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Amusing Ourselves to Death


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Neil Postman's seminal examination on the role of news as entertainment, and how it dooms public discourse:

https://mafhom.files.wordpress.com/2013/11/amusing-ourselves-to-death.pdf

I haven't read it in decades but his warnings now seem quaint, I'm sure.  Another media book I read had a sentence that stayed with me.  A morning show (like Good Morning America) interrupted a discussion on the SALT nuclear arms talks between experts to show the Kentucky Derby winner the day after he won.  Basically, stopping discussion on a supremely important issue to show people a horse waking up.

The townhall is an example of a public that is designed: stakeholders and governors meeting face to face to discuss important issues and hammer out a way forward.  MLW is about interested parties coming together to present their ideas and principles.

With the demise of television and newspapers, the idea of a public is disintegrating.  Your job is to make one.

 

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Postman's book completely changed the way I looked at technology and media consumption. I've read it twice already, and each time I get more out of it.

I'm actually disappointed in myself that I haven't read any Marshal McLuhan. I'm going to order McLuhan, "Understanding Media" right now!

On a similar thread, have you read: The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains...? That's a rather disturbing examination of the impact the Internet (and associated tech) is having on our brains/society...

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Well.. no I haven't even heard of it.  I will look it up.

 

McLuhan is frustrating, I will warn you.  He throws out pat aphorisms and metaphors, half of which are wrong, so you start to wonder if he's a giant fake.  Huge portions of his theories seem to be dead wrong, but the important thing was he used a way of writing that got you to think for yourself rather than get sucked in.  It stimulates your own ideas about media.

 

And he famously said: Don't like my ideas ?  I've got some more for you.

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2 hours ago, Greg said:

On a similar thread, have you read: The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains...? That's a rather disturbing examination of the impact the Internet (and associated tech) is having on our brains/society...

I started working in the technology industry In the 80's. I remember when email was first introduced. I hated the way it replaced ad hoc meetings around someone's workspace. No longer were ideas shared and flushed out. Except in some sort of a structured format. I think that many creative solutions were lost in that period. 

Now it seems to have come full circle with many companies forbidding the use of emails and instead replacing with a more community focused intranet. 

But still, ad hoc impromptu meetings are continuing to be a thing of the past which I think are missed opportunities for grand ideas. 

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1 minute ago, Michael Hardner said:

Emails are a good example of people recognizing media somewhat and trying to mitigate it.  It's used so badly.

But then again, there isn't a good way to convey a lot of information.  I do this for a living (PM/Scrum Master) so I know whereof I speak.

PO here. I love my SM. Couldn't survive without him and he does encourage impromptu meetings. I couldn't be happier. F2F is far superior to electronic communication. 

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Go turn on CNN any time in the last year.  Go turn it on right now.  Facts are boring.  All they show is 24/7 coverage of any sort of thing Trump had said or done.  It's all for ratings and advertising revenue.

TV news is pretty much crap, because of how that medium works.  Internet I think has much more freedom from limitations, like squeezing info into a 30 or 60 minute show, plus commercials.  I like PBS Newshour on TV, probably because PBS it doesn't rely on the same kind of private sector ad revenue.  And you know what, it's pretty boring but at least it has information.

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6 hours ago, Moonlight Graham said:

Go turn on CNN any time in the last year.  Go turn it on right now.  Facts are boring.  All they show is 24/7 coverage of any sort of thing Trump had said or done.  It's all for ratings and advertising revenue.

TV news is pretty much crap, because of how that medium works.  Internet I think has much more freedom from limitations, like squeezing info into a 30 or 60 minute show, plus commercials.  I like PBS Newshour on TV, probably because PBS it doesn't rely on the same kind of private sector ad revenue.  And you know what, it's pretty boring but at least it has information.

Sure, but you have to look at the medium in the context of both the infrastructure and the media ecosystem.

In the beginning, TV news needed to mimic the press to get respectability.  Eventually, television became hotter (to use McLuhan's term) and more combative.  CNN news relied on conflict and controversy to sustain the 24-hour cycle.  Remember in 1980 people couldn't figure out how they would find stories to cover.  They invented 'Crossfire' where political surrogates argued and fought like pro-wrestlers on the behalf of "left" and "right" viewpoint.  Of course they weren't really left and right, as they had to capture a middle-of-the-road audience.

The internet is like the apple to Adam and Eve.  They wanted it, but once they took a bite they couldn't go back.  We now know that our neighbours are the horrible right-wing maniacs who would vote for Harper, or the chilling leftists who would actually vote for the NDP.  Postman's book talked about the colonial town hall, where people had to confront their differences face to face and build agreements together.  Identity politics on cable news do the opposite.  They sell your identity back to you under an advertising model, and you are not required to change.

Left- and right- politics are really nowhere near as far apart as they would have you believe.  

The good news is that the internet will free political discussion from the narrow constraints of the CNN Crossfire frame.  I would like to see the government design online public groups around important issues such as healthcare, that will allow a broader discussion of costs, services and so on.  

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8 minutes ago, Michael Hardner said:

....In the beginning, TV news needed to mimic the press to get respectability.  Eventually, television became hotter (to use McLuhan's term) and more combative.  CNN news relied on conflict and controversy to sustain the 24-hour cycle.  Remember in 1980 people couldn't figure out how they would find stories to cover.  They invented 'Crossfire' where political surrogates argued and fought like pro-wrestlers.....

 

The conflict format on American broadcast television pre-dates CNN cable news by many years, going back at least as far as Firing Line (WOR/PBS), Gore Vidal vs. William F. Buckley Jr. debates (1968), and Point-Counterpoint  segments on 60 Minutes (early 1970's).   The style was so mainstream by the 1980's it was routinely parodied on SNL by the original cast.

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I don't mean to say that there was no conflict, but to see two erudite orators like Buckley and Vidal speaking in bot mots is texturally much different than shouting across the table as you started to see with McLaughlin Report and other such shows.

The narrative that 'there is nothing new under the sun' is true at its core, and I wouldn't argue with that, but the lens through which we watch age-old human behaviours does change with technology and the results are often not known until much later.

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39 minutes ago, Michael Hardner said:

....The narrative that 'there is nothing new under the sun' is true at its core, and I wouldn't argue with that, but the lens through which we watch age-old human behaviours does change with technology and the results are often not known until much later.

 

Agreed, but just because we watch it on a smart phone or internet browser doesn't really change the age-old content.

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4 hours ago, Michael Hardner said:

 The good news is that the internet will free political discussion from the narrow constraints of the CNN Crossfire frame.  I would like to see the government design online public groups around important issues such as healthcare, that will allow a broader discussion of costs, services and so on.  

Interesting idea.  At least we have forums like this.  I don't count on government to want to do that.  They just want to implement their policies, they don't really care what we think so long as we vote them back in.

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On 12/15/2016 at 5:29 PM, Greg said:

I'm actually disappointed in myself that I haven't read any Marshal McLuhan. I'm going to order McLuhan, "Understanding Media" right now!

On a similar thread, have you read: The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains...? That's a rather disturbing examination of the impact the Internet (and associated tech) is having on our brains/society...

Interestingly, the following article has appeared just in time for this thread.  Not a short piece - maybe 20 pages - but gives the best snapshot of who McLuhan was, how he formed his ideas, his conservatism and moralism, how he changed in the 1960s at UofT, how he got famous, and how his ideas resonated with publics.

 

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/become-famous-media-scholar-case-marshall-mcluhan/#!

The "Are Our Kids Learning ?" meme bugs me on a lot of levels, and I learned from McLuhans admonishment of moralizing when analyzing media.  However, it seems that his personal take on media change was quite conservative, moralistic, religious (Catholic) and perhaps not too far from the surface.

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Which came first, shorter and shorter news segments, or people's shortening attention spans? Is the internet responsible for the latter, or was it the shorter news bytes, or is it something ingrained? In the long ago when an important politician gave a speech the newspapers would print it verbatim. And people would read it. No newspaper I'm aware of has done that in a very long time. Instead you get a few brief quotes followed by the reporter's recap of the gist of the speech. You can't blame the internet for that. It's been that way for decades, at least.

I read a post-apocalyptic book where one of the characters laments that you don't really know what's going on in far away places any more. Another says you didn't know that before either. When someone says "Well, there was CNN" another replies with "Sure, if you wanted to know about a farmer who taught his cow to dance" (Paraphrasing).  How long has it been since the TV news actually told us what was going on in the far away? Did Walter Cronkite's CBS give us the details of all those dirty little wars going on on Central and South America or how the locals were being screwed over by big American corporations? I don't think so.

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That's an interesting probe, Argus.  I think I have mentioned when CP24 would show CityTV news from the 80s late at night, and how loooong the segments seemed even from an outfit that was seen as fluff news at the time

The 'far away' topic is interesting.  People didn't have the ability or desire to know about news from away until the telegraph started shrinking the world and putting the news in our faces.  News is purportedly supposed to inform us about 'our' world, but what is our world.  With facebook, we have news from our friends taking precedent and people aren't even interested in local news either.

Cronkite did in fact tell us about a dirty little war in Vietnam and brought it home, around the time McLuhan started talking about the 'Global Village'.  Cronkite also famously told American the war couldn't be won, I think.

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On 15/12/2016 at 4:05 AM, Michael Hardner said:

The townhall is an example of a public that is designed: stakeholders and governors meeting face to face to discuss important issues and hammer out a way forward.  MLW is about interested parties coming together to present their ideas and principles.

Interesting that in both examples the stake-holders don't get the final say. If there is an actual decision made it's the designers who make it, usually in-camera.

There are very very few processes that are designed otherwise.

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