How Neil Postman's 1985 Ideas Connect to Today

The book Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman highlights the ongoing trend towards infotainment. Though the book was written in 1985, its concepts still connect with media trends today.

For example, Postman states, “Former [presidential] nominee George McGovern has hosted the popular television show Saturday Night Live. So has a candidate of more recent vintage, the Reverend Jesse Jackson.”

Ironically, the current potential Republican presidential candidate, John McCain, has also hosted SNL. Actually, everything about SNL closely ties to Postman’s discussion.

While thinking about Postman’s ideas during my daily life I find they still have relevance in today’s media. Postman states that we are more concerned with entertainment and images then news and ideas. Even when just examining SNL, this is seen in its news parody, “Weekend Update” and its sketches sparked by current events.

The impact of shows like SNL on our culture ties to Postman’s statements about Americans increasingly seeking infotainment. As Postman predicted this is not a dying trend. Since 1985 more of these types of shows have emerged, such as The Daily Show and The Colbert Report.

According to the SNL, True Hollywood Story, during the 2000 election over a third of Americans under 30 watched SNL for their election news. In addition, Tom Shales and James Andrew Miller note in their book, Live from New York, that Al Gore and his aides watched the 2000 election parodies to determine why Gore was defeated during the presidential debates.

The fact that we have evolved into a culture where the presidential candidate watched a comedy show to evaluate his campaign would infuriate Postman. Our culture and the media are so intertwined that we do not even think about what it means for the next possible president to have hosted a sophomoric, comedy show; a show, as Postman would note, that has become part of the culture itself. SNL is a perfect example of Postman’s discussion because its sole purpose is making current trends and events into entertainment.

SNL, and most of the shows on television today, connect with Postman’s statement that “Television is our culture’s principle mode of knowing about itself. Therefore, […] how television stages the world becomes the model for how the world is properly staged.”

Reading Amusing Ourselves to Death illustrates that as our culture becomes more about the media, the media reflects this trend, which creates an ongoing cycle towards infotainment obsession.

News for Citizens by Citizens

We are bombarded with news stories; therefore, we have to ask ourselves what is news? The book Media Literacy by W. James Potter describes news as having three constraints: deadlines, resources limitations, and geographical focus. With these constraints in mind, citizen journalism sites can overcome most of the limitations. I have examined the American Town Network citizen journalism site and found a section of articles about events and daily activities of places across the nation.

Steven Outing notes in his article “The 11 Layers of Citizen Journalism” that there are several different types of citizen journalism sites. Ones I have found important to the theme of responding to the constraints of news are: opening the site up to public comment, having the citizen as the add-on reporter, and having an edited stand-alone citizen journalism site. By incorporating one or more elements in a citizen journalism site the reporting of news will not be as constrained.

With traditional print media it is often hard for journalists to gather information about an ongoing event or story. Using an online site could eliminate the constraints of a deadline because new posts and comments can be added to the story as the event continues. The three layers of Citizen Journalism mentioned in Outing’s article show how news can overcome the constraint of deadlines by having local citizens post articles and comments about the events.

The constraint of resource limitations can be improved by Citizen Journalism because the people involved in or experts on a story can post their views. With an endless number of people contributing the need for resources should not be a problem.

The constraint of geographic focus closely ties to the American Town Network site. By browsing this site I found stories about specific places. When looking at my hometown’s site I found it was broken into smaller townships. This was interesting because many newspapers are going out of business or merging with other newspapers and leaving a gap in community news coverage. With Citizen Journalism, people in smaller communities can get news about their community and also post news.

Survivor: Favorites vs. Fans

The statement made on Survivor: Fans vs. Favorites brings up a debate that connects with issues of media literacy.
Alexis (a fan) stated, "I think the fans versus favorites setup is the ultimate challenge because we have the favorites who have obviously played the game before, coming in here with experience. But at the same time you have us (the fans) and we know their game. We know not only their strengths but weaknesses too. So I think that puts us at a huge advantage."
I think Alexis is neither completely correct nor completely wrong in her statement. By watching the past seasons she probably picked up a bit of information about the strategies of how to play the game. Like she said, she saw how her opponents have played the game in the past, whereas they do not know anything about her.
However, the shows are condensed and put together for entertainment purposes, so they might not always have been truthful. Alexis has probably fallen in the media literacy trap of getting a false feeling of being informed. She believes that she has the advantage because she has watched her opponents play the game in the past, but what is to say that the favorites will play the same way as they have before?
The Favorites are definitely the ones with the advantage because they have had the chance to experience the game. They already figured out which individual strategies have worked and which have not. The fans might think a strategy could work for them, but since they have never actually played the game, all of their preconceived notions could be way off.

Max Headroom Thoughts

The episode of Max Headroom illustrated the concept of message saturation. Television was the main focus of everyone’s life in the show and TVs seemed to be everywhere.
Television was not just a passive activity, but it was also a way to communicate. Several times throughout the episode people were instantly connected to one other by using a television.
This connects with the issue of message saturation because people were bombarded with television and it would have been nearly impossible for anyone too keep up with all the news. Even just the rapid news stories aired by Channel 23 and Breakthru-News would be too much to handle.
Our daily lives are a lot like the world of Max Headroom’s because people now have access to a countless number of stations, which all air different programs. It would be impossible for anyone to ever watch all the TV programs produced.
TV is not the only cause of this problem. Media messages are everywhere, therefore, message saturation causes people to psychologically sort through all the different messages on a daily basis without even realizing what they are doing.