I just finished reading Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death. Written in 1985, Postman is concerned primarily with the effect visual media (ie. television) has on public discourse. I expected to find Postman’s concerns and arguments a bit dated and worn. They aren’t. This book freaked me out. It is required reading for anyone interested in the social implications of mobile technology.

First, let me point out that Postman does not address the phenomenon of mobile information technology anywhere in his book. He couldn’t. The mobile internet didn’t exist in 1985. Still, his concerns about what gets lost when TV culture replaces typographic (ie. “written”) culture seem even more apropos to the mobile internet device age. You don’t have to read between the lines much to glimpse that we may be farther down the Road of Cultural Collapse than we would prefer to believe.

On the other hand, Postman does seem a bit ridiculous when he speculates in 1985 that this whole computer-thing might just actually be a bunch of hype.

Set that aside. Here’s what’s important to me about this book:

Postman argues that any pervasive communication technology is not only a tool used by people to convey a message, but that communication technologies also shape the types of messages that are conveyed to suit the particular needs of the technology.

This is pretty much classic Marshall McLuhan — “the medium is the message”. Postman goes farther. The medium is not only the message. The medium favors a certain type of message and precludes other types of messages. The technology creates biases, assumptions and mental constructs that shape the realities of the message sender and receiver. In fact, the very language of “sender” and “receiver” is a biased way of thinking about shared information.

Typographic culture requires careful thought, rewards deliberation and cannot help but exist in context with many, many other written documents. Typographic culture gave rise to the idea of history. That today is different from yesterday and that yesterday’s experiences, through good writing and good reading, can actually be more real to us than today’s experience. Typographic culture always conspires to make sense of things. It can’t be helped. Ideas, when written down, become fixed in a way that begs analysis, observation and careful consideration. In other words, typographic culture is logical.

Visual culture is fleeting. Visual culture rewards abbreviation, quick seques and high emotional impact. Visual messages by nature appeal more to our emotional selves than our rational selves. Visual culture prevents historical understanding. Visual messages, such as photographs and video, lift events out of their historical context and can only be experienced as something that is happening now. That’s why TV shows that depict historical happenings often have to label these historical visual interludes with text so we understand that a time-shift has occured. Visual images are immediate. They are fleeting and they exist completely outside of context.

I’m simplifying a bit here, but you get the idea. Visual culture is very, very different from typographic culture. Visual culture makes everything seem equally urgent and immediate so that, in the end, nothing is really truly urgent.

I think I’m loosing my thread here a bit. I wanted to talk a bit about how technology serves as metaphor. I will have to take another pass at that idea, I think.

For now, I’m thinking very much about the iPad and the ways in which it blends visual and typographic culture. I’m wondering if the iPad and other mobile internet devices can represent a healthy hybrid of sorts, something new, or, as Postman seems to suggest is inevitable, whether the iPad represents the complete subjugation of text to image. More on that later.

A few other threads to pull at in future posts:

• The telegraph represented the first major step into an unsettling, incoherent information environment where information no longer represented something personally meaningful, but becomes something akin to data where all information is equal. This precipitated the “ripped from the headlines” quality I so detest in TV news and news-esque shows like Law and Order.
• Postman presents the idea of actionable and non-actionable information and points out that much of what we are being offered as “news of the day” is actually quite useless to us and renders us completely incapable of meaningful action.
• The telegraph shifted the burden of sense-making from the sender to the receiver. The sender just reports “facts”. The receiver is left on his own to figure out what these “facts” mean or how they might be useful.
• The information environment created by the telegraph and photograph created such a glut of contextless information that the rise of Trivia Culture became inevitable to give us something to do with all the things we know of but don’t really know about. Examples: crossword puzzles, radio and TV quiz shows; Trivial Pursuit.
• “Each technology has an agenda of its own.” (84)
• “Television is our culture’s principle 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.” (92)
• The television commercial is anti-capitalist. Adam Smith would have hated TV commercials for how they damaged the pure capitalist model.