The Information Highway: More Like a Roller Coaster
When a DC-10 crashed at Sioux City’s airport in July 1989, Americans were riveted yet pained by the video of the plane flipping end over end on the runway in a ball of fire. But if that same incident took place today there’s a good chance it would barely be newsworthy. Who wants to watch a plane flipping like that if the video doesn’t also involve close-ups of blood and bodily carnage?
Live broadcasts that may contain a suicide have so conditioned us that there has to be a human element in the news presentation or we’ve no time for it. But ironically, the inclusion of the human element in this particular way is dehumanizing for it shows our fellow man not simply at a point of pain, but often at a point of disembodiment; it actually makes our fellow man part of the sideshow that serves to distract us from the mundane.
There has been a great perversion and we, as a consequence, are in sensory overload. Thus to keep our attention, both the news and Obama’s foreign policy positions are delivered via a scripted blitz from which we can hardly turn away. Postman described this well when he wrote: “The news of the day is a figment of our technological imagination. It is, quite precisely, a media event.”
In praising Obama’s “YouTube diplomacy,” Rasiej missed the profundity of his own words when he said: “[This] has the opportunity to reinvent diplomacy by not only having diplomats talk to each other but by engaging citizens talking to each other, debating common issues and goals.” In other words, this type of foreign policy delivery makes everyone a diplomat.
Perhaps this is good news unless you’re a real diplomat, because real diplomats understand that if everyone is a diplomat then being one is overrated at best, unnecessary at worst. To put it plainly — there is no need for such a specialty when there’s nothing special about diplomacy.
Another frightening aspect of “unfiltered” technology is the speed by which it catapults us through life. In 1967, when Ronald Reagan said, “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction,” the generations to which he spoke moved much slower than we do. Unchecked immediacy almost guarantees that when the freedom-squashing generation Reagan feared arises, it will diminish freedom with a quickness that even the Great Communicator did not foresee.
But what else can we expect? This is where too much immediacy, and certainly unchecked immediacy, brings us as it carries us from media event to media event or news report to news report.
We see our fellow man killed or killing in real time. We see plane crashes as they happen and listen to cockpit recordings of terror. We watch as hostage crises unfold. We even become diplomats. Yet through it all we remain numb, waiting for the next level of reporting to be developed in the same way those who frequent amusement parks wait for a faster roller coaster to be unveiled.
This is why I don’t watch the news. They try to suck you in as if it’s a sitcom. It truly is a media event moreso than the simply delivery of news.
I know that when I watch the news, if I do so for two or three days in a row, I find myself pulled into a vortex where I want to keep watching to stay up to speed. The problem is that there’s rarely anything to stay up to speed with: they’re just repackaging old news in a new way or showing a shooting in Ohio that I’m supposed to view as a threat to me in Arizona.
I am afraid Hawkins is very accurate in his assessment that the generation Reagan feared would take our freedom will do so with a speed unimaginable. Technology is not a bad thing, but the bad use of technology is. And I fear the “unchecked immediacy” Hawkins describes has been used to put us in a place where we’re be easily tricked into trading all that our Founding Fathers held dear for the chance to be globally relevant.
This is well worded. I’ve had concerns about the encroaching nature of today’s media but not such as I could express this clearly. Very nice article.
We are indeed led by our technologies, which is as much a reflection on our disdain for education as our mindless flight through this life. The use of Neil Postman is surperb, for it was he that pointed to the benefit people received from spending time in books instead of news and entertainment.
Good stuff here. It’s scary how we allow ourselves to be led by another (or by an “it” in the case of technology).
I like the phrase “unchecked immediacy” – for there is something wrong with seeing everything as it happens. I want an open society, but I want an ethical norm as well.
Very good article.
Even more trenchant and disturbing that Neil Postman’s book (which is excellent), is Mediated: How the Media Shapes Our World and the Way We Live in It by Thomas de Zengotita. He focuses on the effects of living in a society in which all information comes to any of us only through intermediaries, and how few people even stop to ever think about that.
sorry. Only the title was supposed to be bold in that. Gotta work on my HTML tagging skills.
The British Are Coming / The British Are Coming , now it’s to late , you getwhat you as k for .