(Excerpted from a speech given to the Superhighway Summit at the University of California at Los Angeles earlier this year.)
In his book Amusing Ourselves To Death, Neil Postman says that he doesn't worry so much about junk television - after all, "there have been enough junk books published to fill the Grand Canyon." What dismays him is how bad television is when it is trying to be good. He means that it does a terrible job of carrying the important discourse of our civilization.
Thus TV is fine for sports, forest fires, and sitcoms, but it can't carry a 50-page reasoned argument like Thomas Paine's "Common Sense." Or even carry the daily news in context. Its junk nature has been able to displace reasoned discourse and, worse, to convince most people that nothing important has been taken away. Postman compares the Lincoln-Douglas debates, in which each had three hours to hold forth followed by a one-hour rebuttal, to TV presidential "debates," in which the participants on equally weighty issues are given two minutes to respond with a one-minute rebuttal! TV has changed the very meaning of debate, but few have noticed. It is shiny beads instead of serious discussion. (This summit is shiny beads - the format forces opinions rather than reasoned discussion and argument; essays would be better.)
The main thing we want to understand about each medium we communicate through is whether it can carry the full weight of the ideas we want to express. Each medium has a special way of representing ideas that emphasize particular ways of thinking and de-emphasize others. There is no question that the new dynamic media we are discussing today will have an immense transforming impact on society similar to that of the printing press. The book helped bring forth the thought patterns of science that enabled us to penetrate some of the mysteries and complexities of the world - not just in physics but in biology, medicine, and agriculture. Less than 3 percent of us feed all of America, and food is our largest export. In the rest of the world, tens of millions - a Holocaust's worth - starve to death each year. This is not an informational problem but one requiring changes in thinking and values.
Like the printing press, the new computer media will bring forth its own very special ways to think about complexities we have not been able to deal with up to now - especially for complex chaotic systems such as the AIDS epidemic and the ecological balance of our planet. But much care has to be taken with design and education in order for the change to be positive. We don't have natural defenses against fat, sugar, salt, alcohol, alkaloids - or media. Every technology really needs to be shipped with a special manual - not how to use it but why, when, and for what. Another way to think of roadkill on the information highway will be the billions who will forget there are offramps to destinations other than Hollywood, Las Vegas, the local bingo parlor, or shiny beads from a shopping network. Not couch potatoes but mouse potatoes! It's not the wonderful things they could do with new media, it's what they will be convinced they should do. This is a new tragedy in the making. No democracy that is less than 10 percent literate can survive in the driving forces of society. Television should be the last mass communications medium to be naively designed and put into the world without a surgeon general's warning!
With the recent disclosures of similarly highly educated American scientists and doctors conducting radiation experiments on unsuspecting victims, it should be clear that more education per se is not what we need, nor more information. First and foremost, we need a better sense of how to transcend the psychological and social limitations of being human. That must be our nation's - and world's - most urgent priority.
