The second half of Postman’s work is rather uneven with his stronger chapters acting as bookends to what I expected to be a more constructive collection of essays. His opening chapter entitled Now… This talked about televised news and the changing nature of journalism in the digital age. I’ve covered this chapter elsewhere in conjunction with some contemporary discussions on networked journalism and I think Postman is at his most prophetic in this chapter.
The next few chapters fall pretty flat. He takes on televised religion and politics in turn by basically applying his general critiques in the first half of his book to more concrete phenomena, but the chapters are so generic that they are virtually interchangeable and I don’t think they do much to add to his argument.[1] In fact, I think there are some problems in his chapter on politics in particular.
Postman argues that the dominant metaphor for American political discourse is the television commercial (pg. 126). His critique, as anyone reading the book or my blog should anticipate, is twofold: commercials are too short to mediate any serious talking-points (much less initiate community-wide conversations), and that since commercials are image-based they are unable to make claims. Technically, he argues that claims must be made through language:
More precisely, it must take the form of a proposition, for that is the universe of discourse from which such words as “true” and “false” come. If that universe of discourse is discarded, then the application of empirical tests, logical analysis or any of the other instruments of reason are impotent… By substituting images for claims, the pictorial commercial made emotional appeal, not tests of truth, the basis of consumer decisions. (pgs. 127-128)
Since the commercial is the controlling metaphor for political discourse, this non-refutable nature of television advertisements also applies to the realm of American politics.
I’m not naïve enough to argue that elections are won on reason alone. I grew up during MTV’s relatively successful Rock the Vote campaigns and vividly remember the question that resonated the most with young voters during Bill Clinton’s run for office: boxers or briefs? President Obama made excellent use of YouTube in his campaign, and the most powerful artifact from his run was the “Hope Poster.” And, of course, George W. Bush turned the 9/11 lapel pin into a portable monument that has shaped the picture of patriotism in the U.S. Even pop-culture is in on the joke (just watch the opening 60 seconds and pardon me for using television to make, or at least supplement, an argument):
But any student of rhetoric should object to some of Postman’s conclusions. Images can’t make claims? Pathos isn’t a legitimate form of (reasonable!) argument? In what strikes me as a glaring counterexample, Postman (just one page later) talks about a politician who used a commercial to “project himself as a man of experience, virtue and piety,” all of which seem to be refutable claims. What is the difference between “project” and “claim” or “argue”?
In the end, my problem with Postman (as I’ve written before) is that most of his objections could be answered by insisting on teaching people how to read images. Increased visuality requires a shift in educational emphases (a point that he fails to acknowledge in his chapter on education, and instead makes the argument again television contains no arguments, just narratives; pg. 148). If a class like RWS 744 existed at a high school level, would televised arguments be as subversive as Postman suggests? One of my favorite quotes is from William Blake and I think it is appropriate here:
This life’s dim windows of the soul
Distorts the heavens from pole to pole
And leads you to believe a lie
When you look with, and not through, the eye.
We need to concern ourselves with teaching people to look “through the eye” otherwise Postman’s critiques are, in general, fitting.
[1] If I were, for a moment, to put on my confessional protestant and seminary graduate hat I would recommend that all mainline evangelicals read Shuffle off to Bethlehem as it serves as a relevant critique of American Christianity’s obsession with celebrity and their appropriation of entertainment models.
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