Amusing Ourselves to Death
If we go back to the 17th and 18th century, the nature of the discourse at the time was expository, rational, long-form and sequential. People had a typographic mind; the only medium of communication available was the printed word, so people had to read, think and engage actively with the medium which, in turn, made them more thoughtful and critical. listening to a debate for 7 hours in the town square was normal. The medium is a metaphor for shaping a culture, for changing behaviors. Think of the invention of the clock; it was a metaphor for controlling infinity; similarly, sunglasses were a metaphor for rebellion against nature. Oratory discourse aided by a typographic mind, marked the apogee of seriousness and critical thought. The ratio of information to action was super high, the "news" was relevant, the truth was reachable through long-form discourse, everything you heard was contained in a context familiar to your model of the world.
Then came the telegraph, an instantaneous transfer of information over space was suddenly possible. The problems of the world become your problem; decontextualization arrived and the relevance started to fade in a back of a sea of irrelevance. The medium of the telegraph was encroaching on the clarity of the typographic mind. Next arrived the TV. The promise of the TV was to turn everything into entertainment: Religion, Politics, News, Education. Suddenly everything had to conform to what the medium of TV required: make things that are appealing to a wide audience; short-form and entertaining, and switch between widely different topics using the Now....then method. The goal was to keep you watching.
Orwell was scared of a world where books are banned, information is restricted, and truth is concealed, but it turns out the world we ended up in is a Huxleyan world: no need to ban books, restrict information, or censor the truth. Just make the truth hard to get to; drown it in a sea of irrelevance and make things entertaining. You can extend Neil Postman's worries to the 21st century, and think of the mediums of nowadays: TikTok, X, Instagram... How are these mediums shaping the culture of the day? What are they a metaphor for? I think it is clear that we're still living in that Huxleyan world of scrolling ourselves to death and entertaining ourselves with the illusion of knowledge which is, as a matter of fact, merely sound-bites of a decontextualized sea of entertainment.
This book has reminded me to revive my typographical mind and seek long-form writing and reading because the habits of mind that these new mediums are imposing on us are ones that encourage rage, delusions, and atrophy of our critical faculties. That said, These modern mediums can also open doors to exciting worlds if we knew how to harness them and were able to ferret out the real value they offer as opposed to getting sucked into the dark side of what they offer. The internet as a point of leverage is an excellent medium, but the mind needs to be protected at all costs. Here is to keeping the typographic mind alive in the age of technological pandemonium!