Well, it took a few years, but I finally got around to reading Neil Postman. So, in response to “Amusing ourselves to Death”, as applied to 2012, both as an indictment of modern means of communication and as a justification for censorship, I offer the following: As much as I want to be sympathetic to Postman’s cool, rebellious and iconoclastic argument, I have to consider that it plainly doesn’t coincide with my reality. In no small part because of post-tv means of communication, never in my life have I ever been exposed to so much educated, solidly built, substantive and well-articulated thought. My beliefs have been fortified, challenged, confirmed and rebuked. My views have expanded, deepened and evolved. Rarely have I been so readily prompted to action, solicited and enabled. Drowned in that sea of “infotainment” that Postman dreaded, people simply learn to swim, learn to differentiate signal from noise and elect to focus on what they will. Passivity, egotism and triviality are traps in which men have fallen throughout the ages. Blaming modern noise and information overload for it is too easy an excuse. Certainly, we have to see that people watching reality TV today isn’t that different from reading unimaginative and repetitive pulp magazines from the last century or from Neanderthals unproductively looking for animal shapes in the clouds all day… In the end, meaningless entertainment is really a scapegoat for intellectual laziness, fatigue or poor judgement, none of which can be censored. You will not “wake up & enlighten the masses” by trying to ban what you think is distracting them. An indolent mind will find its way to idleness no matter what… A misguided attempt at censoring “bad entertainment” is not worth the risk of smothering something whose value you just might not have yet seen. So in the (translated) words of Voltaire: “Think for yourselves and let others enjoy the privilege to do so, too.”
Posted on: Tue, 12 Aug 2014 05:03:48 +0000
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