COMM 432

Media in Film

Amusing Ourselves to Death

Neil Postman  (1931-2003)

  • Critic, writer, educator and communication theorist
  • Professor of Communication at New York University at the Department of Culture and Communication
  • Academic research field: media and education
  • Concerned with the unstoppable decline of education in the country

Work:

  • Crazy Talk, Stupid Talk (1976)
  • The Disappearance of Childhood (1982)
  • Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985)
  • The End of Education (1995)

The age of show business

  • What is television? What kinds of conversation does it permit? What are the intellectual tendencies it encourages, what sort of culture does it produce?
  • Distinction between technology and medium:
    • Technology: physical apparatus
    • Medium: a use to which a physical apparatus is put
  • Characteristics of the Medium Television:
    • Combination of audio and image.
    • The average shot length on network television is 3.5 seconds.
    • The eye never rests.
    • It offers a variety of subjects.
    • It requires minimal skills to comprehend.
    • It is largely aimed at emotional gratification.
  • “TV offers viewers a beautiful spectacle, a visual delight, pouring  forth thousands of images on any given day”.
  • “Even commercials, which some regard as an annoyance, are beautifully crafted, always pleasing the eye and accompanied by exciting music”.
  • 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.
  • American TV programs are in demand all over the world.
  • The total estimate of U.S. TV exported is over 200,000 hours.

Cosmetics has replaced ideology.

  • Those with camera appeal can command salaries exceeding one million dollar a year …
  • The container overshadows the content …
  • Can you believe that a presidential election can be lost because the candidate was sabotaged by make-up staff?

The medium is the metaphor

  • The Medium is the Message.
  • “I believed then, as I believe now, that he (McLuhan) 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”.
  • Confusion between “message” and “metaphor”
    • Message: specific, concrete statement about the world
    • Metaphor: symbolic activity to make sense of the world
  • “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”.
  • “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.
  • “The clock” (Lewis Mumford’s Technics and Civilization – 1934)

Media as Epistemology

  • Origin and nature of knowledge.
  • Which are the proper vehicles to reach the truth?
  • Is the speech a vehicle of knowledge, an artifact you can trust to find the truth?
  • The written word replaced the oral word as vehicle of knowledge.
  • And now images have taken over. We believe not what we read, but what we see.
  • “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 live, that we are getting sillier by the minute”.

The typographic mind

  • The written word has a CONTENT, a semantic, paraphrasable, propositional content. 
  • Reading is by its nature a serious business. It is also, of course, an essentially rational activity.
  • In a culture dominated by print, public discourse tends to be characterized by a coherent, orderly arrangement of facts and ideas.
  • The propositional, sequential character of the written word fosters “the analytic management of knowledge”.

Electricity – The Peek-A-Boo World

  • Electricity – telegraph.
  • Above all the symbiosis between telegraph and newspapers “made information into a commodity, a ‘thing’ that could be bought and sold irrespective of its uses and meanings”.
  • The telegraph introduced three elements that would undermine the typographic culture: irrelevance, incoherence, impotence.
  • In 1848, The New York Herald contained over 79,000 words of telegraphic content.
  • This is the origin of the current communication overload we are suffering.
  • We are facing everyday a variety of dramatic issues that happened all around the world, but that very rarely affect what we do during the day.
  • The glut of information is irrelevant for our lives, incoherent, since it can only provides us with a superficial knowledge about the facts, and highlight our impotence.

Is TV entertaining?

TV “has made entertainment itself the natural form for the representation of all experience”.

  • “The problem is not that TV presents us with entertaining subject matter, but that all subject matter is presented as entertaining”.
  • “Entertainment is the supraideology of all discourse on TV”.
  • “No matter what is depicted or from what point of view, the overarching presumption is that it is there for our amusement”.
  • Anything can become news, but when it come through the filter of TV, immediately becomes entertainment:
    • Triple by-pass surgery
    • Rape or murder trials
    • Terrorist Actions
    • Financial crisis
    • Natural catastrophes

Teaching as Entertainment

  • The “Sesame Street” Syndrome
  • The TV show appeared “to justify allowing a four- or five-year-old to sit transfixed in front of a TV screen for unnatural periods of time”.
  • “It 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” (initiation into the fun-loving culture).
  • Everybody (parents, educators, legislators) approved Sesame Street.
  • The problem was:  “Sesame Street encourage children to love school, only if school is like Sesame Street”.

Network (1976)

  • Director: Sydney Lumet
  • Screenwriter: Paddy Chayesvsky
  • Faye Dunaway, William Holden, Peter Finch, Robert Duvall

The following questions should help you as a guide to focus on the most relevant ideas for this course while watching the film.

1 – Postman admits being a disciple of Marshal McLuhan. What are the most important technical aspects of TV, and how this aspects condition – even determine – the TV business?

2 – What is the main issue with the news section within the UBS network corporation?

3 – The key moment in the film is the announcement Howard Beale makes when he knows that he is going to be fired. What happens? What changes?

4 – Can you analyze from the point of view of Postman’s thesis the most ambitious project to boost rating of Diana Christensen?   

5 – How does the film portray the direction the network TV news business is taking? 

6 – Can you explain this development using the title of Postman’s book Amusing ourselves to Death?

7 – And finally, What are the possible social and political conflicts this structural transformation of TV news can bring to society?