While reading the end of chapter six of Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death and beginning chapter seven of the book Postman explains the degrading that the discourse of television has caused in our society's ability of being informed. The age of show business has created the issue of presenting everything as entertainment including the news, which is suppose to aid us in understanding the world around us. Due to the fast pace of our media's discourse we have become desensitized to any events or information the frilly daily news channels throw at us. Our already short attention spans are being constantly entertained and not actually required to reflect or ponder any of the information being spilled out in the minute or less news stories before an entirely new story or event is quickly grasping our attention. "There is no murder so brutal no earthquake so devastating, no political blunder so costly-for the matter, no ball score so tantalizing or weather report so threatening- that it cannot be erased from our minds by a newscaster saying, 'Now...this' " (Postman 99). Before the shift of discourse to photography, and telegraphy, and eventually television, typography was not filled with entertainment but information needing to be shared. Today our society is riddled with disinformation. With the trend of entertainment over knowledge and comprehension how may we better understand our world and create solid opinions about the things that occur within it?
I ask, those of you who are left, what are your opinions on the overly decorated news we rely on today? How may we stop and think, and comprehend the events that shape our world while living in the fast paced discourse of today?
I am not sure if our society as a whole could ever go back to slowing down to fully comprehend news, especially in such an action-packed year as 2020 where there is too much awful news to comprehend it all. The only way I could see an individual being able to stop and truly understand all that has happened this year is if they take a break from electronics for a week or two - but once they come back they'll have even more news to think about and the cycle will repeat. The only way I could see society as a whole being able to stop and comprehend our world's news is if another popular technology is created that encourages civil discourse similar to the printing press. Unfortunately this is very unlikely, at least for a VERY long time, due to the TV's and smart phone's gigantic influence on our lives and the future of technology for the next decades or even centuries. On an individual level people could definitely slow down and look at the news critically but society as a whole - never again.
ReplyDelete