideas; they exchange images. They do not argue with
propositions; they argue with good looks, celebrities and commercials.
For the message of television as metaphor is not only that all the world
is a stage but that the stage is located in Las Vegas, Nevada.

In Chicago, for example, the Reverend Greg Sakowicz, a Roman Catholic
priest, mixes his religious teaching with rock 'n' roll music. According
to the Associated Press, the Reverend Sakowicz is both an associate
pastor at the Church of the Holy Spirit in Schaumberg (a suburb of
Chicago) and a disc jockey at WKQX. On his show, "the Journey Inward,"
Father Sakowicz chats in soft tones about such topics as family
relationships or commitment, and interposes his sermons with "the sound
of Billboard's Top 10." He says that his preaching is not done "in a
churchy way," and adds, "You don't have to be boring in order to be
holy."

Meanwhile in New York City at St. Patrick's Cathedral, Father John J.
O'Connor put on a New York Yankee baseball cap as he mugged his way
through his installation as Archbishop of the New York Archdiocese. He
got off some excellent gags, at least one of which was specifically
directed at Mayor Edward Koch, who was a member of his audience; that is
to say, he was a congregant. At his next public performance, the new
archbishop donned a New York Mets baseball cap. These events were, of
course, televised, and were vastly entertaining, largely because
Archbishop (now Cardinal) O'Connor has gone Father Sakowicz one better:
Whereas the latter believes that you don't have to be boring to be holy,
the former apparently believes you don't have to be holy at all.

In Phoenix, Arizona, Dr. Edward Dietrich performed triple bypass
surgery on Bernard Schuler. the operation was successful, which was
nice for Mr. Schuler. It was also on television, which was nice for
America. the operation was carried by at least fifty television
stations in the United States, and also by the British Broadcasting
Corporation. A two-man panel of narrators (a

play-by-play and color man, so to speak) kept viewers informed about
what they were seeing. It was not clear as to why this event was
televised, but it resulted in transforming both Dr. Dietrich and Mr.
Schuler's chest into celebrities. Perhaps because he has seen too many
doctor shows on television, Mr. Schuler was uncommonly confident about
the outcome of his surgery. "There is no way in hell they are going to
lose me on live TV," he said.2 As reported with great enthusiasm by both
WCBS-TV and WNBC-TV in 1984, the Philadelphia public schools have
embarked on an experiment in which children will have their curriculum
sung to them. Wearing Walkman equipment, students were shown listening
to rock music whose lyrics were about the eight parts of speech. Mr.
Jocko Henderson, who thought of this idea, is planning to delight
students further by subjecting mathematics and history, as well as
English, to the rigors of a rock music format. In fact, this is not Mr.
Henderson's idea at all. It was pioneered by the Children's Television
Workshop, whose television show "Sesame Street" is an expensive
illustration of the idea that education is indistinguishable from
entertainment. Nonetheless, Mr. Henderson has a point in his favor.
Whereas "Sesame Street" merely attempts to make learning to read a form
of light entertainment, the Philadelphia experiment aims to make the
classroom itself into a rock concert. In New Bedford, Massachusetts, a
rape trial was televised, to the delight of audiences who could barely
tell the difference between the trial and their favorite midday soap
opera. In Florida, trials of varying degrees of seriousness, including
murder, are regularly televised and are considered to be more
entertaining than most fictional courtroom dramas. All of this is done
in the interests of "public education." For the same high purpose, plans
are afoot, it is rumored, to televise confessionals. To be called
"Secrets of the Confessional Box," the program will, of course, carry
the warning that some of its material may be offensive to children and
therefore parental guidance is suggested.

On a United Airlines flight from Chicago to Vancouver, a stewardess
announces that its passengers will play a game. the passenger with the
most credit cards will win a bottle of champagne. A man from Boston with
twelve credit cards wins. A second game requires the passengers to
guess the collective age of the cabin crew. A man from Chicago guesses
128, and wins another bottle of wine. During the second game, the air
turns choppy and the Fasten Seat Belt sign goes on. Very few people
notice, least of all the cabin crew, who keep up a steady flow of gags
on the intercom. When the plane reaches its destination, everyone seems
to agree that it's fun to fly from Chicago to Vancouver. On February 7,
1985, the New York Times reported that Professor Charles Pine of Rutgers
University (Newark campus) was named Professor of the Year by the
Council for the Support and Advancement of Education. In explaining why
he has such a great impact on his students, Professor Pine said: "I have
some gimmicks I use all the time. If you reach the end of the
blackboard, I keep writing on the wall. It always gets a laugh. the
way I show what a glass molecule does is to run over to one wall and
bounce off it, and run over to the other wall." His students are,
perhaps, too young to recall that James Cagney used this "molecule move"
to great effect in Yankee Doodle Dandy. If I am not mistaken, Donald
O'Connor duplicated it in Singing in the Rain. So far as I know, it has
been used only once before in a classroom: Hegel tried it several times
in demonstrating how the dialectical method works. the Pennsylvania
Amish try to live in isolation from mainstream American culture. Among
other things, their religion opposes the veneration of graven images,
which means that the Amish are forbidden to see movies or to be
photographed. But apparently their religion has not got around to
disallowing seeing movies when they are being photographed. In the
summer of 1984, for example, a Paramount Pictures crew descended upon
Lancaster County to film the movie Witness, which is

about a detective, played by Harrison Ford, who falls in love with an
Amish woman. Although the Amish were warned by their church not to
interfere with the film makers, it turned out that some Amish welders
ran to see the action as soon as their work was done. Other devouts lay
in the grass some distance away, and looked down on the set with
binoculars. "We read about the movie in the paper," said an Amish
woman. "the kids even cut out Harrison Ford's picture." She added: "But
it doesn't really matter that much to them. Somebody told us he was in
Star Wars but that doesn't mean anything to us." 3 the last time a
similar conclusion was drawn was when the executive director of the
American Association of Blacksmiths remarked that he had read about the
automobile but that he was convinced it would have no consequences for
the future of his organization. In the Winter, 1984, issue of the
Official Video Journal there appears a full-page advertisement for "the
Genesis Project." the project aims to convert the Bible into a series of
movies. the end-product, to be called "the New Media Bible," will
consist of 225 hours of film and will cost a quarter of a billion
dollars. Producer John Heyman, whose credits include Saturday Night
Fever and Grease, is one of the film makers most committed to the
project. "Simply stated," he is quoted as saying, "I got hooked on the
Bible." the famous Israeli actor Topol, best known for his role as Tevye
in Fiddler on the Roof, will play the role of Abraham. the
advertisement does not say who will star as God but, given the
producer's background, there is some concern that it might be John
Travolta. At the commencement exercises at Yale University in 1983,
several honorary degrees were awarded, including one to Mother Teresa.
As she and other humanitarians and scholars, each in turn, received
their awards, the audience applauded appropriately but with a slight
hint of reserve and impatience, for it wished to give its heart to the
final recipient who waited shyly in the wings. As the details of her
achievements were being

recounted, many people left their seats and surged toward the stage to
be closer to the great woman. And when the name Meryl Streep was
announced, the audience unleashed a sonic boom of affection to wake the
New Haven dead. One man who was present when Bob Hope received his
honorary doctorate at another institution said that Dr. Streep's
applause surpassed Dr. Hope's. Knowing how to please a crowd as well as
anyone, the intellectual leaders at Yale invited Dick Cavett, the
talk-show host, to deliver the commencement address the following year.
It is rumored that this year, Don Rickles will receive a Doctorate of
Humane Letters and Lola Falana will give the commencement address. Prior
to the 1984 presidential elections, the two candidates confronted each
other on television in what were called "debates." These events were not
in the least like the Lincoln-Douglas debates or anything else that goes
by the name. Each candidate was given five minutes to address such
questions as, What is (or would be) your policy in Central America? His
opposite number was then given one minute for a rebuttal. In such
circumstances, complexity, documentation and logic can play no role,
and, indeed, on several occasions syntax itself was abandoned entirely.
It is no matter. the men were less concerned with giving arguments than
with "giving off" impressions, which is what television does best.
Post-debate commentary largely avoided any evaluation of the candidates'
ideas, since there were none to evaluate. Instead, the debates were
conceived as boxing matches, the relevant question being, Who KO'd whom?
the answer was determined by the "style" of the men--how they looked,
fixed their gaze, smiled, and delivered one-liners. In the second
debate, President Reagan got off a swell one-liner when asked a question
about his age. the following day, several newspapers indicated that Ron
had KO'd Fritz with his joke. Thus, the leader of the free world is
chosen by the people in the Age of Television. What all of this means is
that our culture has moved toward a

new way of conducting its business, especially its important business.
the nature of its discourse is changing as the demarcation line between
what is show business and what is not becomes harder to see with each
passing day. Our priests and presidents, our surgeons and lawyers, our
educators and news-casters need worry less about satisfying the demands
of their discipline than the demands of good showmanship. Had Irving
Berlin changed one word in the title of his celebrated song, he would
have been as prophetic, albeit more terse, as Aldous Huxley. He need
only have written, There's No Business But Show Business.

the American humorist H. Allen Smith once suggested that of all the
worrisome words in the English language, the scariest is "uh oh," as
when a physician looks at your X-rays, and with knitted brow says, "Uh
oh." I should like to suggest that the words which are the title of this
chapter are as ominous as any, all the more so because they are spoken
without knitted brow--indeed, with a kind of idiot's delight. the
phrase, if that's what it may be called, adds to our grammar a new part
of speech, a conjunction that does not connect anything to anything but
does the opposite: separates everything from everything. As such, it
serves as a compact metaphor for the discontinuities in so much that
passes for public discourse in present-day America.

"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. the phrase is a means of acknowledging the fact
that the world as mapped by the speeded-up electronic media has no order
or meaning and is not to be taken seriously. There is no murder so
brutal, no earthquake so devastating, no political blunder so
costly--for that matter, no ball score so tantalizing or weather report
so threatening--that it cannot be erased from our minds by a newscaster
saying, "Now... this." the newscaster means that you have thought long
enough on the previous matter (approximately forty-five seconds), that
you must not be morbidly preoccupied with it (let us say, for ninety
seconds), and that you must now give your attention to another fragment
of news or a commercial. Television did not invent the "Now... this"
world view. As I have tried to show, it is the offspring of the
intercourse between telegraphy and photography. But it is through
television that it has been nurtured and brought to a perverse maturity.
For on television, nearly every half hour is a discrete event, separated
in content, context, and emotional texture from what precedes and
follows it. In part because television sells its time in seconds and
minutes, in part because television must use images rather than words,
in part because its audience can move freely to and from the television
set, programs are structured so that almost each eight-minute segment
may stand as a complete event in itself. Viewers are rarely required to
carry over any thought or feeling from one parcel of time to another. Of
course, in television's presentation of the "news of the day," we may
see the "Now... this" mode of discourse in its boldest and most
embarrassing form. For there, we are presented not only with fragmented
news but news without context, without consequences, without value, and
therefore without essential seriousness; that is to say, news as pure
entertainment. Consider, for example, how you would proceed if you were
given the opportunity to produce a television news show for any station
concerned to attract the largest possible audience. You would, first,
choose a cast of players, each of whom has a face that is both "likable"
and "credible." Those who apply would, in fact, submit to you their
eight-by-ten glossies, from which you would eliminate those whose
countenances are not suitable for nightly display. This means that you
will exclude women who are not beautiful or who are over the age of
fifty, men who are bald, all people who are overweight or whose noses
are too long or whose eyes are too close together. You will try, in
other words, to assemble a cast of talking hair-do's.

"Now... This"

At the very least, you will want those whose faces would not be
unwelcome on a magazine cover. Christine Craft has just such a face, and
so she applied for a co-anchor position on KMBC-TV in Kansas City.
According to a lawyer who represented her in a sexism suit she later
brought against the station, the management of KMBC-TV "loved
Christine's look." She was accordingly hired in January 1981. She was
fired in August 1981 because research indicated that her appearance
"hampered viewer acceptance." What exactly does "hampered viewer
acceptance" mean? And what does it have to do with the news? Hampered
viewer acceptance means the same thing for television news as it does
for any television show: Viewers do not like looking at the performer.
It also means that viewers do not believe the performer, that she lacks
credibility. In the case of a theatrical performance, we have a sense
of what that implies: the actor does not persuade the audience that he
or she is the character being portrayed. But what does lack of
credibility imply in the case of a news show? What character is a
co-anchor playing? And how do we decide that the performance lacks
verisimilitude? Does the audience believe that the newscaster is lying,
that what is reported did not in fact happen, that something important
is being concealed? It is frightening to think that this may be so, that
the perception of the truth of a report rests heavily on the
acceptability of the newscaster. In the ancient world, there was a
tradition of banishing or killing the bearer of bad tidings. Does the
television news show restore, in a curious form, this tradition? Do we
banish those who tell us the news when we do not care for the face of
the teller? Does television countermand the warnings we once received
about the fallacy of the ad hominem argument? If the answer to any of
these questions is even a qualified "Yes," then here is an issue worthy
of the attention of epistemologists. Stated in its simplest form, it is
that television provides a new (or, possibly, restores an old)
definition of truth:

the credibility of the teller is the ultimate test of the truth of a
proposition. "Credibility" here does not refer to the past record of
the teller for making statements that have survived the rigors of
reality-testing. It refers only to the impression of sincerity,
authenticity, vulnerability or attractiveness (choose one or more)
conveyed by the actor/reporter. This is a matter of considerable
importance, for it goes beyond the question of how truth is perceived on
television news shows. If on television, credibility replaces reality
as the decisive test of truth-telling, political leaders need not
trouble themselves very much with reality provided that their
performances consistently generate a sense of verisimilitude. I
suspect, for example, that the dishonor that now shrouds Richard Nixon
results not from the fact that he lied but that on television he looked
like a liar. Which, if true, should bring no comfort to anyone, not
even veteran Nixon-haters. For the alternative possibilities are that
one may look like a liar but be telling the truth; or even worse, look
like a truth-teller but in fact be lying. As a producer of a television
news show, you would be well aware of these matters and would be careful
to choose your cast on the basis of criteria used by David Merrick and
other successful impresarios. Like them, you would then turn your
attention to staging the show on principles that maximize entertainment
value. You would, for example, select a musical theme for the show. All
television news programs begin, end, and are somewhere in between
punctuated with music. I have found very few Americans who regard this
custom as peculiar, which fact I have taken as evidence for the
dissolution of lines of demarcation between serious public discourse and
entertainment. What has music to do with the news? Why is it there? It
is there, I assume, for the same reason music is used in the theater and
films--to create a mood and provide a leitmotif for the entertainment.
If there were no music--as is the case when any television program is
interrupted for a news flash--viewers would expect something truly
alarming, possibly life-altering.

"Now... This"

But as long as the music is there as a frame for the program, the viewer
is comforted to believe that there is nothing to be greatly alarmed
about; that, in fact, the events that are reported have as much relation
to reality as do scenes in a play. This perception of a news show as a
stylized dramatic performance whose content has been staged largely to
entertain is reinforced by several other features, including the fact
that the average length of any story is forty-five seconds. While
brevity does not always suggest triviality, in this case it clearly
does. It is simply not possible to convey a sense of seriousness about
any event if its implications are exhausted in less than one minute's
time. In fact, it is quite obvious that TV news has no intention of
suggesting that any story has any implications, for that would require
viewers to continue to think about it when it is done and therefore
obstruct their attending to the next story that waits panting in the
wings. In any case, viewers are not provided with much opportunity to
be distracted from the next story since in all likelihood it will
consist of some film footage. Pictures have little difficulty in
overwhelming words, and short-circuiting introspection. As a television
producer, you would be certain to give both prominence and precedence to
any event for which there is some sort of visual documentation. A
suspected killer being brought into a police station, the angry face of
a cheated consumer, a barrel going over Niagara Falls (with a person
alleged to be in it), the President disembarking from a helicopter on
the White House lawn--these are always fascinating or amusing, and
easily satisfy the requirements of an entertaining show. It is, of
course, not necessary that the visuals actually document the point of a
story. Neither is it necessary to explain why such images are intruding
themselves on public consciousness. Film footage justifies itself, as
every television producer well knows. It is also of considerable help in
maintaining a high level of unreality that the newscasters do not pause
to grimace or shiver when they speak their prefaces or epilogs to the
film clips. In-

deed, many newscasters do not appear to grasp the meaning of what they
are saying, and some hold to a fixed and ingratiating enthusiasm as they
report on earthquakes, mass killings and other disasters. Viewers would
be quite disconcerted by any show of concern or terror on the part of
newscasters. Viewers, after all, are partners with the newscasters in
the "Now... this" culture, and they expect the newscaster to play out
his or her role as a character who is marginally serious but who stays
well clear of authentic understanding. the viewers, for their part,
will not be caught contaminating their responses with a sense of
reality, any more than an audience at a play would go scurrying to call
home because a character on stage has said that a murderer is loose in
the neighborhood. the viewers also know that no matter how grave any
fragment of news may appear (for example, on the day I write a Marine
Corps general has declared that nuclear war between the United States
and Russia is inevitable), it will shortly be followed by a series of
commercials that will, in an instant, defuse the import of the news, in
fact render it largely banal. This is a key element in the structure of
a news program and all by itself refutes any claim that television news
is designed as a serious form of public discourse. Imagine what you
would think of me, and this book, if I were to pause here, tell you that
I will return to my discussion in a moment, and then proceed to write a
few words in behalf of United Airlines or the Chase Manhattan Bank. You
would rightly think that I had no respect for you and, certainly, no
respect for the subject. And if I did this not once but several times
in each chapter, you would think the whole enterprise unworthy of your
attention. Why, then, do we not think a news show similarly unworthy?
the reason, I believe, is that whereas we expect books and even other
media (such as film) to maintain a consistency of tone and a continuity
of content, we have no such expectation of television, and especially
television news. We have become so accustomed to its discontinuities
that we are no longer struck dumb, as any sane

"Now... This"

person would be, by a newscaster who having just reported that a nuclear
war is inevitable goes on to say that he will be right back after this
word from Burger King; who says, in other words, "Now... this." One can
hardly overestimate the damage that such juxtapositions do to our sense
of the world as a serious place. the damage is especially massive to
youthful viewers who depend so much on television for their clues as to
how to respond to the world. In watching television news, they, more
than any other segment of the audience, are drawn into an epistemology
based on the assumption that all reports of cruelty and death are
greatly exaggerated and, in any case, not to be taken seriously or
responded to sanely. I should go so far as to say that embedded in the
surrealistic frame of a television news show is a theory of
anticommunication, featuring a type of discourse that abandons logic,
reason, sequence and rules of contradiction. In aesthetics, I believe
the name given to this theory is Dadaism; in philosophy, nihilism; in
psychiatry, schizophrenia. In the parlance of the theater, it is known
as vaudeville. For those who think I am here guilty of hyperbole, I
offer the following description of television news by Robert MacNeil,
executive editor and co-anchor of the "MacNeil-Lehrer News-hour." the
idea, he writes, "is to keep everything brief, not to strain the
attention of anyone but instead to provide constant stimulation through
variety, novelty, action, and movement. You are required... to pay
attention to no concept, no character, and no problem for more than a
few seconds at a time." 2 He goes on to say that the assumptions
controlling a news show are "that bite-sized is best, that complexity
must be avoided, that nuances are dispensable, that qualifications
impede the simple message, that visual stimulation is a substitute for
thought, and that verbal precision is an anachronism." 3 Robert MacNeil
has more reason than most to give testimony about the television news
show as vaudeville act. the "Mac-Neil-Lehrer Newshour" is an unusual
and gracious attempt to

bring to television some of the elements of typographic discourse. the
program abjures visual stimulation, consists largely of extended
explanations of events and in-depth interviews (which even there means
only five to ten minutes), limits the number of stories covered, and
emphasizes background and coherence. But television has exacted its
price for MacNeil's rejection of a show business format. By
television's standards, the audience is minuscule, the program is
confined to public-television stations, and it is a good guess that the
combined salary of MacNeil and Lehrer is one-fifth of Dan Rather's or
Tom Brokaw's.

If you were a producer of a television news show for a commercial
station, you would not have the option of defying television's
requirements. It would be demanded of you that you strive for the
largest possible audience, and, as a consequence and in spite of your
best intentions, you would arrive at a production very nearly resembling
MacNeil's description. Moreover, you would include some things MacNeil
does not mention. You would try to make celebrities of your
newscasters. You would advertise the show, both in the press and on
television itself. You would do "news briefs," to serve as an
inducement to viewers. You would have a weatherman as comic relief, and
a sportscaster whose language is a touch uncouth (as a way of his
relating to the beer-drinking common man). You would, in short, package
the whole event as any producer might who is in the entertainment
business.

the result of all this is that Americans are the best entertained and
quite likely the least well-informed people in the Western world. I say
this in the face of the popular conceit that television, as a window to
the world, has made Americans exceedingly well informed. Much depends
here, of course, on what is meant by being informed. I will pass over
the now tiresome polls that tell us that, at any given moment, percent
of our citizens do not know who is the Secretary of State or the Chief
Justice of the Supreme Court. Let us consider, instead, the case

"Now... This"

of Iran during the drama that was called the "Iranian Hostage Crisis." I
don't suppose there has been a story in years that received more
continuous attention from television. We may assume, then, that
Americans know most of what there is to know about this unhappy event.
And now, I put these questions to you: Would it be an exaggeration to
say that not one American in a hundred knows what language the Iranians
speak? Or what the word "Ayatollah" means or implies? Or knows any
details of the tenets of Iranian religious beliefs? Or the main
outlines of their political history? Or knows who the Shah was, and
where he came from?

Nonetheless, everyone had an opinion about this event, for in America
everyone is entitled to an opinion, and it is certainly useful to have a
few when a pollster shows up. But these are opinions of a quite
different .order from eighteenth- or nineteenth-century opinions. It is
probably more accurate to call them emotions rather than opinions, which
would account for the fact that they change from week to week, as the
pollsters tell us. What is happening here is that television is
altering the meaning of "being informed" by creating a species of
information that might properly be called disinformation. I am using
this word almost in the precise sense in which it is used by spies in
the CIA or KGB. Disinformation does not mean false information. It
means misleading information--misplaced, irrelevant, fragmented or
superficial information--information that creates the illusion of
knowing something but which in fact leads one away from knowing. In
saying this, I do not mean to imply that television news deliberately
aims to deprive Americans of a coherent, contextual understanding of
their world. I mean to say that when news is packaged as entertainment,
that is the inevitable result. And in saying that the television news
show entertains but does not inform, I am saying something far more
serious than that we are being deprived of authentic information. I am
saying we are losing our sense of what it means to be

108 "Now... This"

well informed. Ignorance is always correctable. But what shall we do
if we take ignorance to be knowledge? Here is a startling example of how
this process bedevils us. A New York Times article is headlined on
February 15, 1983:

REAGAN MISSTATEMENTS GETTING LESS ATtENTION

the article begins in the following way:

President Reagan's aides used to become visibly alarmed at suggestions
that he had given mangled and perhaps misleading accounts of his
policies or of current events in general. That doesn't seem to happen
much anymore. Indeed, the President continues to make debatable
assertions of fact but news accounts do not deal with them as
extensively as they once did. In the view of White House officials, the
declining news coverage mirrors a decline in interest by the general
public. (my italics)

This report is not so much a news story as a story about the news, and
our recent history suggests that it is not about Ronald Reagan's charm.
It is about how news is defined, and I believe the story would be quite
astonishing to both civil libertarians and tyrants of an earlier time.
Walter Lippmann, for example, wrote in 1920: "There can be no liberty
for a community which lacks the means by which to detect lies." For all
of his pessimism about the possibilities of restoring an eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century level of public discourse, Lippmann assumed, as did
Thomas Jefferson before him, that with a well-trained press functioning
as a lie-detector, the public's interest in a President's mangling of
the truth would be piqued, in both senses of that word. Given the means
to detect lies, he believed, the public could not be indifferent to
their consequences. But this case refutes his assumption. the reporters
who cover the White House are ready and able to expose lies, and thus

create the grounds for informed and indignant opinion. But apparently
the public declines to take an interest. To press reports of White
House dissembling, the public has replied with Queen Victoria's famous
line: "We are not amused." However, here the words mean something the
Queen did not have in mind. They mean that what is not amusing does not
compel their attention. Perhaps if the President's lies could be
demonstrated by pictures and accompanied by music the public would raise
a curious eyebrow. If a movie, like All the President's Men, could be
made from his misleading accounts of government policy, if there were a
break-in of some sort or sinister characters laundering money, attention
would quite likely be paid. We do well to remember that President Nixon
did not begin to come undone until his lies were given a theatrical
setting at the Watergate hearings. But we do not have anything like
that here. Apparently, all President Reagan does is say things that are
not entirely true. And there is nothing entertaining in that. But there
is a subtler point to be made here. Many of the President's
"misstatements" fall in the category of contradictions-mutually
exclusive assertions that cannot possibly both, in the same context, be
true. "In the same context" is the key phrase here, for it is context
that defines contradiction. There is no problem in someone's remarking
that he prefers oranges to apples, and also remarking that he prefers
apples to oranges--not if one statement is made in the context of
choosing a wallpaper design and the other in the context of selecting
fruit for dessert. In such a case, we have statements that are
opposites, but not contradictory. But if the statements are made in a
single, continuous, and coherent context, then they are contradictions,
and cannot both be true. 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 para-

graph 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. the only thing to be amused about is the
bafflement of reporters at the public's indifference. There is an irony
in the fact that the very group that has taken the world apart should,
on trying to piece it together again, be surprised that no one notices
much, or cares. For all his perspicacity, George Orwell would have been
stymied by this situation; there is nothing "Orwellian" about it. the
President does not have the press under his thumb. the New York Times
and the Washington Post are not Pravda; the Associated Press is not
Tass. And there is no Newspeak here. Lies have not been defined as
truth nor truth as lies. All that has happened is that the public has
adjusted to incoherence and been

"Now... This"

amused into indifference. Which is why Aldous Huxley would not in the
least be surprised by the story. Indeed, he prophesied its coming. He
believed that it is far more likely that the Western democracies will
dance and dream themselves into oblivion than march into it, single file
and manacled. Huxley grasped, as Orwell did not, that it is not
necessary to conceal anything from a public insensible to contradiction
and narcoticized by technological diversions. Although Huxley did not
specify that television would be our main line to the drug, he would
have no difficulty accepting Robert MacNeil's observation that
"Television is the soma of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World." Big Brother
turns out to be Howdy Doody. I do not mean that the trivialization of
public information is all accomplished on television. I mean that
television is the paradigm for our conception of public information. As
the printing press did in an earlier time, television has achieved the
power to define the form in which news must come, and it has also
defined how we shall respond to it. In presenting news to us packaged
as vaudeville, television induces other media to do the same, so that
the total information environment begins to mirror television. For
example, America's newest and highly successful national newspaper, USA
Today, is modeled precisely on the format of television. It is sold on
the street in receptacles that look like television sets. Its stories
are uncommonly short, its design leans heavily on pictures, charts and
other graphics, some of them printed in various colors. Its weather
maps are a visual delight; its sports section includes enough pointless
statistics to distract a computer. As a consequence, USA Today, which
began publication in September 1982, has become the third largest daily
in the United States (as of July 1984, according to the Audit Bureau of
Circulations), moving quickly to overtake the Daily News and the Wall
Street Journal. Journalists of a more traditional bent have criticized
it for its superficiality and theatrics, but the paper's editors remain
steadfast in their disregard

112 "Now... This"

of typographic standards. the paper's Editor-in-Chief, John Quinn, has
said: "We are not up to undertaking projects of the dimensions needed to
win prizes. They don't give awards for the best investigative
paragraph." 'Here is an astonishing tribute to the resonance of
television's epistemology: In the age of television, the paragraph is
becoming the basic unit of news in print media. Moreover, Mr. Quinn
need not fret too long about being deprived of awards. As other
newspapers join in the transformation, the time cannot be far off when
awards will be given for the best investigative sentence.

It needs also to be noted here that new and successful magazines such as
People and Us are not only examples of television-oriented print media
but have had an extraordinary "ricochet" effect on television itself.
Whereas television taught the magazines that news is nothing but
entertainment, the magazines have taught television that nothing but
entertainment is news. Television programs, such as "Entertainment
Tonight," turn information about entertainers and celebrities into
"serious" cultural content, so that the circle begins to close: Both the
form and content of news become entertainment.

Radio, of course, is the least likely medium to join in the descent into
a Huxleyan world of technological narcotics. It is, after all,
particularly well suited to the transmission of rational, complex
language. Nonetheless, and even if we disregard radio's captivation by
the music industry, we appear to be left with the chilling fact that
such language as radio allows us to hear is increasingly primitive,
fragmented, and largely aimed at invoking visceral response; which is to
say, it is the linguistic analogue to the ubiquitous rock music that is
radio's principal source of income. As I write, the trend in call-in
shows is for the "host" to insult callers whose language does not, in
itself, go much beyond humanoid grunting. Such programs have little
content, as this word used to be defined, and are merely of
ar-cheological interest in that they give us a sense of what a dialogue
among Neanderthals might have been like. More to the

point, the language of radio newscasts has become, under the influence
of television, increasingly decontextualized and discontinuous, so that
the possibility of anyone's knowing about the world, as against merely
knowing of it, is effectively blocked. In New York City, radio station
WINS entreats its listeners to "Give us twenty-two minutes and we'll
give you the world." This is said without irony, and its audience, we
may assume, does not regard the slogan as the conception of a disordered
mind.

And so, we move rapidly into an information environment which may
rightly be called trivial pursuit. As the game of that name uses facts
as a source of amusement, so do our sources of news. It has been
demonstrated many times that a culture can survive misinformation and
false opinion. It has not yet been demonstrated whether a culture can
survive if it takes the measure of the world in twenty-two minutes. Or
if the value of its news is determined by the number of laughs it
provides.

Shuffle Off to Bethlehem

There is an evangelical preacher on television who goes by the name of
Reverend Terry. She appears to be in her early fifties, and features a
coiffure of which it has been said that it cannot be mussed, only
broken. Reverend Terry is energetic and folksy, and uses a style of
preaching modeled on early Milton Berle. When her audiences are shown in
reaction shots, they are almost always laughing. As a consequence, it
would be difficult to distinguish them from audiences, say, at the Sands
Hotel in Las Vegas, except for the fact that they have a slightly
cleaner, more wholesome look. Reverend Terry tries to persuade them, as
well as those "at home," to change their ways by finding Jesus Christ.
To help her do this, she offers a "prosperity Campaign Kit," which
appears to have a dual purpose: As it brings one nearer to Jesus, it
also provides advice on how to increase one's bank account. This makes
her followers extremely happy and confirms their predisposition to
believe that prosperity is the true aim of religion. Perhaps God
disagrees. As of this writing, Reverend Terry has been obliged to
declare bankruptcy and temporarily halt her ministrations.

Pat Robertson is the master of ceremonies of the highly successful "700
Club," a television show and religious organization of sorts to which
you can belong by paying fifteen dollars per month. (Of course, anyone
with cable television can watch the show free of charge.) Reverend
Robertson does his act in a much lower register than Reverend Terry. He
is modest, intelligent, and has the kind of charm television viewers
would associate with a cool-headed talk-show host. His appeal to
godliness is considerably more sophisticated than Reverend Terry's, at
least from the standpoint of television. Indeed, he appears to use as
his model of communication "Entertainment Tonight." His program includes
interviews, singers and taped segments with entertainers who are
born-again Christians. For example, all of the chorus girls in Don Ho's
Hawaiian act are born-again, and in one segment, we are shown them both
at prayer and on stage (although not at the same time). the program
also includes taped reenactments of people who, having been driven to
the edge of despair, are saved by the 700 Club'. Such people play
themselves in these finely crafted docu-dramas. In one, we are shown a
woman racked with anxiety. She cannot concentrate on her wifely duties.
the television shows and movies she sees induce a generalized fear of
the world. Paranoia closes in. She even begins to believe that her own
children are trying to kill her. As the play proceeds, we see her in
front of her television set chancing upon the 700 Club. She becomes
interested in its message. She allows Jesus to enter her heart. She is
saved. At the end of the play, we see her going about her business,
calmly and cheerfully, her eyes illuminated with peace. And so, we may
say that the 700 Club has twice elevated her to a state of
transcendence: first, by putting her in the presence of Jesus; second,
by making her into a television star. To the uninitiated, it is not
entirely clear which is the higher estate.

Toward the end of each 700 Club show, the following day's acts are
announced. They are many and various. the program concludes with
someone's saying, "All this and more... tomorrow on the 700 Club."

Jimmy Swaggart is a somewhat older-style evangelist. Though he plays the
piano quite well, sings sweetly, and uses the full range of television's
resources, when he gets going he favors a kind of fire-and-brimstone
approach. But because this is television, he often moderates his
message with a dollop of ecumenism. For example, his sermon on the
question, Are the

Jews practicing blasphemy? begins by assuring his audience that they
are not, by recalling Jesus' bar mitzvah, and by insisting that
Christians owe the Jews a considerable debt. It ends with his
indicating that with the loss of their Temple in Biblical times, the
Jews have somehow lost their way. His message suggests that they are
rather to be pitied than despised but that, in any case, many of them
are pretty nice people. It is the perfect television sermon--theatrical,
emotional, and in a curious way comforting, even to a Jewish viewer. For
television-bless its heart--is not congenial to messages of naked hate.
For one thing, you never know who is watching, so it is best not to be
wildly offensive. For another, haters with reddened faces and demonic
gestures merely look foolish on television, as Marshall McLuhan observed
years ago and Senator Joseph McCarthy learned to his dismay. Television
favors moods of conciliation and is at its best when substance of any
kind is muted. (One must make an exception here for those instances
when preachers, like Swaggart, turn to the subject of the Devil and
secular humanism. Then they are quite uncompromising in the ferocity of
their assaults, partly, one may assume, because neither the Devil nor
secular humanists are included in the Nielsen Ratings. Neither are they
inclined to watch.) There are at present thirty-five television stations
owned and operated by religious organizations, but every television
station features religious programming of one sort or another. To
prepare myself for writing this chapter, I watched forty-two hours of
television's version of religion, mostly the shows of Robert Schuller,
Oral Roberts, Jimmy Swaggart, Jerry Falwell, Jim Bakker and Pat
Robertson. Forty-two hours were entirely unnecessary. Five would have
provided me with all the conclusions, of which there are two, that are
fairly to be drawn. 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. 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. It is true enough that some
of these men are uneducated, provincial and even bigoted. They
certainly do not compare favorably with well-known evangelicals of an
earlier period, such as Jonathan Edwards, George Whitefield and Charles
Finney, who were men of great learning, theological subtlety and
powerful expositional skills. Nonetheless, today's television preachers
are probably not greatly different in their limitations from most
earlier evangelicals or from many ministers today whose activities are
confined to churches and synagogues. What makes these television
preachers the enemy of religious experience is not so much their
weaknesses but the weaknesses of the medium in which they work. 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 naive to suppose that
something that has been expressed in one form can be expressed in
another without significantly changing its meaning, texture or value.
Much prose translates fairly well from one language to another, but we
know that poetry does not; we may get a rough idea of the sense of a
translated poem but usually everything else is lost, especially that
which makes it an object of beauty. the translation makes it into
something it was not. To take another example: We may find it
convenient to send a condolence card to a bereaved friend, but we delude
ourselves if we believe that our card conveys the same meaning as our
broken and whispered words when we are present. the card not only
changes the words but eliminates the context from which the words take
their meaning. Similarly, we delude ourselves if we believe that most
everything a

teacher normally does can be replicated with greater efficiency by a
microcomputer. Perhaps some things can, but there is always the
question, What is lost in the translation? the answer may even be:
Everything that is significant about education. Though it may be
unAmerican to say it, not everything is televisible. Or to put it more
precisely, what is televised is transformed from what it was to
something else, which may or may not preserve its former essence. For
the most part, television preachers have not seriously addressed this
matter. They have assumed that what had formerly been done in a church
or a tent, and face-to-face, can be done on television without loss of
meaning, without changing the quality of the religious experience.
Perhaps their failure to address the translation issue has its origin in
the hubris engendered by the dazzling number of people to whom
television gives them access. "Television," Billy Graham has written,
"is the most powerful tool of communication ever devised by man. Each
of my prime-time 'specials' is now carried by nearly 300 stations across
the U.S. and Canada, so that in a single telecast I preach to millions
more than Christ did in his lifetime." To this, Pat Robertson adds: "To
say that the church shouldn't be involved with television is utter
folly. the needs are the same, the message is the same, but the
delivery can change .... It would be folly for the church not to get
involved with the most formative force in America." 2 This is gross
technological naivete. If the delivery is not the same, then the
message, quite likely, is not the same. And if the context in which the
message is experienced is altogether different from what it was in
Jesus' time, we may assume that its social and psychological meaning is
different, as well. To come to the point, there are several
characteristics of television and its surround that converge to make
authentic religious experience impossible. the first has to do with the
fact that there is no way to consecrate the space in which a television
show is experienced. It is an essential condition of any traditional
religious service that the space in which it is conducted must be
invested with some measure of sacrality. Of course, a church or
synagogue is designed as a place of ritual enactment so that almost
anything that occurs there, even a bingo game, has a religious aura. But
a religious service need not occur only in a church or synagogue. Almost
any place will do, provided it is first decontaminated; that is,
divested of its profane uses. This can be done by placing a cross on a
wall, or candles on a table, or a sacred document in public view.
Through such acts, a gymnasium or dining hall or hotel room can be
transformed into a place of worship; a slice of space-time can be
removed from the world of profane events, and be recreated into a
reality that does not belong to our world. But for this transformation
to be made, it is essential that certain rules of conduct be observed.
There will be no eating or idle conversation, for example. One may be
required to put on a skull cap or to kneel down at appropriate moments.
Or simply to contemplate in silence. Our conduct must be congruent with
the otherworldliness of the space. But this condition is not usually
met when we are watching a religious television program. the activities
in one's living room or bedroom or--God help us--one's kitchen are
usually the same whether a religious program is being presented or "the
A-Team" or "Dallas" is being presented. People will eat, talk, go to
the bathroom, do push-ups or any of the things they are accustomed to
doing in the presence of an animated television screen. If an audience
is not immersed in an aura of mystery and symbolic otherworldliness,
then it is unlikely that it can call forth the state of mind required
for a nontrivial religious experience. Moreover, the television screen
itself has a strong bias toward a psychology of secularism. the screen
is so saturated with our memories of profane events, so deeply
associated with the commercial and entertainment worlds that it is
difficult for it to be recreated as a frame for sacred events. Among
other things, the viewer is at all times aware that a flick of the
switch will produce a different and secular event on the screenma hockey
game, a commercial, a cartoon. Not only that, but both prior to and
immediately following most religious programs, there are commercials,
promos for popular shows, and a variety of other secular images and
discourses, so that the main message of the screen itself is a continual
promise of entertainment. Both the history and the ever-present
possibilities of the television screen work against the idea that
introspection or spiritual transcendence is desirable in its presence.
the television screen wants you to remember that its imagery is always
available for your amusement and pleasure.

the television preachers themselves are well aware of this. They know
that their programs do not represent a discontinuity in commercial
broadcasting but are merely part of an unbroken continuum. Indeed, many
of these programs are presented at times other than traditional Sunday
hours. Some of the more popular preachers are quite willing to go "head
to head" with secular programs because they believe they can put on a
more appealing show. Incidentally, the money to do this is no problem.
Contributions to these shows run into the millions. It has been
estimated that the total revenue of the electric church exceeds $500
million a year.

I mention this only to indicate why it is possible for these preachers
to match the high production costs of any strictly commercial program.
And match them they do. Most of the religious shows feature sparkling
fountains, floral displays, choral groups and elaborate sets. All of
them take as their model for staging some well-known commercial program.
Jim Bakker, for example, uses "the Merv Griffin Show" as his guide. More
than occasionally, programs are done "on location," in exotic locales
with attractive and unfamiliar vistas.

In addition, exceedingly handsome people are usually in view, both on
the stage and in the audience. Robert Schuiler is particularly partial
to celebrities, especially movie actors like Efrem Zimbalist, Jr., and
Cliff Robertson, who have declared

their allegiance to him. Not only does Schuller have celebrities on his
show but his advertisements use their presence to attract an audience.
Indeed, I think it fair to say that attracting an audience is the main
goal of these programs, just as it is for "the A-Team" and "Dallas."

To achieve this goal, the most modern methods of marketing and promotion
are abundantly used, such as offering free pamphlets, Bibles and gifts,
and, in Jerry Falwell's case, two free "Jesus First" pins. the
preachers are forthright about how they control the content of their
preaching to maximize their ratings. You shall wait a very long time
indeed if you wish to hear an electronic preacher refer to the
difficulties a rich man will have in gaining access to heaven. the
executive director of the National Religious Broadcasters Association
sums up what he calls the unwritten law of all television preachers:
"You can get your share of the audience only by offering people
something they want."

You will note, I am sure, that this is an unusual religious credo. There
is no great religious leader--from the Buddha 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. As a
consequence, what is preached on television is not anything like the
Sermon on the Mount. Religious programs are filled with good cheer.
They celebrate affluence. Their featured players become celebrities.
Though their messages are trivial, the shows have high ratings, or
rather, because their messages are trivial, the shows have high ratings.

I believe I am not mistaken in saying that Christianity is a demanding
and serious religion. When it is delivered as easy and amusing, it is
another kind of religion altogether.

There are, of course, counterarguments to the claim that television
degrades religion. Among them is that spectacle is hardly a stranger to
religion. If one puts aside the Quakers and a few other austere sects,
every religion tries to make itself appealing through art, music, icons
and awe-inspiring ritual. the aesthetic dimension to religion is the
source of its attraction to many people. This is especially true of
Roman Catholicism and Judaism, which supply their congregants with
haunting chants; magnificent robes and shawls; magical hats, wafers and
wine; stained-glass windows; and the mysterious cadences of ancient
languages. the difference between these accoutrements of religion and
the floral displays, fountains and elaborate sets we see on television
is that the former are not, in fact, accoutrements but integral parts of
the history and doctrines of the religion itself; they require
congregants to respond to them with suitable reverence. A Jew does not
cover his head at prayer because a skull cap looks good on television. A
Catholic does not light a votive candle to improve the look of the
altar. Rabbis, priests and Presbyterian ministers do not, in the midst
of a service, take testimony from movie stars to find out why they are
religious people. the spectacle we find in true religions has as its
purpose enchantment, not entertainment. the distinction is critical. By
endowing things with magic, enchantment is the means through which we
may gain access to sacredness. Entertainment is the means through which
we distance ourselves from it. the reply to this is that most of the
religion available to us on television is "fundamentalist," which
explicitly disdains ritual and theology in favor of direct communication
with the Bible itself, that is, with God. Without ensnaring myself in a
theological argument for which I am unprepared, I think it both fair and
obvious to say that on television, God is a vague and subordinate
character. Though His name is invoked repeatedly, the concreteness and
persistence of the image of the preacher carries the clear message that
it is he, not He, who must be worshipped. I do not mean to imply that
the preacher wishes it to

be so; only that the power of a close-up televised face, in color, makes
idolatry a continual hazard. Television is, after all, a form of graven
imagery far more alluring than a golden calf. I suspect (though I have
no external evidence of it) that Catholic objections to Bishop Fulton
Sheen's theatrical performances on television (of several years back)
sprang from the impression that viewers were misdirecting their
devotions, away from God and toward Bishop Sheen, whose piercing eyes,
awesome cape and stately tones were as close a resemblance to a deity as
charisma allows. Television's strongest point is that it brings
personalities into our hearts, not abstractions into our heads. That is
why CBS' programs about the universe were called "Walter Cronkite's
Universe." One would think that the grandeur of the universe needs no
assistance from Walter Cronkite. One would think wrong. CBS knows that
Walter Cronkite plays better on television than the Milky Way. And
Jimmy Swaggart plays better than God. For God exists only in our minds,
whereas Swaggart is there, to be seen, admired, adored. Which is why he
is the star of the show. And why Billy Graham is a celebrity, and why
Oral Roberts has his own university, and why Robert Schuller has a
crystal cathedral all to himself. If I am not mistaken, the word for
this is blasphemy. There is a final argument that whatever criticisms
may be made of televised religion, there remains the inescapable fact
that it attracts viewers by the millions. This would appear to be the
meaning of the statements, quoted earlier by Billy Graham and Pat
Robertson, that there is a need for it among the multitude. To which the
best reply I know was made by Hannah Arendt, who, in reflecting on the
products of mass culture, wrote:

This state of affairs, which indeed is equalled nowhere else in the
world, can properly be called mass culture; its promoters are neither
the masses nor their entertainers, but are those who try to

entertain the masses with what once was an authentic object of culture,
or to persuade them that Hamlet can be as entertaining as My Fair Lady,
and educational as well. the danger of mass education is precisely that
it may become very entertaining indeed; there are many great authors of
the past who have survived centuries of oblivion and neglect, but it is
still an open question whether they will be able to survive an
entertaining version of what they have to say.

If we substitute the word "religion" for Hamlet, and the phrase "great
religious traditions" for "great authors of the past," this quotation
may stand as the decisive critique of televised religion. There is no
doubt, in other words, that religion can be made entertaining. the
question is, By doing so, do we destroy it as an "authentic object of
culture"? And does the popularity of a religion that employs the full
resources of vaudeville drive more traditional religious conceptions
into manic and trivial displays? I have already referred to Cardinal
O'Connor's embarrassing attempts to be well liked and amusing, and to a
parish priest who cheerfully tries to add rock music to Catholic
education. I know of one rabbi who has seriously proposed to his
congregation that Luciano Pavarotti be engaged to sing Kol Nidre at a
Yom Kippur service. He believes that the event would fill the synagogue
as never before. Who can doubt it? But as Hannah Arendt would say, that
is the problem, not a solution to one. As a member of the Commission on
Theology, Education and the Electronic Media of the National Council of
the Churches of Christ, I am aware of the deep concern among
"established" Protestant religions about the tendency toward
refashioning Protestant services so that they are more televisible. It
is well understood at the National Council that the danger is not that
religion has become the content of television shows but that television
shows may become the content of religion.

Reach Out and Elect Someone

In the Last Hurrah, Edwin O'Connor's fine novel about lusty party
politics in Boston, Mayor Frank Skeffington tries to instruct his young
nephew in the realities of political machinery. Politics, he tells him,
is the greatest spectator sport in America. In 1966, Ronald Reagan used
a different metaphor. "Politics," he said, "is just like show
business." Although sports has now become a major branch of show
business, it still contains elements that make Skeffington's vision of
politics somewhat more encouraging than Reagan's. In any sport the
standard of excellence is well known to both the players and spectators,
and an athlete's reputation rises and falls by his or her proximity to
that standard. Where an athlete stands in relation to it cannot be
easily disguised or faked, which means that David Garth can do very
little to improve the image of an outfielder with a .218 batting
average. It also means that a public opinion poll on the question, Who
is the best woman tennis player in the world?, is meaningless. the
public's opinion has nothing to do with it. Martina Navratilova's serve
provides the decisive answer. One may also note that spectators at a
sporting event are usually well aware of the rules of the game and the
meaning of each piece of the action. There is no way for a batter who
strikes out with the bases loaded to argue the spectators into believing
that he has done a useful thing for his team (except, perhaps, by
reminding them that he could have hit into a double play). the
difference between hits and strike-outs, touchdowns and fumbles, aces
and double faults cannot be blurred, even by the pomposities and
malapropisms of a Howard Cosell. If politics were like a sporting
event, there would be several virtues to attach to its name: clarity,
honesty, excellence.

But what virtues attach to politics if Ronald Reagan is right? Show
business is not entirely without an idea of excellence, but its main
business is to please the crowd, and its principal instrument is
artifice. If politics is like show business, then the idea is not to
pursue excellence, clarity or honesty but to appear as if you are, which
is another matter altogether. And what the other matter is can be
expressed in one word: advertising. In Joe McGinnis' book about Richard
Nixon's campaign in 1968, the Selling of the President, he said much of
what needs to be said about politics and advertising, both in his title
and in the book. But not quite all. For though the selling of a
President is an astonishing and degrading thing, it is only part of a
larger point: In America, the fundamental metaphor for political
discourse is the television commercial.

the television commercial is the most peculiar and pervasive form of
communication to issue forth from the electric plug. An American who
has reached the age of forty will have seen well over one million
television commercials in his or her lifetime, and has close to another
million to go before the first Social Security check arrives. We may
safely assume, therefore, that the television commercial has profoundly
influenced American habits of thought. Certainly, there is no
difficulty in demonstrating that it has become an important paradigm for
the structure of every type of public discourse. My major purpose here
is to show how it has devastated political discourse. But there may be
some value in my pointing, first, to its effect on commerce itself.

By bringing together in compact form all of the arts of show
business--music, drama, imagery, humor, celebrity--the television
commercial has mounted the most serious assault on capitalist ideology
since the publication of Das Kapital. To understand why, we must remind
ourselves that capitalism, like science and liberal democracy, was an
outgrowth of the Enlightenment. Its principal theorists, even its most
prosperous practitioners, believed capitalism to be based on the idea
that both buyer and seller are sufficiently mature, well informed and
reasonable to engage in transactions of mutual self-interest. If greed
was taken to be the fuel of the capitalist engine, then surely
rationality was the driver. the theory states, in part, that
competition in the marketplace requires that the buyer not only knows
what is good for him but also what is good. If the seller produces
nothing of value, as determined by a rational marketplace, then he loses
out. It is the assumption of rationality among buyers that spurs
competitors to become winners, and winners to keep on winning. Where it
is assumed that a buyer is unable to make rational decisions, laws are
passed to invalidate transactions, as, for example, those which prohibit
children from making contracts. In America, there even exists in law a
requirement that sellers must tell the truth about their products, for
if the buyer has no protection from false claims, rational
decision-making is seriously impaired.

Of course, the practice of capitalism has its contradictions. Cartels
and monopolies, for example, undermine the theory. But television
commercials make hash of it. To take the simplest example: To be
rationally considered, any claim--commercial or otherwise--must be made
in language. More precisely, it must take the form of a proposition,
for that is the universe of discourse from which such words as "true"
and "false" come. If that universe of discourse is discarded, then the
application of empirical tests, logical analysis or any of the other
instruments of reason are impotent.

the move away from the use of propositions in commercial advertising
began at the end of the nineteenth century. But it was not until the
1950's that the television commercial made linguistic discourse obsolete
as the basis for product decisions. By substituting images for claims,
the pictorial commercial

made emotional appeal, not tests of truth, the basis of consumer
decisions. the distance between rationality and advertising is now so
wide that it is difficult to remember that there once existed a
connection between them. Today, on television commercials, propositions
are as scarce as unattractive people. the truth or falsity of an
advertiser's claim is simply not an issue. A McDonald's commercial, for
example, is not a series of testable, logically ordered assertions. It
is a drama--a mythology, if you will--of handsome people selling, buying
and eating hamburgers, and being driven to near ecstasy by their good
fortune. No claims are made, except those the viewer projects onto or
infers from the drama. One can like or dislike a television commercial,
of course. But one cannot refute it. Indeed, we may go this far: the
television commercial is not at all about the character of products to
be consumed. It is about the character of the consumers of products.
Images of movie stars and famous athletes, of serene lakes and macho
fishing trips, of elegant dinners and romantic interludes, of happy
families packing their station wagons for a picnic in the country--these
tell nothing about the products being sold. But they tell everything
about the fears, fancies and dreams of those who might buy them. What
the advertiser needs to know is not what is right about the product but
what is wrong about the buyer. And so, the balance of business
expenditures shifts from product research to market research. the
television commercial has oriented business away from making products of
value and toward making consumers feel valuable, which means that the
business of business has now become pseudo-therapy. the consumer is a
patient assured by psycho-dramas. All of this would come as a great
surprise to Adam Smith, just as the transformation of politics would be
equally surprising to the redoubtable George Orwell. It is true, as
George Steiner has remarked, that Orwell thought of Newspeak as
originating, in part, from "the verbiage of commercial advertising." But
when Orwell wrote in his famous essay "the Politics of the English

Language" that politics has become a matter of "defending the
indefensible," he was assuming that politics would remain a distinct,
although corrupted, mode of discourse. His contempt was aimed at those
politicians who would use sophisticated versions of the age-old arts of
double-think, propaganda and deceit. That the defense of the
indefensible would be conducted as a form of amusement did not occur to
him. He feared the politician as deceiver, not as entertainer. the
television commercial has been the chief instrument in creating the
modern methods of presenting political ideas. It has accomplished this
in two ways. the first is by requiring its form to be used in political
campaigns. It is not necessary, I take it, to say very much about this
method. Everyone has noticed and worried in varying degrees about it,
including former New York City mayor John Lindsay, who has proposed that
political "commercials" be prohibited. Even television commentators
have brought it to our attention, as for example, Bill Moyers in "the
Thirty-second President," a documentary on his excellent television
series "A Walk Through the 20th Century." My own awakening to the power
of the television commercial as political discourse came as a result of
a personal experience of a few years back, when I played a minuscule
role in Ramsey Clark's Senate campaign against Jacob Javits in New York.
A great believer in the traditional modes of political discourse, Clark
prepared a small library of carefully articulated position papers on a
variety of subjects from race relations to nuclear power to the Middle
East. He filled each paper with historical background, economic and
political facts, and, I thought, an enlightened sociological
perspective. He might as well have drawn cartoons. In fact, Jacob
Javits did draw cartoons, in a manner of speaking. If Javits had a
carefully phrased position on any issue, the fact was largely unknown.
He built his campaign on a series of thirty-second television
commercials in which he used visual imagery, in much the same way as a
McDonald's commercial, to project himself as a man of experience, virtue
and piety. For all I

know, Javits believed as strongly in reason as did Ramsey Clark. But he
believed more strongly in retaining his seat in the Senate. And he knew
full well in what century we are living. He understood that in a world
of television and other visual media, "political knowledge" means having
pictures in your head more than having words. the record will show that
this insight did not fail him. He won the election by the largest
plurality in New York State history. And I will not labor the
commonplace that any serious candidate for high political office in
America requires the services of an image manager to design the kinds of
pictures that will lodge in the public's collective head. I will want
to return to the implications of "image politics" but it is necessary,
before that, to discuss the second method by which the television
commercial shapes political discourse. Because the television commercial
is the single most voluminous form of public communication in our
society, it was inevitable that Americans would accommodate themselves
to the philosophy of television commercials. By "accommodate," I mean
that we accept them as a normal and plausible form of discourse. By
"philosophy," I mean that the television commercial has embedded in it
certain assumptions about the nature of communication that run counter
to those of other media, especially the printed word. For one thing,
the commercial insists on an unprecedented brevity of expression. One
may even say, in-stancy. A sixty-second commercial is prolix; thirty
seconds is longer than most; fifteen to twenty seconds is about average.
This is a brash and startling structure for communication since, as I
remarked earlier, the commercial always addresses itself to the
psychological needs of the viewer. Thus it is not merely therapy. It
is instant therapy. Indeed, it puts forward a psychological theory of
unique axioms: the commercial asks us to believe that all problems are
solvable, that they are solvable fast, and that they are solvable fast
through the interventions of technology, techniques and chemistry. This
is, of course, a preposterous theory about the roots of discontent, and
would appear so to anyone hearing or reading it. But the commercial
disdains exposition, for that takes time and invites argument. It is a
very bad commercial indeed that engages the viewer in wondering about
the validity of the point being made. That is why most commercials use
the literary device of the pseudo-parable as a means of doing their
work. Such "parables" as the Ring Around the Collar, the Lost
Traveler's Checks and the Phone Call from the Son Far Away not only have
irrefutable emotional power but, like Biblical parables, are
unambiguously didactic. the television commercial is about products
only in the sense that the story of Jonah is about the anatomy of
whales, which is to say, it isn't. Which is to say further, it is about
how one ought to live one's life. Moreover, commercials have the
advantage of vivid visual symbols through which we may easily learn the
lessons being taught. Among those lessons are that short and simple
messages are preferable to long and complex ones; that drama is to be
preferred over exposition; that being sold solutions is better than
being confronted with questions about problems. Such beliefs would
naturally have implications for our orientation to political discourse;
that is to say, we may begin to accept as normal certain assumptions
about the political domain that either derive from or are amplified by
the television commercial. For example, a person who has seen one
million television commercials might well believe that all political
problems have fast solutions through simple measures--or ought to. Or
that complex language is not to be trusted, and that all problems lend
themselves to theatrical expression. Or that argument is in bad taste,
and leads only to an intolerable uncertainty. Such a person may also
come to believe that it is not necessary to draw any line between
politics and other forms of social life. Just as a television
commercial will use an athlete, an actor, a musician, a novelist, a
scientist or a countess to speak for the virtues of a product in no way
within their domain of expertise, television also frees politicians from
the limited field of their own expertise. Political figures may

show up anywhere, at any time, doing anything, without being thought
odd, presumptuous, or in any way out of place. Which is to say, they
have become assimilated into the general television culture as
celebrities. Being a celebrity is quite different from being well known.
Harry Truman was well known but he was not a celebrity. Whenever the
public saw him or heard him, Truman was talking politics. It takes a
very rich imagination to envision Harry Truman or, for that matter, his
wife, making a guest appearance on "the Goldbergs" or "I Remember Mama."
Politics and politicians had nothing to do with these shows, which
people watched for amusement, not to familiarize themselves with poo
litical candidates and issues. It is difficult to say exactly when
politicians began to put themselves forward, intentionally, as sources
of amusement. In the 1950's, Senator Everett Dirksen appeared as a
guest on "What's My Line." When he was running for office, John F.
Kennedy allowed the television cameras of Ed Murrow's "Person to Person"
to invade his home. When he was not running for office, Richard Nixon
appeared for a few seconds on "Laugh-In," an hour-long comedy show based
on the format of a television commercial. By the 1970% the public had
started to become accustomed to the notion that political figures were
to be taken as part of the world of show business. In the 1980's came
the deluge. Vice-presidential candidate William Miller did a commercial
for American Express. So did the star of the Watergate Hearings,
Senator Sam Ervin. Former President Gerald Ford joined with former
Secretary of State Henry Kissinger for brief roles on "Dynasty."
Massachusetts Governor Mike Dukakis appeared on "St. Elsewhere."
Speaker of the House Tip O'Neill did a stint on "Cheers." Consumer
advocate Ralph Nader, George McGovern and Mayor Edward Koch hosted
"Saturday Night Live." Koch also played the role of a fight manager in a
made-for-television movie starring James Cagney. Mrs. Nancy Reagan
appeared on "Diff'rent Strokes." Would

anyone be surprised if Gary Hart turned up on "Hill Street Blues"? Or
if Geraldine Ferraro played a small role as a Queens housewife in a
Francis Coppola film? Although it may go too far to say that the
politician-as-celebrity has, by itself, made political parties
irrelevant, there is certainly a conspicuous correlation between the
rise of the former and the decline of the latter. Some readers may
remember when voters barely knew who the candidate was and, in any case,
were not preoccupied with his character and personal life. As a young
man, I balked one November at voting for a Democratic mayoralty
candidate who, it seemed to me, was both unintelligent and corrupt.
"What has that to do with it?" my father protested. "All Democratic
candidates are unintelligent and corrupt. Do you want the Republicans
to win?" He meant to say that intelligent voters favored the party that
best represented their economic interests and sociological perspective.
To vote for the "best man" seemed to him an astounding and naive
irrelevance. He never doubted that there were good men among
Republicans. He merely understood that they did not speak for his
class. He shared, with an unfailing eye, the perspective of Big Tim
Sullivan, a leader of New York's Tammany Hall in its glory days. As
Terence Moran recounts in his essay, "Politics 1984," Sullivan was once
displeased when brought the news that the vote in his precinct was 6,382
for the Democrat and two for the Republican. In evaluating this
disappointing result, Sullivan remarked, "Sure, didn't Kelly come to me
to say his wife's cousin was running on the Republican line and didn't
I, in the interests of domestic tranquility, give him leave to vote
Republican? But what I want to know is, who else voted Republican?" 2 I
will not argue here the wisdom of this point of view. There may be a
case for choosing the best man over party (although I know of none). the
point is that television does not reveal who the best man is. In fact,
television makes impossible the determination of who is better than
whom, if we mean by "better"

such things as more capable in negotiation, more imaginative in
executive skill, more knowledgeable about international affairs, more
understanding of the interrelations of economic systems, and so on. the
reason has, almost entirely, to do with "image." But not because
politicians are preoccupied with presenting themselves in the best
possible light. After all, who isn't? It is a rare and deeply
disturbed person who does not wish to project a favorable image. But
television gives image a bad name. 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.
To understand how image politics works on television, we may use as an
entry point the well-known commercial from which this chapter takes the
first half of its title. I refer to the Bell Telephone romances,
created by Mr. Steve Horn, in which we are urged to "Reach Out and
Touch Someone." the "someone" is usually a relative who lives 'in Denver
or Los Angeles or Atlanta--in any case, very far from where we are, and
who, in a good year, we will be lucky to see on Thanksgiving Day. the
"someone" used to play a daily and vital role in our lives; that is to
say, used to be a member of the family. Though American culture stands
vigorously opposed to the idea of family, there nonetheless still exists
a residual nag that something essential to our lives is lost when we
give it up. Enter Mr. Horn's commercials. These are thirty-second
homilies concerned to provide a new definition of intimacy in which the
telephone wire will take the place of old-fashioned co-presence. Even
further, these commercials intimate a new conception of family cohesion
for a nation of kinsmen who have been split asunder by automobiles, jet
aircraft and other instruments of family suicide. In analyzing these
commercials, Jay Rosen makes the following observation: "Horn isn't
interested in saying anything, he has no message to get across. His
goal is not to provide information about Bell, but to somehow bring out
from the broken ties of millions of American lives a feeling which might
focus on the telephone .... Horn does not express himself. You do not
express yourself. Horn expresses you." 3 This is the lesson of all great
television commercials: They provide a slogan, a symbol or a focus that
creates for viewers a comprehensive and compelling image of themselves.
In the shift from party politics to television politics, the same goal
is sought. We are not permitted to know who is best at being President
or Governor or Senator, but whose image is best in touching and soothing
the deep reaches of our discontent. We look at the television screen
and ask, in the same voracious way as the Queen in Snow White and the
Seven Dwarfs, "Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the fairest one of
all?" We are inclined to vote for those whose personality, family life,
and style, as imaged on the screen, give back a better answer than the
Queen received. As Xenophanes remarked twenty-five centuries ago, men
always make their gods in their own image. But to this, television
politics has added a new wrinkle: Those who would be gods refashion
themselves into images the viewers would have them be. And so, while
image politics preserves the idea of self-interest voting, it alters the
meaning of "self-interest." Big Tim Sullivan and my father voted for the
party that represented their interests, but "interests" meant to them
something tangible--patronage, preferential treatment, protection from
bureaucracy, support for one's union or community, Thanksgiving turkeys
for indigent families. Judged by this standard, blacks may be the only
sane voters left in America. Most of the rest of us vote our interests,
but they are largely symbolic ones, which is to say, of a psychological
nature. Like television commercials, image politics is a form of
therapy, which is why so much of it is charm, good looks, celebrity and
personal disclosure. It is a sobering thought to recall that there are
no photographs of Abraham Lincoln smiling, that his wife was in all
likelihood a psycho-path, and that he was subject to lengthy fits of
depression. He

would hardly have been well suited for image politics. We do not want
our mirrors to be so dark and so far from amusing. What I am saying is
that just as the television commercial empties itself of authentic
product information so that it can do its psychological work, image
politics empties itself of authentic political substance for the same
reason. It follows from this that history can play no significant role
in image politics. For history is of value only to someone who takes
seriously the notion that there are patterns in the past which may
provide the present with nourishing traditions. "the past is a world,"
Thomas Carlyle said, "and not a void of grey haze." But he wrote this at
a time when the book was the principal medium of serious public
discourse. A book is all history. Everything about it takes one back in
time--from the way it is produced to its linear mode of exposition to
the fact that the past tense is its most comfortable form of address. As
no other medium before or since, the book promotes a sense of a coherent
and usable past. In a conversation of books, history, as Carlyle
understood it, is not only a world but a living world. It is the
present that is shadowy. But television is a speed-of-light medium, a
present-centered medium. Its grammar, so to say, permits no access to
the past. Everything presented in moving pictures is experienced as
happening "now," which is why we must be told in language that a
videotape we are seeing was made months before. Moreover, like its
forefather, the telegraph, television needs to move fragments of
information, not to collect and organize them. Carlyle was more
prophetic than he could imagine: the literal gray haze that is the
background void on all television screens is an apt metaphor of the
notion of history the medium puts forward. In the Age of Show Business
and image politics, political discourse is emptied not only of
ideological content but of historical content, as well. Czeslaw Milosz,
winner of the 1980 Nobel Prize for Literature, remarked in his
acceptance speech in Stockholm that our

age is characterized by a "refusal to remember"; he cited, among other
things, the shattering fact that there are now more than one hundred
books in print that deny that the Holocaust ever took place. the
historian Carl Schorske has, in my opinion, circled closer to the truth
by noting that the modern mind has grown indifferent to history because
history has become useless to it; in other words, it is not obstinacy or
ignorance but a sense of irrelevance that leads to the diminution of
history. Television's Bill Moyers inches still closer when he says, "I
worry that my own business . . . helps to make this an anxious age of
agitated amnesiacs .... We Americans seem to know everything about the
last twenty-four hours but very little of the last sixty centuries or
the last sixty years." 4 Terence Moran, I believe, lands on the target
in saying that with media whose structure is biased toward furnishing
images and fragments, we are deprived of access to an historical
perspective. In the absence of continuity and context, he says, "bits
of information cannot be integrated into an intelligent and consistent
whole." 5 We do not refuse to remember; neither do we find it exactly
useless to remember. Rather, we are being rendered unfit to remember.
For if remembering is to be something more than nostalgia, it requires a
contextual basis--a theory, a vision, a metaphor-- something within
which facts can be organized and patterns discerned. the politics of
image and instantaneous news provides no such context, is, in fact,
hampered by attempts to provide any. A mirror records only what you are
wearing today. It is silent about yesterday. With television, we vault
ourselves into a continuous, incoherent present. "History," Henry Ford
said, "is bunk." Henry Ford was a typographic optimist. "History," the
Electric Plug replies, "doesn't exist." If these conjectures make sense,
then in this Orwell was wrong once again, at least for the Western
democracies. He envisioned the demolition of history, but believed that
it would be accomplished by the state; that some equivalent of the
Ministry of Truth would systematically banish inconvenient facts and
destroy the records of the past. Certainly, this is the way of the
Soviet Union, our modern-day Oceania. But as Huxley more accurately
foretold it, nothing so crude as all that is required. Seemingly benign
technologies devoted to providing the populace with a politics of image,
instancy and therapy may disappear history just as effectively, perhaps
more permanently, and without objection. We ought also to look to
Huxley, not Orwell, to understand the threat that television and other
forms of imagery pose to the foundation of liberal democracy--namely, to
freedom of information. Orwell quite reasonably supposed that the state,
through naked suppression, would control the flow of information,
particularly by the banning of books. In this prophecy, Orwell had
history strongly on his side. For books have always been subjected to
censorship in varying degrees wherever they have been an important part
of the communication landscape. In ancient China, the Analects of
Confucius were ordered destroyed by Emperor Chi Huang Ti. Ovid's
banishment from Rome by Augustus was in part a result of his having
written Ars Amatoria. Even in Athens, which set enduring standards of
intellectual excellence, books were viewed with alarm. In Areopagitica,
Milton provides an excellent review of the many examples of book
censorship in Classical Greece, including the case of Protagoras, whose
books were burned because he began one of his discourses with the
confession that he did not know whether or not there were gods. But
Milton is careful to observe that in all the cases before his own time,
there were only two types of books that, as he puts it, "the magistrate
cared to take notice of": books that were blasphemous and books that
were libelous. Milton stresses this point because, writing almost two
hundred years after Gutenberg, he knew that the magistrates of his own
era, if unopposed, would disallow books of every conceivable subject
matter. Milton knew, in other words, that it was in the printing press
that censorship had found its true metier; that, in fact, information
and ideas did not become a

profound cultural problem until the maturing of the Age of Print.
Whatever dangers there may be in a word that is written, such a word is
a hundred times more dangerous when stamped by a press. And the problem
posed by typography was recognized early; for example, by Henry VIII,
whose Star Chamber was authorized to deal with wayward books. It
continued to be recognized by Elizabeth I, the Stuarts, and many other
post-Gutenberg monarchs, including Pope Paul IV, in whose reign the
first Index Librorum Prohibitorurn was drawn. To paraphrase David
Riesman only slightly, in a world of printing, information is the
gunpowder of the mind; hence come the censors in their austere robes to
dampen the explosion. Thus, Orwell envisioned that ( 1 ) government
control over (2) printed matter posed a serious threat for Western
democracies. He was wrong on both counts. (He was, of course, right on
both counts insofar as Russia, China and other pre-electronic cultures
are concerned.) Orwell was, in effect, addressing himself to a problem
of the Age of Print--in fact, to the same problem addressed by the men
who wrote the United States Constitution. the Constitution was composed
at a time when most free men had access to their communities through a
leaflet, a newspaper or the spoken word. They were quite well
positioned to share their political ideas with each other in forms and
contexts over which they had competent control. Therefore, their
greatest worry was the possibility of government tyranny. the Bill of
Rights is largely a prescription for preventing government from
restricting the flow of information and ideas. But the Founding Fathers
did not foresee that tyranny by government might be superseded by
another sort of problem altogether, namely, the corporate state, which
through television now controls the flow of public discourse in America.
I raise no strong objection to this fact (at least not here) and have no
intention of launching into a standard-brand complaint against the
corporate state. I merely note the fact with apprehension, as did
George Gerbner, Dean of the Annenberg School of Communication, when he
wrote:

Television is the new state religion run by a private Ministry of
Culture (the three networks), offering a universal curriculum for all
people, financed by a form of hidden taxation without representation.
You pay when you wash, not when you watch, and whether or not you care
to watch ....

Earlier in the same essay, Gerbner said:

Liberation cannot be accomplished by turning [television] off.
Television is for most people the most attractive thing going any time
of the day or night. We live in a world in which the vast majority will
not turn off. If we don't get the message from the tube, we get it
through other people.

I do not think Professor Gerbner meant to imply in these sentences that
there is a conspiracy to take charge of our symbolic world by the men
who run the "Ministry of Culture." I even suspect he would agree with me
that if the faculty of the An-nenberg School of Communication were to
take over the three networks, viewers would hardly notice the
difference. I believe he means to say--and in any case, I do--that in
the Age of Television, our information environment is completely
different from what it was in 1783; that we have less to fear from
government restraints than from television glut; that, in fact, we have
no way of protecting ourselves from information disseminated by
corporate America; and that, therefore, the battles for liberty must be
fought on different terrains from where they once were. For example, I
would venture the opinion that the traditional civil libertarian
opposition to the banning of books from school libraries and from school
curricula is now largely irrelevant. Such acts of censorship are
annoying, of course, and must be opposed. But they are trivial. Even
worse, they are distracting, in that they divert civil libertarians from
confronting those questions that have to do with the claims of new
technologies.

To put it plainly, a student's freedom to read is not seriously injured
by someone's banning a book on Long Island or in Anaheim or anyplace
else. But as Gerbner' suggests, television clearly does impair the
student's freedom to read, and it does so with innocent hands, so to
speak. Television does not ban books, it simply displaces them. the
fight against censorship is a nineteenth-century issue which was largely
won in the twentieth. What we are confronted with now is the problem
posed by the economic and symbolic structure of television. Those who
run television do not limit our access to information but in fact widen
it. Our Ministry of Culture is Huxleyan, not Orwellian. It does
everything possible to encourage us to watch continuously. But what we
watch is a medium which presents information in a form that renders it
simplistic, nonsubstantive, nonhistorical and noncontextual; that is to
say, information packaged as entertainment. In America, we are never
denied the opportunity to amuse ourselves. Tyrants of all varieties have
always known about the value of providing the masses with amusements as
a means of pacifying discontent. But most of them could not have even
hoped for a situation in which the masses would ignore that which does
not amuse. That is why tyrants have always relied, and still do, on
censorship. Censorship, after all, is the tribute tyrants pay to the
assumption that a public knows the difference between serious discourse
and entertainment--and cares. How delighted would be all the kings,
czars and fuehrers of the past (and commissars of the present) to know
that censorship is not a necessity when all political discourse takes
the form of a jest.

Teaching as an Amusing Activity

There could not have been a safer bet when it began in 1969 than that
"Sesame Street" would be embraced by children, parents and educators.
Children loved it because they were raised on television commercials,
which they intuitively knew were the most carefully crafted
entertainments on television. To those who had not yet been to school,
even to those who had just started, the idea of being taught by a series
of commercials did not seem peculiar. And that television should
entertain them was taken as a matter of course. Parents embraced "Sesame
Street" for several reasons, among them that it assuaged their guilt
over the fact that they could not or would not restrict their children's
access to television. "Sesame Street" appeared to justify allowing a
four- or five-year-old to sit transfixed in front of a television screen
for unnatural periods of time. Parents were eager to hope that
television could teach their children something other than which
breakfast cereal has the most crackle. At the same time, "Sesame
Street" relieved them of the responsibility of teaching their preschool
children how to read--no small matter in a culture where children are
apt to be considered a nuisance. They could also plainly see that in
spite of its faults, "Sesame Street" was entirely consonant with the
prevailing spirit of America. Its use of cute puppets, celebrities,
catchy tunes, and rapid-fire editing was certain to give pleasure to the
children and would therefore serve as adequate preparation for their
entry into a fun-loving culture.

As for educators, they generally approved of "Sesame Street," too.
Contrary to common opinion, they are apt to find new methods congenial,
especially if they are told that education can be accomplished more
efficiently by means of the new techniques. (That is why such ideas as
"teacher-proof" textbooks, standardized tests, and, now, microcomputers
have been welcomed into the classroom.) "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. 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. Whereas a classroom is a place of social
interaction, the space in front of a television set is a private
preserve. Whereas in a classroom, one may ask a teacher questions, one
can ask nothing of a television screen. Whereas school is centered on
the development of language, television demands attention to images.
Whereas attending school is a legal requirement, watching television is
an act of choice. Whereas in school, one fails to attend to the teacher
at the risk of punishment, no penalties exist for failing to attend to
the television screen. Whereas to behave oneself in school means to
observe rules of public decorum, television watching requires no such
observances, has no concept of public decorum. Whereas in a classroom,
fun is never more than a means to an end, on television it is the end in
itself. Yet "Sesame Street" and its progeny, "the Electric Company," are
not to be blamed for laughing the traditional classroom out of
existence. If the classroom now begins to seem a stale and flat
environment for learning, the inventors of television itself are to
blame, not the Children's Television Workshop. We can hardly expect
those who want to make good television shows to concern themselves with
what the classroom is for. They are concerned with what television is
for. This

does not mean that "Sesame Street" is not educational. It is, in fact,
nothing but educational--in the sense that every television show is
educational. Just as reading a book--any kind of book repromotes a
particular orientation toward learning, watching a television show does
the same. "the Little House on the Prairie,"

"Cheers" and "the Tonight Show" are as effective as "Sesame Street" in
promoting what might be called the television style of learning. And
this style of learning is, by its nature, hostile to what has been
called book-learning or its handmaiden, school-learning. If we are to
blame "Sesame Street" for anything, it is for the pretense that it is
any ally of the classroom. That, after all, has been its chief claim on
foundation and public money. As a television show, and a good one,
"Sesame Street" does not encourage children to love school or anything
about school. It encourages them to love television.

Moreover, it is important to add that whether or not "Sesame Street"
teaches children their letters and numbers is entirely irrelevant. We
may take as our guide here John Dewey's observation that the content of
a lesson is the least important thing about learning. As he wrote in
Experience and Education: "Perhaps the greatest of all pedagogical
fallacies is the notion that a person learns only what he is studying at
the time. Collateral learning in the way of formation of enduring
attitudes... may be and often is more important than the spelling
lesson or lesson in geography or history .... For these attitudes are
fundamentally what count in the future." In other words, the most
important thing one learns is always something about how one learns. As
Dewey wrote in another place, we learn what we do. Television educates
by teaching children to do what television-viewing requires of them. And
that is as precisely remote from what a classroom requires of them as
reading a book is from watching a stage show.

Although one would not know it from consulting various recent proposals
on how to mend the educational system, this point--that reading books
and watching television differ entirely in what they imply about
learning--is the primary educational issue in America today. America
is, in fact, the leading case in point of what may be thought of as the
third great crisis in Western education. the first occurred in the
fifth century B.c., when Athens underwent a change from an oral culture
to an alphabet-writing culture. To understand what this meant, we must
read Plato. the second occurred in the sixteenth century, when Europe
underwent a radical transformation as a result of the printing press. To
understand what this meant, we must read John Locke. the third is
happening now, in America, as a result of the electronic revolution,
particularly the invention of television. To understand what this
means, we must read Marshall McLuhan.

We face the rapid dissolution of the assumptions of an education
organized around the slow-moving printed word, and the equally rapid
emergence of a new education based on the speed-of-light electronic
image. the classroom is, at the moment, still tied to the printed word,
although that connection is rapidly weakening. Meanwhile, television
forges ahead, making no concessions to its great technological
predecessor, creating new conceptions of knowledge and how it is
acquired. One is entirely justified in saying that the major
educational enterprise now being undertaken in the United States is not
happening in its classrooms but in the home, in front of the television
set, and under the jurisdiction not of school administrators and
teachers but of network executives and entertainers. I don't mean to
imply that the situation is a result of a conspiracy or even that those
who control television want this responsibility. I mean only to say
that, like the alphabet or the printing press, television has by its
power to control the time, attention and cognitive habits of our youth
gained the power to control their education.

This is why I think it accurate to call television a curriculum. As I
understand the word, a curriculum is a specially constructed information
system whose purpose is to influence,

teach, train or cultivate the mind and character of youth. Television,
of course, does exactly that, and does it relentlessly. In so doing, it
competes successfully with the school curriculum. By which I mean, it
damn near obliterates it. Having devoted an earlier book, Teaching as a
Conserving Activity, to a detailed examination of the antagonistic
nature of the two curriculums--television and school--I will not burden
the reader or myself with a repetition of that analysis. But I would
like to recall two points that I feel I did not express forcefully
enough in that book and that happen to be central to this one. I refer,
first, to -the fact that television's principal contribution to
educational philosophy is the idea that teaching and entertainment are
inseparable. This entirely original conception is to be found nowhere
in educational discourses, from Confucius to Plato to Cicero to Locke to
John Dewey. In searching the literature of education, you will find it
said by some that children will learn best when they are interested in
what they are learning. You will find it said--Plato and Dewey
emphasized this --that reason is best cultivated when it is rooted in
robust emotional ground. You will even find some who say that learning
is best facilitated by a loving and benign teacher. But no one has ever
said or implied that significant learning is effectively, durably and
truthfully achieved when education is entertainment. Education
philosophers have assumed that becoming acculturated is difficult
because it necessarily involves the imposition of restraints. They have
argued that there must be a sequence to learning, that perseverance and
a certain measure of perspiration are indispensable, that individual
pleasures must frequently be submerged in the interests of group
cohesion, and that learning to be critical and to think conceptually and
rigorously do not come easily to the young but are hard-fought
victories. Indeed, Cicero remarked that the purpose of education is to
free the student from the tyranny of the present, which cannot be
pleasurable for those, like the young, who are struggling

hard to do the opposite--that is, accommodate themselves to the present.
Television offers a delicious and, as I have said, original alternative
to all of this. We might say there are three commandments that form the
philosophy of the education which television offers. the influence of
these commandments is observable in every type of television
programming--from "Sesame Street" to the documentaries of "Nova" and
"the National Geographic" to "Fantasy Island' to MTV. the commandments
are as follows:

Thou shalt have no prerequisites

Every television program must be a complete package in itself. No
previous knowledge is to be required. There must not be even a hint
that learning is hierarchical, that it is an edifice constructed on a
foundation. the learner must be allowed to enter at any point without
prejudice. This is why you shall never hear or see a television program
begin with the caution that if the viewer has not seen the previous
programs, this one will be meaningless. Television is a nongraded
curriculum and excludes no viewer for any reason, at any time. In other
words, in doing away with the idea of sequence and continuity in
education, television undermines the idea that sequence and continuity
have anything to do with thought itself.

Thou shalt induce no perplexity

In television teaching, perplexity is a superhighway to low ratings. A
perplexed learner is a learner who will turn to another station. This
means that there must be nothing that has to be remembered, studied,
applied or, worst of all, endured. It is assumed that any information,
story or idea can be made immediately accessible, since the contentment,
not the growth, of the learner is paramount.

Thou shalt avoid exposition like the ten plagues visited upon Egypt

Of all the enemies of television-teaching, including continuity and
perplexity, none is more formidable than exposition. Arguments,
hypotheses, discussions, reasons, refutations or any of the traditional
instruments of reasoned discourse turn television into radio or, worse,
third-rate printed matter. Thus, television-teaching always takes the
form of story-telling, conducted through dynamic images and supported by
music. This is as characteristic of "Star Trek" as it is of "Cosmos,"
of "Diff'rent Strokes" as of "Sesame Street," of commercials as of
"Nova." Nothing will be taught on television that cannot be both
visualized and placed in a theatrical context. the name we may properly
give to an education without prerequisites, perplexity and exposition is
entertainment. And when one considers that save for sleeping there is
no activity that occupies more of an American youth's time than
television-viewing, we cannot avoid the conclusion that a massive
reorientation toward learning is now taking place. Which leads to the
second point I wish to emphasize: the consequences of this reorientation
are to be observexd not only in the decline of the potency of the
classroom but, paradoxically, in the refashioning of the classroom into
a place where both teaching and learning are intended to be vastly
amusing activities. I have already referred to the experiment in
Philadelphia in which the classroom is reconstituted as a rock concert.
But this is only the silliest example of an attempt to define education
as a mode of entertainment. Teachers, from primary grades through
college, are increasing the visual stimulation of their lessons; are
reducing the amount of exposition their students must cope with; are
relying less on reading and writing assignments; and are reluctantly
concluding that the principal means by which student interest may be
engaged is entertainment. With no difficulty I could fill the remaining
pages of this chapter with examples of teachers' efforts--in some
instances, unconscious-to make their classrooms into second-rate
television shows. But I will rest my case with "the Voyage of the
Mimi," which may be taken as a synthesis, if not an apotheosis, of the
New Education. "the Voyage of the Mimi" is the name of an expensive
science and mathematics project that has brought together some of the
most prestigious institutions in the field of education--the United
States Department of Education, the Bank Street College of Education,
the Public Broadcasting System, and the publishing firm Holt, Rinehart
and Winston. the project was made possible by a $3.65 million grant
from the Department of Education, which is always on the alert to put
its money where the future is. And the future is "the Voyage of the
Mimi." To describe the project succinctly, I quote from four paragraphs
in the New York Times of August 7, 1984:

Organized around a twenty-six-unit television series that depicts the
adventures of a floating whale-research laboratory, [the project]
combines television viewing with lavishly illustrated books and computer
games that simulate the way scientists and navigators work .... "the
Voyage of the Mimi" is built around fifteen-minute television programs
that depict the adventures of four young people who accompany two
scientists and a crusty sea captain on a voyage to monitor the behavior
of humpback whales off the coast of Maine. the crew of the converted
tuna trawler navigates the ship, tracks down the whales and struggles to
survive on an uninhabited island after a storm damages the ship's hull
.... Each dramatic episode is then followed by a fifteen-minute
documentary on related themes. One such documentary involved a visit by
one of the teen-age actors to Ted Taylor, a nuclear physicist in
Greenport, L.I., who has devised a way of purifying sea water by
freezing it.

the television programs, which teachers are free to record off the air
and use at their convenience, are supplemented by a series of books and
computer exercises that pick up four academic themes that emerge
naturally from the story line: map and navigational skills, whales and
their environment, ecological systems and computer literacy.

the television programs have been broadcast over PBS; the books and
computer software have been provided by Holt, Rinehart and Winston; the
educational expertise by the faculty of the Bank Street College. Thus,
"the Voyage of the Mimi" is not to be taken lightly. As Frank Withrow
of the Department of Education remarked, "We consider it the flagship of
what we are doing. It is a model that others will begin to follow."
Everyone involved in the project is enthusiastic, and extraordinary
claims of its benefits come trippingly from their tongues. Janice
Trebbi Richards of Holt, Rinehart and Winston asserts, "Research shows
that learning increases when information is presented in a dramatic
setting, and television can do this better than any other medium."
Officials of the Department of Education claim that the appeal of
integrating three media--television, print, and computers--lies in their
potential for cultivating higher-order thinking skills. And Mr. Withrow
is quoted as saying that projects like "the Voyage of the Mimi" could
mean great financial savings, that in the long run "it is cheaper than
anything else we do." Mr. Withrow also suggested that there are many
ways of financing such projects. "With 'Sesame Street,'" he said, "it
took five or six years, but eventually you can start bringing in the
money with T-shirts and cookie jars." We may start thinking about what
"the Voyage of the Mimi" signifies by recalling that the idea is far
from original. What is here referred to as "integrating three media" or
a "multi-media presentation" was once called "audio-visual aids," used
by teachers for years, usually for the modest purpose of enhancing

student interest in the curriculum. Moreover, several years ago, the
Office of Education (as the Department was then called) supplied funds
to WNET for a similarly designed project called "Watch Your Mouth," a
series of television dramatizations in which young people inclined to
misuse the English language fumbled their way through a variety of
social problems. Linguists and educators prepared lessons for teachers
to use in conjunction with each program. the dramatizations were
compelling-although not nearly as good as "Welcome Back, Kotter," which
had the unassailable advantage of John Travolta's charisma--but there
exists no evidence that students who were required to view "Watch Your
Mouth" increased their competence in the use of the English language.
Indeed, since there is no shortage of mangled English on everyday
commercial television, one wondered at the time why the United States
government would have paid anyone to go to the trouble of producing
additional ineptitudes as a source of classroom study. A videotape of
any of David Susskind's programs would provide an English teacher with
enough linguistic aberrations to fill a semester's worth of analysis.
Nonetheless, the Department of Education has forged ahead, apparently in
the belief that ample evidence--to quote his. Richards again--"shows
that learning increases when information is presented in a dramatic
setting, and that television can do this better than any other medium."
the most charitable response to this claim is that it is misleading.
George Comstock and his associates have reviewed 2,800 studies on the
general topic of television's influence on behavior, including cognitive
processing, and are unable to point to persuasive evidence that
"learning increases when information is presented in a dramatic
setting." 2 Indeed, in studies conducted by Cohen and Salomon;
Meringoff; Jacoby, Hoyer and Sheluga; Stauffer, Frost and Rybolt; Stern;
Wilson; Neuman; Katz, Adoni and Parness; and Gunter, quite the opposite
conclusion is justified. Jacoby et all. found, for example, that only
3.5 percent of viewers were

able to answer successfully twelve true/false questions concerning two
thirty-second segments of commercial television programs and
advertisements. Stauffer et all. found in studying students' responses
to a news program transmitted via television, radio and print, that
print significantly increased correct responses to questions regarding
the names of people and numbers contained in the material. Stern
reported that 51 percent of viewers could not recall a single item of
news a few minutes after viewing a news program on television. Wilson
found that the average television viewer could retain only 20 percent of
the information contained in a fictional televised news story. Katz et
all. found that 21 percent of television viewers could not recall any
news items within one hour of broadcast. On the basis of his and other
studies, Salomon has concluded that "the meanings secured from
television are more likely to be segmented, concrete and less
inferential, and those secured from reading have a higher likelihood of
being better tied to one's stored knowledge and thus are more likely to
be inferential." 4 In other words, so far as many reputable studies are
concerned, television viewing does not significantly increase learning,
is inferior to and less likely than print to cultivate higher-order,
inferential thinking. But one must not make too much of the rhetoric of
grants-manship. We are all inclined to transform our hopes into tenuous
claims when an important project is at stake. Besides, I have no doubt
that his. Richards can direct us to several studies that lend support
to her enthusiasm. the point is that if you want money for the
redundant purpose of getting children to watch even more television than
they already do--and dramatizations at that--you have to escalate the
rhetoric to Herculean proportions. What is of greatest significance
about "the Voyage of the Mimi" is that the content selected was
obviously chosen because it is eminently televisible. Why are these
students studying the behavior of humpback whales? How critical is it
that the

"academic themes" of navigational and map-reading skills be learned?
Navigational skills have never been considered an "academic theme" and
in fact seem singularly inappropriate for most students in big cities.
Why has it been decided that "whales and their environment" is a subject
of such compelling interest that an entire year's work should be given
to it? I would suggest that "the Voyage of the Mimi" was conceived by
someone's asking the question, What is television good for?, not, What
is education good for? Television is good for dramatizations,
shipwrecks, seafaring adventures, crusty old sea captains, and
physicists being interviewed by actor-celebrities. And that, of course,
is what we have got in "the Voyage of the Mimi." the fact that this
adventure sit-com is accompanied by lavishly illustrated books and
computer games only underscores that the television presentation
controls the curriculum. the books whose pictures the students will
scan and the computer games the students will play are dictated by the
content of the television shows, not the other way around. books, it
would appear, have now become an audio-visual aid; the principal carrier
of the content of education is the television show, and its principal
claim for a preeminent place in the curriculum is that it is
entertaining. Of course, a television production can be used to
stimulate interest in lessons, or even as the focal point of a lesson.
But what is happening here is that the content of the school curriculum
is being determined by the character of television, and even worse, that
character is apparently not included as part of what is studied. One
would have thought that the school room is the proper place for students
to inquire into the ways in which media of all kinds--including
television--shape people's attitudes and perceptions. Since our
students will have watched approximately sixteen thousand hours of
television by high school's end, questions should have arisen, even in
the minds of officials at the Department of Education, about who will
teach our students how to look at television, and when not to, and with
what critical equipment when

they do. "the Voyage of the Mimi" project bypasses these questions;
indeed, hopes that the students will immerse themselves in the
dramatizations in the same frame of mind used when watching "St.
Elsewhere" or "Hill Street Blues." (One may also assume that what is
called "computer literacy" does not involve raising questions about the
cognitive biases and social effects of the computer, which, I would
venture, are the most important questions to address about new
technologies.)

"the Voyage of the Mimi," in other words, spent $3.65 million for the
purpose of using media in exactly the manner that media merchants want
them to be used--mindlessly and invisibly, as if media themselves have
no epistemological or political agenda. And, in the end, what will the
students have learned? They will, to be sure, have learned something
about whales, perhaps about navigation and map reading, most of which
they could have learned just as well by other means. Mainly, they will
have learned that learning is a form of entertainment or, more
precisely, that anything worth learning can take the form of an
entertainment, and ought to. And they will not rebel if their English
teacher asks them to learn the eight parts of speech through the medium
of rock music. Or if their social studies teacher sings to them the
facts about the War of 1812. Or if their physics comes to them on
cookies and T-shirts. Indeed, they will expect it and thus will be well
prepared to receive their politics, their religion, their news and their
commerce in the same delightful way.

II.

the Huxleyan Warning

There are two ways by which the spirit of a culture may be shriveled. In
the first--the Orwellian--culture becomes a prison. In the second--the
Huxleyan--culture becomes a burlesque.

No one needs to be reminded that our world is now marred by many
prison-cultures whose structure Orwell described accurately in his
parables. If one were to read both 1984 and Animal Farm, and then for
good measure, Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon, one would have a
fairly precise blueprint of the machinery of thought-control as it
currently operates in scores of countries and on millions of people. Of
course, Orwell was not the first to teach us about the spiritual
devastations of tyranny. What is irreplaceable about his work is his
insistence that it makes little difference if our wardens are inspired
by right- or left-wing ideologies. the gates of the prison are equally
impenetrable, surveillance equally rigorous, icon-worship equally
pervasive.

What Huxley teaches is that in the age of advanced technology, spiritual
devastation is more likely to come from an enemy with a smiling face
than from one whose countenance exudes suspicion and hate. In the
Huxleyan prophecy, Big Brother does not watch us, by his choice." We
watch him, by ours. There is no need for wardens or gates or Ministries
of Truth. When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural
life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious
public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in

short, a people become an audience and their public business a
vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture-death is a
clear possibility.

In America, Orwell's prophecies are of small relevance, but Huxley's are
well under way toward being realized. For America is engaged in the
world's most ambitious experiment to accommodate itself to the
technological distractions made possible by the electric plug. This is
an experiment that began slowly and modestly in the mid-nineteenth
century and has now, in the latter half of the twentieth, reached a
perverse maturity in America's consuming love-affair with television. As
nowhere else in the world, Americans have moved far and fast in bringing
to a close the age of the slow-moving printed word, and have granted to
television sovereignty over all of their institutions. By ushering in
the Age of Television, America has given the world the clearest
available glimpse of the Huxleyan future.

Those who speak about this matter must often raise their voices to a
near-hysterical pitch, inviting the charge that they are everything from
wimps to public nuisances to Jeremiahs. But they do so because what they
want others to see appears benign, when it is not invisible altogether.
An Orwellian world is much easier to recognize, and to oppose, than a
Huxleyan. Everything in our background has prepared us to know and
resist a prison when the gates begin to close around us. We are not
likely, for example, to be indifferent to the voices of the Sakharovs
and the Timmermans and the Walesas. We take arms against such a sea of
troubles, buttressed by the spirit of Milton, Bacon, Voltaire, Goethe
and Jefferson. But what if there are no cries of anguish to be heard?
Who is prepared to take arms against a sea of amusements? To whom do we
complain, and when, and in what tone of voice, when serious discourse
dissolves into giggles? What is the antidote to a culture's being
drained by laughter?

I fear that our philosophers have given us no guidance in this

matter. Their warnings have customarily been directed against those
consciously formulated ideologies that appeal to the worst tendencies in
human nature. But what is happening in America is not the design of an
articulated ideology. No Mein Kampf or Communist Manifesto announced
its coming. It comes as the unintended consequence of a dramatic change
in our modes of public conversation. But it is an ideology nonetheless,
for it imposes a way of life, a set of relations among people and ideas,
about which there has been no consensus, no discussion and no
opposition. Only compliance. Public consciousness has not yet
assimilated the point that technology is ideology. This, in spite of
the fact that before our very eyes technology has altered every aspect
of life in America during the past eighty years. For example, it would
have been excusable in 1905 for us to be unprepared for the cultural
changes the automobile would bring. Who could have suspected then that
the automobile would tell us how we were to conduct our social and
sexual lives? Would reorient our ideas about what to do with our
forests and cities? Would create new ways of expressing our personal
identity and social standing?

But it is much later in the game now, and ignorance of the score is
inexcusable. To be unaware that a technology comes equipped with a
program for social change, to maintain that technology is neutral, to
make the assumption that technology is always a friend to culture is, at
this late hour, stupidity plain and simple. Moreover, we have seen
enough by now to know that technological changes in our modes of
communication are even more ideology-laden than changes in our modes of
transportation. Introduce the alphabet to a culture and you change its
cognitive habits, its social relations, its notions of community,
history and religion. Introduce the printing press with movable type,
and you do the same. Introduce speed-of-light transmission of images
and you make a cultural revolution. Without a vote. Without polemics.
Without guerrilla resistance. Here is ideology, pure if not serene. Here
is ideology without

words, and all the more powerful for their absence. All that is
required to make it stick is a population that devoutly believes in the
inevitability of progress. And in this sense, all Americans are
Marxists, for we believe nothing if not that history is moving us toward
some preordained paradise and that technology is the force behind that
movement. Thus, there are near insurmountable difficulties for anyone
who has written such a book as this, and who wishes to end it with some
remedies for the affliction. In the first place, not everyone believes
a cure is needed, and in the second, there probably isn't any. But as a
true-blue American who has imbibed the unshakable belief that where
there is a problem, there must be a solution, I shall conclude with the
following suggestions. We must, as a start, not delude ourselves with
preposterous notions such as the straight Luddite position as outlined,
for example, in Jerry Mander's Four Arguments for the Elimination of
Television. Americans will not shut down any part of their
technological apparatus, and to suggest that they do so is to make no
suggestion at all. It is almost equally unrealistic to expect that
nontrivial modifications in the availability of media will ever be made.
Many civilized nations limit by law the amount of hours television may
operate and thereby mitigate the role television plays in public life.
But I believe that this is not a possibility in America. Once having
opened the Happy Medium to full public view, we are not likely to
countenance even its partial closing. Still, some Americans have been
thinking along these lines. As I write, a story appears in the New York
Times (September 27, 1984) about the plans of the Farmington,
Connecticut, Library Council to sponsor a "TV Turnoff." It appears that
such an effort was made the previous year, the idea being to get people
to stop watching television for one month. the Times reports that the
turnoff the previous January was widely noted by the media. Ms. Ellen
Babcock, whose family participated, is quoted as saying, "It will be
interesting to see if the

impact is the same this year as last year, when we had terrific media
coverage." In other words, Ms. Babcock hopes that by watching
television, people will learn that they ought to stop watching
television. It is hard to imagine that Ms. Babcock does not see the
irony in this position. It is an irony that I have confronted many
times in being told that I must appear on television to promote a book
that warns people against television. Such are the contradictions of a
television-based culture. In any case, of how much help is a one-month
turnoff?. It is a mere pittance; that is to say, a penance. How
comforting it must be when the folks in Farmington are done with their
punishment and can return to their true occupation. Nonetheless, one
applauds their effort, as one must applaud the efforts of those who see
some relief in limiting certain kinds of content on television-for
example, excessive violence, commercials on children's shows, etc. I am
particularly fond of John Lindsay's suggestion that political
commercials be banned from television as we now ban cigarette and liquor
commercials. I would gladly testify before the Federal Communications
Commission as to the manifold merits of this excellent idea. To those
who would oppose my testimony by claiming that such a ban is a clear
violation of the First Amendment, I would offer a compromise: Require
all political commercials to be preceded by a short statement to the
effect that common sense has determined that watching political
commercials is hazardous to the intellectual health of the community. I
am not very optimistic about anyone's taking this suggestion seriously.
Neither do I put much stock in proposals to improve the quality of
television programs. Television, as I have implied earlier, serves us
most usefully when presenting junk-entertainment; it serves us most ill
when it co-opts serious modes of discourse--news, politics, science,
education, commerce, religion--and turns them into entertainment
packages. We would all be better off if television got worse, not
better.

"the A-Team" and "Cheers" are no threat to our public health. "
Minutes,"

"Eye-Witness News" and "Sesame Street" are.

the problem, in any case, does not reside in what people watch. the
problem is in that we watch. the solution must be found in how we
watch. For I believe it may fairly be said that we have yet to learn
what television is. And the reason is that there has been no worthwhile
discussion, let alone widespread public understanding, of what
information is and how it gives direction to a culture. There is a
certain poignancy in this, since there are no people who more frequently
and enthusiastically use such phrases as "the information age,"

"the information explosion," and "the information society." We have
apparently advanced to the point where we have grasped the idea that a
change in the forms, volume, speed and context of information means
something, but we have not got any further.

What is information? Or more precisely, what are information? What are
its various forms? What conceptions of intelligence, wisdom and
learning does each form insist upon? What conceptions does each form
neglect or mock? What are the main psychic effects of each form? What
is the relation between information and reason? What is the kind of
information that best facilitates thinking? Is there a moral bias to
each information form? What does it mean to say that there is too much
information? How would one know? What redefinitions of important
cultural meanings do new sources, speeds, contexts and forms of
information require? Does television, for example, give a new meaning
to "piety," to "patriotism," to "privacy"? Does television give a new
meaning to "judgment" or to "understanding"? How do different forms of
information persuade? Is a newspaper's "public" different from
television's "public"? How do different information forms dictate the
type of content that is expressed?

These questions, and dozens more like them, are the means through which
it might be possible for Americans to begin talking back to their
television sets, to use Nicholas Johnson's

phrase. For no medium is excessively dangerous if its users understand
what its dangers are. It is not important that those who ask the
questions arrive at my answers or Marshall McLuhan's (quite different
answers, by the way). This is an instance in which the asking of the
questions is sufficient. To ask is to break the spell. To which I
might add that questions about the psychic, political and social effects
of information are as applicable to the computer as to television.
Although I believe the computer to be a vastly overrated technology, I
mention it here because, clearly, Americans have accorded it their
customary mindless inattention; which means they will use it as they are
told, without a whimper. Thus, a central thesis of computer
technology--that the principal difficulty we have in solving problems
stems from insufficient data--will go unexamined. Until, years from now,
when it will be noticed that the massive collection and speed-of-light
retrieval of data have been of great value to large-scale organizations
but have solved very little of importance to most people and have
created at least as many problems for them as they may have solved.

In any case, the point I am trying to make is that only through a deep
and unfailing awareness of the structure and effects of information,
through a demystification of media, is there any hope of our gaining
some measure of control over television, or the computer, or any other
medium. How is such media consciousness to be achieved? There are only
two answers that come to mind, one of which is nonsense and can be
dismissed almost at once; the other is desperate but it is all we have.

the nonsensical answer is to create television programs whose intent
would be, not to get people to stop watching television but to
demonstrate how television ought to be viewed, to show how television
recreates and degrades our conception of news, political debate,
religious thought, etc. I imagine such demonstrations would of
necessity take the form of parodies, along the lines of "Saturday Night
Live" and "Monty Python,"

the idea being to induce a nationwide horse laugh over television's
control of public discourse. But, naturally, television would have the
last laugh. In order to command an audience large enough to make a
difference, one would have to make the programs vastly amusing, in the
television style. Thus, the act of criticism itself would, in the end,
be co-opted by television. the parodists would become celebrities,
would star in movies, and would end up making television commercials.

the desperate answer is to rely on the only mass medium of communication
that, in theory, is capable of addressing the problem: our schools. This
is the conventional American solution to all dangerous social problems,
and is, of course, based on a naive and mystical faith in the efficacy
of education. the process rarely works. In the matter at hand, there
is even less reason than usual to expect it to. Our schools have not
yet even got around to examining the role of the printed word in shaping
our culture. Indeed, you will not find two high school seniors in a
hundred who could tell you--within a five-hundred-year margin of
error--when the alphabet was invented. I suspect most do not even know
that the alphabet was invented. I have found that when the question is
put to them, they appear puzzled, as if one had asked, When were trees
invented, or clouds? It is the very principle of myth, as Roland
Barthes pointed out, that it transforms history into nature, and to ask
of our schools that they engage in the task of demythologizing media is
to ask something the schools have never done.

And yet there is reason to suppose that the situation is not hopeless.
Educators are not unaware of the effects of television on their
students. Stimulated by the arrival of the computer, they discuss it a
great deal--which is to say, they have become somewhat "media
conscious." It is true enough that much of their consciousness centers
on the question, How can we use television (or the computer, or word
processor) to control education? They have not yet got to the question,
How can we use education to control television (or the computer, or word
processor)? But our reach for solutions ought to exceed our present
grasp, or what's our dreaming for? Besides, it is an acknowledged task
of the schools to assist the young in learning how to interpret the
symbols of their culture. That this task should now require that they
learn how to distance themselves from their forms of information is not
so bizarre an enterprise that we cannot hope for its inclusion in the
curriculum; even hope that it will be placed at the center of education.

What I suggest here as a solution is what Aldous Huxley suggested, as
well. And I can do no better than he. He believed with H. G. Wells
that we are in a race between education and disaster, and he wrote
continuously about the necessity of our understanding the politics and
epistemology of media. For in the end, he 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.

Chapter I: the Medium Is the Metaphor

As quoted in the Wisconsin State Journal, August 24, 1983, Section 3,
page 1.

Cassirer, p. 43.

Frye, p. 227.

Chapter 2: Media as Epistemology

1. Frye, p. 217.

2. Frye, p. 218. 3. Frye, p. 218.

4.

As quoted in Ong, "Literacy and the Future of Print," pp. 201-202.

5.

Ong, Oralityt p. 35.

6.

Ong, Orality, p. 109.

7.

Jerome Bruner, in Studies in Cognitive Growth, states that growth is "as
much from the outside in as from the inside out," and that "much of
[cognitive growth[ consists in a human being's becoming linked with
culturally transmitted 'amplifiers' of motoric, sensory, and reflective
capacities." (pp. 1-2)

According to Goody, in the Domestication of the Savage blind, "[writing]
changes the nature of the representations of the world (cognitive
processes) for those who cannot [read]." He continues: "the existence of
the alphabet therefore changes the type of data that an individual is
dealing with, and it changes the repertoire of programmes he has
available for treating his data." (p. 110)

Julian Jaynes, in the Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of

the Bicameral Mind, states that the role of "writing in the breakdown of
the bicameral voices is tremendously important." He claims that the
written word served as a "replacement" for the hallucinogenic image, and
took up the right hemispheric function of sorting out and fitting
together data.

Walter Ong, in the Presence of the Word, and Marshall McLuhan, in
Understanding Media, stress media's effects on the variations in the
ratio and balance among the senses. One might add that as early as
1938, Alfred North Whitehead (in Modes of Thought) called attention to
the need for a thorough study of the effects of changes in media on the
organization of the sensorium.

Chapter 3: Typographic America

1. Franklin, p. 175.

2. Hart, p. 8. 3. Hart, p. 8. 4. Hart, p. 8. 5. Hart, p. 15.

6. Lockridge, p. 184. 7. Lockridge, p. 184. 8. Hart, p. 47.

9. Mumford, p. 136.

10. Stone, p. 42.

11. Hart, p. 31.

12. Boorstin, p. 315. 13. Boorstin, p. 315. 14. Hart, p. 39. 15.
Hart, p. 45.

16. Fast, p. x (in Introduction).

17.

This press was not the first established on the American continent. the
Spanish had established a printing office in Mexico a hundred years
earlier.

18.

Mott, p. 7.

19.

Boorstin, p. 320.

20.

Mott, p. 9.

21.

Lee, p. 10.

22.

23.

24.

25.

26.

27.

28.

29.

30.

31.

32.

33.

34.

35.

36.

37.

38.

39.

40.

41.

42.

43.

44.

45.

Boorstin, p. 326. Boorstin, p. 327. Hart, p. 27. Tocqueville, p. 58.
Tocqueville, pp. 5-6. Hart p. 86.

Curti pp. 353-354. Hart p. 153.

Hart p. 74.

Curti p. 337.

Hart p. 102.

Bet [er, p. 183. Curti, p. 356. Berger, p. 158. Berger, p. 158.
Berger, p. 158. Curti, p. 356. Twain, p. 161. Hofstadter, p. 145.
Hofstadter, p. 19. Tocqueville, p. 260. Miller, p. 269. Miller, p.
271. Marx, p. 150.

Chapter 4: the Typographic Mind

1. Sparks, p. 4.

2. Sparks, p. 11. 3. Sparks, p. 87.

4.

Questions were continuously raised about the accuracy of the
transcriptions of these debates. Robert Hitt was the verbatim reporter
for the debates, and he was accused of repairing Lincoln's
"illiteracies." the accusations were made, of course, by Lincoln's
political enemies, who, perhaps, were dismayed by the impression
Lincoln's performances were making on the country. Hitt emphatically
denied he had "doctored" any of Lincoln's speeches.

5. Hudson, p. 5. 6. Sparks, p. 86. 7. Mill, p. 64.

8. Hudson, p. 110. 9. Paine, p. 6. 10. Hudson, p. 132. 11. Perry
Miller, p. 15. 12. Hudson, p. 65. 13. Hudson, p. 143.

14. Perry Miller, p. 119.

15. Perry Miller, p. 140.

16. Perry Miller, pp. 140-141. 17. Perry Miller, p. 120. 18. Perry
Miller, p. 153. 19. Presbrey, p. 244. 20. Presbrey, p. 126. 21.
Presbrey, p. 157. 22. Presbrey, p. 235.

23.

Anderson, p. 17. In this connection, it is worth citing a letter,
dated January 15, 1787, written by Thomas Jefferson to Monsieur de
Crave-coeur. In his letter, Jefferson complained that the English were
trying to claim credit for an American invention: making the
circumference of a wheel out of one single piece of wood. Jefferson
speculated that Jersey farmers learned how to do this from their reading
of Homer, who described the process clearly. the English must have
copied the procedure from Americans, Jefferson wrote, "because ours are
the only farmers who can read Homer."

Chapter 5: the Peek-a-Boo World

1.

Thoreau, p. 36.

2.

Harlow, p. 100.

3.

Czitrom, pp. 15-16.

4.

Sontag, p. 165.

5.

Newhall, p. 33.

6.

Salomon, p. 36.

Notes

7. Sontag, p. 20. 8. Sontag, p. 20.

Chapter 6: the Age of Show Business

1.

On July 20, 1984, the New York Times reported that the Chinese National
Television network had contracted with CBS to broadcast sixty-four hours
of CBS programming in China. Contracts with NBC and ABC are sure to
follow. One hopes that the Chinese understand that such transactions
are of great political consequence. the Gang of Four is as nothing
compared with the Gang of Three.

2.

This story was carried by several newspapers, including the Wisconsin
State Journal, February 24, 1983, Section 4, p. 2.

3.

As quoted in the New York Times, June 7, 1984, Section A, p. 20.

Chapter 7: "Now... This"

1.

For a fairly thorough report on Ms. Craft's suit, see the New York
Times, July 29, 1983.

2.

MacNeil, p. 2.

3.

MacNell, p. 4.

4.

See Time, July 9, 1984, p. 69.

Chapter 8: Shuffle Off to Bethlehem

1.

Graham, pp. 5-8. For a detailed analysis of Graham's style, see
Michael Real's Mass Mediated Culture. For an amusing and vitriolic one,
see Roland Barthes' "Billy Graham at the Winter Cyclo-dome," in the
Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies. Barthes says, "If God really does
speak through the mouth of Dr. Graham, then God is a real blockhead."

2.

As quoted in "Religion in Broadcasting," by Robert Abelman and Kimberly
Neuendorf, p. 2. This study was funded by a grant from Unda-USA,
Washington, D.C.

3.

Armstrong, p. 137.

4.

Arendt, p. 352.

Chapter 9: Reach Out and Elect Someone

1.

Drew, p. 263.

2.

Moran, p. 122.

3.

Rosen, p. 162.

4.

Quoted from a speech given on March, 27, 1984, at the Jewish Museum in
New York City on the occasion of a conference of the National Jewish
Archive of Broadcasting.

5.

Moran, p. 125.

6.

From a speech given at the twenty-fourth Media Ecology Conference, April
26, 1982, in Saugerties, New York. For a full account of Dean Gerbner's
views, see "Television: the New State Religion," Etcetera 34:2 (June,
1977: 145-150.

Chapter I0: Teaching as an Amusing Activity

1. Dewey, p. 48.

2.

G. Comstock, S. Chaffee, N. Katzman, M. McCombs, and D. Roberts,
Television and Human Behavior (New York: Columbia University Press,
1978).

3.

A. Cohen and G. Salomon, "Children's Literate Television Viewing:
Surprises and Possible Explanations," Journal of Communication 29
(1979): 156-163; L. M. Meringoff, "What Pictures Can and Can't Do for
Children's Story Comprehension," paper presented at the annual meeting
of the American Educational Research Association, April, 1982; J.
Jacoby, W. D. Hoyer and D. A. Sheluga, Miscomprehension of Televised
Communications (New York: the Educational Foundation of the American
Association of Advertising Agencies, 1980); J. Stauffer, R. Frost and
W. Rybolt, "Recall and Learning from Broadcast News: Is Print Better?,"
Journal of Broadcasting (Summer, 1981): 253-262; A. Stern, "A Study for
the National Association for Broadcasting," in M. Barret (ed.), the
Politics of Broadcasting, 1971-1972 (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1973);
C. E. Wilson, "the Effect of a Medium on Loss of Information,"
Journalism Quarterly 51 (Spring, 1974): 111-115; W. R. Neuman,
"Patterns of Recall Among Television News Viewers," Public Opinion
Quarterly 40 (1976): 118-125; E. Katz, H. Adoni

and P. Parness, "Remembering the News: What the Pictures Add to
Recall," Journalism Quarterly 54 (1977): 233-242; B. Gunter,
"Remembering Television News: Effects of Picture Content," Journal of
General Psychology 102 (1980): 127-133.

4. Salomon, p. 81.

Anderson, Paul. Platonism in the Midwest. Philadelphia: Temple
University Publications, 1963.

Arendt, Hannah. "Society and Culture," in the Human Dialogue, edited by
Floyd Matson and Ashley Montagu. Glencoe, I11.: Free Press, 1967.
Armstrong, Ben. the Electric Church. Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1979.
Berger, Max. the British Traveler in America, 1836-1860. New York:

Columbia University Press, 1943.

Boorstin, Daniel J. the Americans: the Colonial Experience. New York:

Vintage books, 1958.

Cassirer, Ernst. An Essay on Man. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday Anchor,
1956.

Curti, Merle. the Growth of American Thought. New York: Harper &

Row, 1951.

Czitrom, Daniel. Media and the American Mind: From Morse to McLuhan.

Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982.

Dewey, John. Experience and Education. the Kappa Delta Pi Lectures.

London: Collier books, 1963.

Drew, Elizabeth. Portrait of an Election: the 1980 Presidential
Campaign.

New York: Simon and Schuster, 1981.

Eisenstein, Elizabeth. the Printing Press as an Agent of Change. New

York: Cambridge University Press, 1979.

Fast, Howard. Introduction to Rights of Man, by Thomas Paine. New

York: Heritage Press, 1961.

Franklin, Benjamin. the Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. New

York: Magnum books, 1968.

Frye, Northrop. the Great Code: the Bible and Literature. Toronto:
Academic Press, 1981.

Graham, Billy. "the Future of TV Evangelism." TV Guide 31:10 (1983).
Harlow, Alvin Fay. Old Wires and New Waves: the History of the Tele-
graph, Telephone and Wireless. New York: Appleton-Century, 1936. Hart,
James D. the Popular Book: A History of America's Literary Taste. New
York: Oxford University Press, 1950. Hofstadter, Richard.
Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
1964. Hudson, Winthrop. Religion in America. New York: Charles
Scribner's Sons, 1965. Lee, James Melvin. History of American
Journalism. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1917. Lockridge, Kenneth.
"Literacy in Early America, 1650-1800," in Literacy and Sodal
Development in the West: A Reader, edited by Harvey J. Graff. New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1981. MacNeil, Robert. "Is Television
Shortening Our Attention Span?" New York University Education Quarterly
14:2 (Winter, 1983). Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. the German
Ideology. New York: International Publishers, 1972. Mill, John Stuart.
Autobiography and Other Writings. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1969.
Miller, John C. the First Frontier: Life in Colonial America. New
York: Dell, 1966. Miller, Perry. the Life of the Mind in America: From
the Revolution to the Civil War. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World,
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