Amusing Ourselves to Death

[Prologue:  I don't know why this year's blog posts seem to be gravitating towards an anti-Facebook theme since I am a big fan of Facebook and use it every single day -- this will be the last one of this genre for awhile.]

I just read Amusing Ourselves to Death:  Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business by Neil Postman, and this book has tons of great food for thought in our Internet age.  Postman's main idea is this:  "Every medium of communication [ie books, photographs, television, Internet]...has resonance...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."  Postman is not so much concerned with junk culture - the shows we watch (or the websites we view) just for fun.  He's concerned about serious cultural discussions happening on mediums that were built for entertainment, especially in the categories of politics, education, religion, and journalism.  (In his view, shows like Sesame Street and Dateline NBC are far more dangerous than shows like Reno 911 - and if this boggles your mind, then you should check out his book.)

This book was written in 1985 and was intended to criticize the cultural dominance of television, but the ideas apply just as strongly in 2016 to our Internet / social media dominated age.  This blog post has some thoughts, inspired by Postman's book, about what the Internet / social media as our dominant cultural medium is doing to influence politics, religion, and journalism.

Politics:

• Political debates:  In the olden days before television, each candidate would get to answer each question for more than 20 minutes without interruption.  The entire debate would sometimes last seven hours.  Now candidates are lucky to get 30 seconds, with interruptions from other candidates and moderators.   In this environment, the person who wins the debate is the person who gets the best zinger or sound bite.  This has been true for decades, ever since debates have been televised -- but what a difference in content, context, and depth of information can be conveyed in 20 minutes versus 20 seconds.  Do you know who can deliver a great zinger?  Donald Trump.
• On social media, political opinions often get conveyed in the following forms:
• A catchy meme that may or may not contain factually accurate information.
• Angry / aggressive ranting posts that might be long on emotion and short on truth. 
• Even when posts and memes are 100% accurate, because they are so short, they often cannot be contextualized in any meaningful way.
• People can comment on all these things - so even if the original post was truthful, well-reasoned, and put in a proper context, commenters can easily hijack the originally intended thought and turn it into a space for angry debate.
• On the plus side, it's much easier to fact check when people are lying thanks to the Internet.   So candidates on all sides are less able to get away with lying and no one calling them out.  However, there's such a glut of information all the time that people may not notice a politician lying, since it's just one of the thousand items that pops up in their newsfeed that morning.   

Religion:  I have found the Internet to be a helpful source of spiritual encouragement, whether it's the ability to look up Bible verses on my phone, or text /email / Facebook prayer requests to and from friends, or to spend 5 free minutes reading an encouraging Christian living article.  But there are some criticisms about the Internet and social media as the medium for religious conversation:

• On the Internet, religion is taken out of its sacred context - it's great to be able to read the Bible on your phone, but then you get an alert that you got a new email / text / Facebook notification and you click over (or you don't click over, but in the back of your mind you're wondering what the notification could be), and then you read a couple more verses, and then another notification - it changes the experience entirely.  It's certainly better than nothing, but it can be a mentally fragmented experience, like so much of Internet browsing.    
• Christian articles posted on Facebook - again, they can be a source of encouragement, but how  often do we choose to read one paragraph of a 5 paragraph article before our short attention spans demand something else, and we maybe end up missing the whole point?  This type of reading is typical on the Internet (at least for me), but is very unusual if you sit down and read a book.
• Postman's book describes how we all need to be amused because this is the expectation that television creates, and I think that's even more true (combined with short attention spans) in the Internet age -- how difficult does that make the job of pastors?  This might be part of why so many churches use fancy audio-visuals and other flashy attention-keeping devices during sermons - because we are a culture that can't pay attention without some help, and without worship services being entertaining.  (Although millenials are rebelling against the entertainment-driven worship service, so maybe we will see this trend changing.)

Journalism:

• The news cycle more than ever prioritizes speed and sensationalism over depth / context / relevance / truth.  Facebook's "Now Trending" sidebar is the perfect place to look for examples of everything that's wrong with the current news - it glorifies nasty celebrity gossip, horrific crimes against children, and meaningless pieces of trivia that have absolutely nothing to do with your life or anything of importance in the world.  
• News agencies post articles that are click and comment bait - they find a topic that provokes or enchants and causes people to open the article, which often has zero overlap with the content that people most need to hear in order to be well-informed citizens.

This post has gone on long enough, but the really encouraging thing I took from Postman's book (as someone who has no intention of quitting Facebook) is this:  just knowing that you need to think critically about the effect that a medium has on serious cultural discussions does a lot to counter the harmful effects of that medium.  So for me, i'm going to re-double my efforts to scroll past political discussions (which are always extremely tempting to me) and focus on cute family pictures.

The other thing you can do, if this set of ideas has really rubbed you the wrong way, is to start a Facebook page based on Postman's book and post sentences from the book, totally out of context, in the form of memes.