![]() Somehow I gravitate to straw men and lean all too heavily on the one-liner. I find it challenging to give a fair statement of, and the strongest reasons supporting, perspectives I oppose. After all, everyone deserves to have an opinion unsullied by logic or fact or experience.Įven those who love books have difficulty (OK, I have difficulty) talking to people I disagree with in an honest, civil, reasoned manner. And our relativistic culture has made persuasion impolite at best. Persuasion has a bad name because of its associations with manipulation. We have also lost the ability to persuade. Today, I think, Postman would go further. That is the essence of our entertainment news culture. It “made public discourse essentially incoherent.” Now multiply the telegraph by Twitter. It was the demise of public discourse.Įven more troubling, the telegraph presented these isolated factoids without context, without analysis, without perspective. The loss of a print culture didn’t grieve Postman most. What could be the harm of this? “The contribution of the telegraph to public discourse,” Postman wrote, “was to dignify irrelevance and amplify impotence.” What difference would any of these make in the daily life of average readers? And what could one do about any of these anyway? A royal marriage in Japan, the death of an opera star in Brazil, a financial scandal in England, a famine in Turkey. Now, news can come instantly from all over the world to populate the pages of newspapers. Postman traces the origins of this back to the mid-19th century and the introduction of the telegraph. We’ve ceased to be a deliberative culture, having become obsessed with minutiae and irrelevancies instead. The loss of a print culture didn’t grieve him most. When did you last hear a candidate seek to thoughtfully persuade a broad range of listeners rather than merely rally the base by insulting opponents and offering half-truths? Reshaping Our Public Discourse Politicians seem more like stand-up comedians, roaming the stage with handheld mics and giving cynical one-liners rather than offering vision or well-considered policy proposals. Presidential debates are unwatchable as candidates talk over each other. You don’t have to be Marshall McLuhan to recognize how far public discourse has declined even from 35 years ago. Our civic life has become consumed by soundbites and Twitter feeds. Want proof? Just look at the Nielsen Ratings for both of them compared to C-SPAN. Both are primarily concerned with getting as many people to watch as possible so they can make as much money as possible-and that is done through entertainment. Neither is primarily concerned with informing the public. ![]() Despite appearances, Fox News and MSNBC have much in common. Even those outlets that are supposed to be providing substance do not. In contrast, our civic life has become consumed by soundbites and Twitter feeds. Tocqueville wrote, “An American cannot converse, but he can discuss. . . He speaks to you as if he was addressing a meeting.” Why? Their minds and speech were shaped by print. Even the way Americans talked betrayed this. Why were farmers and merchants able to follow the involved arguments and elaborate sentences of Lincoln and Douglas (who spoke for three and four hours at a time per debater)? Because the audience was imbued with a print culture. More than that, libraries and lecture halls multiplied. Common Sense by Thomas Paine, for example, would have sold the equivalent of 33 million copies in today’s America. But books also got their share of attention. People were so busy reading newspapers and pamphlets they hardly had time for books. Reading, Postman tells us, was “not an elitist activity, and printed matter was spread evenly among all kinds of people”-except, of course, for slaves. In Colonial America, before the advent of the entertainment culture, life was different. Though television is not the force it once was, his critique remains as potent as ever. We’d have to wait 22 years for the iPhone and Kindle. ![]() Netflix wouldn’t open for business for 14 years. When Postman’s classic lament for the loss of our print culture was written in 1985, the Big Three networks dominated.
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