‘That delicate exchange’
“It’s no small problem that our society is trying to do very important business with increasingly debased currency.”
What a good time for this introspection on how the communciations media are being used.
“[Neil] Postman argued that the cultural dominance of television, a medium designed to entertain and basically incapable of anything else, necessarily turned everything, including elections, into a form of entertainment.
“Television presents the world as an easily comprehended spectacle marked by novelty and variety. If it is used to transmit serious ideas it will, at best, seriously distort them to make them more entertaining. “The medium,†he said, riffing on Marshall McLuhan “is the metaphor.†The ruling metaphor of a society determines how the world is chiefly understood and discussed.
“Reading Postman for the first time last month gave me clearer language to explain my rage against the rise of blogging. For what he says about media can be said about literary forms—they are biased toward certain kinds of content. The blogpost is biased toward speed, brevity, and cleverness. It thus hands the public square over to bullies, sophists, and clowns.”
I’m a journalist and broadcaster who blogs…reluctantly. I only wish I could do these posts with speed, brevity and cleverness. Of all the forms of advanced technological messaging, blogs and social networks are among the least conducive to communicating that ‘delicate exchange of heart to heart and mind to mind’, as Pope John Paul II described the role of the media.
McDaniel says: “There are proportionately few but absolutely many good blogs, and there’s nothing wrong with reading them. For all my young fogeyism I make a point of reading them myself.
“But few of the good blogs my friends or I read are popular, and they are all constantly pushed towards superficiality by the ruling imperative of generating traffic.
“Furthermore, even good blogging threatens to worsen our already bad relation with the written word. Several excellent bloggers have told me that they find it much harder than they once did either to follow sustained written arguments (especially when not tricked out with flashy rhetoric) or to make such arguments themselves; they have grown impatient with writing that does not meet bloggy criteria.”
Yes, well put. And he goes even further into the depths of finely tuned analysis on one of my favorite subjects and one of the most challenging…the power of words.
“As Postman argued, the written word remains the best tool of serious public discussion, whether political, religious, philosophical, or scholarly. The written word freezes thought, making it the ideal medium for precise, complete, carefully ordered, rational arguments, which may then be inspected and discussed at length.
“Writers who expect sustained public inspection tend to think long and hard before publishing. Readers who assume writers have thought long and hard tend to read with intense attention. This leads, in general, to good writing, good reading, and good thinking. Such an environment is a precondition for vigilant citizenship and a civil society vibrant with critical intelligence. What is more, this environment disciplines speedy, prolific, lively writers, ultimately to their own advantage.”
How to recover that?
“The only solution I know is a slow, personal one: It is the painful discipline of changing my own detestable habits of inattention, sloppiness, and waggish opportunism in daily conversation, whether written or oral, and of writing with the assumption that my reader’s attention is generous and his time valuable.”
Yes, thank you for yours. Especially these days while I try to fix a blog hobbled by technical problems, and create something new to encourage critical thinking skills…towards building up a civil society.
