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In 1985, Neil Postman observed an America imprisoned by its own need for amusement. He was, it turns out, extremely prescient.
[...] Many Americans get their news filtered through late-night comedy and their outrages filtered through Saturday Night Live. They—we—turn to memes to express both indignation and joy.
[...] Postman today is best remembered as a critic of television: That's the medium he directly blamed, in Amusing Ourselves to Death, for what he termed Americans' "vast descent into triviality," and the technology he saw as both the cause and the outcome of a culture that privileged entertainment above all else. But Postman was a critic of more than TV alone. He mistrusted entertainment, not as a situation but as a political tool; he worried that Americans' great capacity for distraction had compromised their ability to think, and to want, for themselves. He resented the tyranny of the lol. His great observation, and his great warning, was a newly relevant kind of bummer: There are dangers that can come with having too much fun.
In 1984, Americans took a look around at the world they had created for themselves and breathed a collective sigh of relief. The year George Orwell had appointed as the locus of his dark and only lightly fictionalized predictions—war, governmental manipulation, surveillance not just of actions, but of thoughts themselves—had brought with it, in reality, only the gentlest of dystopias. Sure, there was corporatism. Sure, there was communism. And yet, for most of the Americans living through that heady decade, 1984 had not, for all practical purposes, become Nineteen Eighty-Four. They surveyed themselves, and they congratulated themselves: They had escaped.
Or perhaps they hadn't. Postman opened Amusing Ourselves to Death with a nod to the year that had preceded it. He talked about the freedoms enjoyed by the Americans of 1984—cultural, commercial, political. And then he broke the bad news: They'd been measuring themselves according to the wrong dystopia. It wasn't Nineteen Eighty-Four that had the most to say about the America of the 1980s, but rather Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. "In Huxley's vision," Postman noted, "no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity, and history." Instead: "People will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think."
The vehicle of their oppression, in this case? Yep, the television. Which had, Postman argued, thoroughly insinuated itself on all elements of American life—and not just in the boob-tubed, couch-potatoed, the-average-American-watches-five-hours-of-television-a-day kind of way that is so familiar in anti-TV invectives, but in a way that was decidedly more intimate.
https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2017/04/are-we-having-too-much-fun/523143/
Are we having tooooo much fun ?
(Score: 3, Informative) by AthanasiusKircher on Sunday April 30 2017, @10:39PM
not just assert that current entertainment doesn't seem very productive and think that is a problem somehow.
I'm not sure that's what TFA is saying at all. It's actually pretty unclear what the overall point of the article is, other than a meditation on Neil Postman's book from the 1980s and how it was "prescient" in various ways. The author of TFA seems to go back and forth between agreeing the Postman's critique of American culture, claiming that he "over-romanticized" historical aspects of the pre-television era, and just making random connections with things that have happened since the 1980s. I don't sense an overall argument that entertainment is bad (though Postman certainly thought so). The only general argument seemingly made here is that the particular brand of media and entertainment is "distinctly American" in some ways. The conclusion to the article is just bizarre, drawing on Brian Williams calling images of missiles "beautiful pictures," though people have found "beauty" in much more horrible things for generations.
And frankly, the closer I read TFA, the more oversimplifying I see. There's this extended section (based on Postman) about how the telegraph changed American life. But most of the nefarious things it supposedly brought existed before -- "yellow journalism" wasn't an invention of the telegraph, and newspapers had already been creating "entertaining" news for centuries by that point.
The author's historical claims are no better:
Still, Postman understood what might come, because he understood what had been. He saw the systems of things. In one way he couldn’t have imagined the world of 2017, one in which television, still, defines so much of American life.
Really? He had already lived though a few decades of television and saw it only expand its power.
He couldn’t have anticipated Samantha Bee or John Oliver or Seth Meyers or Stephen Colbert—he couldn’t have known how comedians would come to double, in a culture saturated with information, as journalists.
Many comedians had been political in the past, though they didn't tend to have talk shows. Editorial cartoons had been around for centuries. Talk-show monologues often gave pointed political commentary. SNL's "Weekend Update" had already been around for a decade before Postman's book. Heck, the 1980s was a golden age for Doonesbury. Was this "journalism" or merely satire? I don't know, but comedians and satirists had been giving novel spins on current events for centuries, some doing more "research" than others.
He couldn’t have known that celebrities would be regularly asked to weigh in on the political conversations of the day
Now I know something's off here. Does the author not remember McCarthyism and how Hollywood actors were frequently attacked because of their open political beliefs? Celebrities have been involved in politics ever since there were modern "celebrities." Heck, P.T. Barnum was elected to the Connecticut legislature in the 1800s. Beyond speaking out directly, celebrities used their art forms: Who can forget Charlie Chaplin in The Great Dictator? And by 1985 and Postman's book, you had prominent celebrities even joining the ranks of politics -- George Murphy as U.S. senator, Shirley Temple as an ambassador, and obviously Reagan was president. Celebrities as a group are probably more politically outspoken than in the past, but this was hardly novel in 1985.
Many of these trends have shifted or grew in unpredictable ways, but humans have sought entertainment ever since there were humans. Informed political satire is at least as old as ancient Greece and Rome. "Bread and circuses" have kept the populace entertained for millennia. Obviously the forms of entertainment have changed, and today many people have more "free time" to consume entertainment than in the past, but I don't think the overall roles of entertainment are as novel as TFA claims.