I WAS reminded of Neil Postman, one of the most important communication theorists, media and culture commentators of modern time, while watching the talented broadcast journalist S. Muzammil Shah on his YouTube channel. He was discussing Postman’s 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death, which examines the changes caused by the shift from when the printed word was the centre of society to when TV became that centre. This transformed American culture into one that sought amusement and entertainment.

Shah has a large real and virtual following so I was happy to hear him reference Pos­t­man and decided to reread the nearly 40-year-old book, almost 20 years after first reading it. When Postman wrote Amusing Ourselves to Death, the US population was 340 million, it was a Cold War era, Dynasty & Dallas were top-rated shows, MTV was a few years old and the Mac computer was just a year old. In Pakistan, the population was 97m, Gen Zia was president, traffic stopped when Tanhaiyan aired and there was only one TV channel.

Postman charts the difference between thinking in a word-centred culture vs thinking in an image-centred culture. For example, you can picture Einstein but not his words. Following the decline of the age of the printed word, you saw the rise in the age of TV. That resulted in less of a reliance on communities, neighbourhoods, a value for elders, all things that were a byproduct of a respect of the printed word. People gathered to discuss literature, events they read about, letters written from family in different countries and so forth. With everyone now glued to their TV screens, society norms changed.

The news media also changed. Long form stories turned into shorter and shorter pieces. First you had journalists on TV reading and discussing the news but that was replaced by people chosen for their appearance. Bulletins feature stories about war, politicians and then something ‘light’. Today, social media’s feeds are similar: posts about genocide share space with cute cat videos. How does one manage one’s emotions while watching/scrolling all this information, Postman asks.

The news is watched but not absorbed.

Information overload creates a psychological detachment from the situation. You can see this in people’s response to the Peshawar attack or calls for an election or climate change. People watch the news but absorb nothing. How can they when they aren’t given time to think?

Imagine a two-person discussion as a form of thinking, and not as a performance art, as is required on TV. Television’s way of ‘knowing’ is hostile to the printed word’s way of ‘knowing’. Conversations on TV promote triviality; TV speaks in a persistent voice of entertainment, writes Postman.

PTI’s Fawad Chaudhry recently teared up while talking about meeting his children during his brief detention. While that is the stuff of ratings gold, did it give us all the information we need in order to know what to think? Was it properly framed, contextualised and were we made wiser by its information?

“Entertainment is the supra ideology of all discourse on all television,” Postman writes. This is clearly evident across Pakistan’s prime time TV where all norms of professional/ ethical lines are crossed. Whether it’s screaming matches between participants — often invited in the hope the opposing teams will launch into fights — or silly theatrics like walking out because one participant felt some form of affront, prime time news is entertainment. It does nothing for the public interest.

“The problem is not that TV presents us with entertaining subject matter,” he writes, “but that all subject matter is presented as entertaining.” When news broadcasts use elements like graphics, music, animation, is it any wonder that news is not taken seriously?

The age of typography paved the way for science to refashion the world, writes Postman. Religious superstitions were dismissed, monarchies challenged, calls for universal literacy made; it resulted in continual progress. Technology has undoubtedly made the unthinkable into a reality but it also resulted in addiction to screens of which no good has come. Instead, it has created a people individualistic and passive to world problems.

Aldous Huxley saw this coming in 1931 when he wrote Brave New World: “People will come to love their oppression, to adore their technologies that undo their capacities to think.”

Who benefits from this? Journalists don’t think it is their job to offer wisdom, an idea Postman disagrees with. Who says where their responsibility as journalists ends, he asks? The problem that needs to be solved in this century is not how to move information or create it, but how to transform it into knowledge and then wisdom, he says. I, for one, think many of my colleagues are up for the challenge.

The writer is the co-host and co-producer of On/Off The Record, a podcast on the news media landscape in Pakistan.
Twitter: @LedeingLady

Published in Dawn, February 12th, 2023