What would Neil Postman say about social media?

I posted the other day about Neil Postman’s important book, Amusing Ourselves to Death, and his argument (made in the mid-1980s) that the structural imperatives of television were responsible for a formal shift in discourse, turning news and debate into entertainment and eliminating context. TV, he says, flattened the informational world, making all information equal and stripping it of real meaning. A home invasion in the Bronx would be treated the same as a New York Rangers playoff game and the same as a Memorial Day parade in northern New Jersey, regardless of where the viewer lived.

I witnessed this shift first hand as a local journalist, often having to explain to my readers why the Bronx home invasion or the fire in New Rochelle were not important stories in South Brunswick, especially when the Township Council might be considering reduced library hours or the school board wanted to renovate many of its buildings.

The paradigm shift that Postman describes, however, has accelerated in the digital age with new platforms that allow us to pick and choose the material we see and to respond instantaneously — and with little thought — to the disparate and often irrelevant events. It was just two weeks ago, or thereabouts, that everyone was talking about a viral video that showed a cat saving a kid from a dog attack — a news item that perfectly fit Postman’s notion of decontextualized information — entertaining, but without real impact and divorced both in time and space from most of our lives.

Why bring this up again? Because I think Postman would have something to say about the impact that Twitter and other social media have had on our discourse. If television decontextualized and turned everything into entertainment, then what has Twitter wrought. I am thinking in particular of the dust-up — am I minimizing it? — that pitted Hollywood icons Judd Apatow and Seth Rogan on one side and the feminist film critic Ann Hornaday on the other pointed me back to it. Hornaday offered a nuanced consideration of the cultural atmosphere created by Hollywood, referencing Apatow’s films as a factor that contributes to a not-so-subtle culture of misogyny. I don’t want to weigh in on her essay, aside from saying it deserves a close reading (a good overview of the essay and the debate can be found on Salon in an essay by Andrew O’Hehir). What strikes me is the way in which our discourse has become little more than one-off shouts of outrage.

Consider Rogan’s tweets:

I don’t mean to pick on Rogan, but his responses seem pretty typical of discourse in the social media era — short, without context and lacking nuance. They exist as pure outrage and do not address — aside from being dismissive of — the basic argument made by Hornaday that a “sexist movie monoculture can be toxic for women and men alike.” Hornaday says very specifically that “Movies may not reflect reality.” However, she adds, “they powerfully condition what we desire, expect and feel we deserve from it.”

The myths that movies have been selling us become even more palpable at a time when spectators become their own auteurs and stars on YouTube, Instagram and Vine. If our cinematic grammar is one of violence, sexual conquest and macho swagger — thanks to male studio executives who green-light projects according to their own pathetic predilections — no one should be surprised when those impulses take luridly literal form in the culture at large.

Is that assigning blame? Perhaps. But it also is making a much larger point about the culture. Rogan’s response, again, does not attempt to address the specifics (as O’Hehir points out), but instead expresses his anger that someone would raise these issues and connect them to his movies That is his prerogative.

Rogan’s responses, however, are pretty typical of the discourse one might find on Twitter and other social media outlets — a discourse that features short snarky comments, a premium on speed of response, a lack of introspection and a decidedly insular sensibility.

Consider this tweet from a conservative, gun rights Twitter user:

Or this from The Huffington Post:

Both cast information into the Twitterverse with the goal of altering the larger political discourse, but neither offers much in the way of context or nuance.

I need to be clear here: I am a regular user of social media, of Facebook and Twitter in particular, but also Instagram and other platforms, and I am an advocate of social media use in journalism. Social media offer significant benefits to the journalist — hell, to anyone with a story to tell — and not just because they allow for mass democratic distribution of content. As I tell my students, social media offer alternative ways of telling stories, especially when multiple platforms can be combined.

But we should not pretend that social media — and Twitter and Instagram, most notably — are not altering the way our discourse works. If television turned everything into entertainment and shortened the attention spans of news consumers, then what about Twitter and its 140-character limit? What about the ease with which we can distribute hastily crafted graphics — usually photos with some kind of text, known as memes to the digital world — and the fact that we now, to a greater degree than ever before, self-select what we want to hear and with whom we wish to debate? In an environment in which we keep our thoughts to 140 characters — 15-20 words, say — there is no room for historical or geographical context. There is no room for nuance. Everything is reduced to its most basic element, while also having to be dressed up in the flashiest language. This changes the basic contours of discourse and creates a new grammar for debate that vastly expands the dangers to our democracy that we first saw in cable television’s noxious stew of logical fallacies and muddled ahistoricism.

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Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.
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Author: hankkalet

Hank Kalet is a poet and freelance journalist. He is the economic needs reporter for NJ Spotlight, teaches journalism at Rutgers University and writing at Middlesex County College and Brookdale Community College. He writes a semi-monthly column for the Progressive Populist. He is a lifelong fan of the New York Mets and New York Knicks, drinks too much coffee and attends as many Bruce Springsteen concerts as his meager finances will allow. He lives in South Brunswick with his wife Annie.

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