I’m headed MO-ward. Twelve hour drive. Yum. Pray for safe travels.

Written at 7:26 am         ||         Add a Comment

A week or two ago I finished reading Neil Postman’s “Amusing Ourselves to Death.” His book is about why he thinks television is incapable of facilitating serious and meaningful conversation. In his opinion, TV is only good for entertainment. Here are some quotes, for your consideration, that made me pause and think about the questions he raises and issues he addresses. The page numbers apply to the 1986 edition (ISBN-10: 0140094385; ISBN-13: 978-0140094381).

“The problem is not that television presents us with entertaining subject matter but that all subject matter is presented as entertaining, which is another issue altogether.

“To say it still another way: Entertainment is the supra-ideology of all discourse on television. No matter what is depicted or from what point of view, the overarching presumption is that it is there for our amusement and pleasure.”
(Page 87)

“[W]hereas we expect books and even other media (such as film) to maintain a consistency of tone and a continuity of content, we have no such expectation of television news. We have become so accustomed to its discontinuities that we are no longer struck dumb, as any sane person would be, by a newscaster who having just reported that a nuclear war is inevitable goes on to say that he will be right back after this word from Burger King. [...] One can hardly underestimate the damage that such juxtapositions do to our sense of the world as a serious place. The damage is especially massive to youthful viewers who depend so much on television for their clues as to how to respond to the world. In watching television news, they, more than any other segment of the audience, are drawn into an epistemology based on the assumption that all reports of cruelty and death are greatly exaggerated and, in any case, not to be taken seriously or reported sanely.”
(Page 104)

“Today, on television commercials, propositions are as scarce as unattractive people. The truth or falsity of an advertiser’s claim is simply not an issue. A McDonald’s commercial, for example, is not a series of testable, logically ordered assertions. It is a drama — a mythology, if you will — of handsome people selling, buying and eating hamburgers, and being driven to near ecstasy by their good fortune. No claims are made, except those the viewer projects onto or infers from the drama. One can like or dislike a television commercial, of course. But one cannot refute it.

“Indeed, we may go this far: the television commercial is not at all about the character of products to be consumed. It is about the character of the consumers of products. Images of movie stars and famous athletes, of serene lakes and macho fishing trips, of elegant dinners and romantic interludes, of happy families packing their station wagons for a picnic in the country — these tell nothing about the products being sold. But they tell everything about the fears, fancies and dreams of those who might buy them. What the advertiser needs to know is not what is right about the product but what is wrong about the buyer. And so, the balance of business expenditures shifts from product research to market research. The television commercial has oriented business away from making products of value and towards making consumers feel valuable, which means that the business of business has now become pseudo-therapy.”
(Page 128)

“Tyrants of all varieties have always known about the value of providing the masses with amusements as a means of pacifying discontent. But most of them could not have even hoped for a situation in which the masses would ignore that which does not amuse. That is why tyrants have always relied, and still do, on censorship. Censorship, after all, is the tribute tyrants pay to the assumption that a public knows the difference between serious discourse and entertainment-and cares. How delighted would be all the kings, czars and fuhrers of the past and commissars of the present to know that censorship is not a necessity when all political discourse takes the form of a jest.”
(Page 141)

“When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainment, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk: culture-death is a clear possibility.”
(Pages 155-156)

Written at 4:01 pm         ||         2 Comments

“Christians shouldn’t engage in defending the Christian faith merely because it’s true, but also because it is good and beautiful.”(1)

This is a helpful reminder for me, because I emphasize truth a great deal.

1 - Copan, Paul. Loving Wisdom: Christian Philosophy of Religion. St. Louis: Chalice Press, 2007.

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I currently work at Milsoft Utility Solutions as a technical writer and software tester. Next week is a big week for Milsoft, as we have a conference attended by many of our users. These users consist entirely of utility company employees, as we design software for the mapping, modeling, and analysis of large scale electrical circuits (e.g. for a city). I’ve been editing papers and presentation notes that will be used in our upcoming conference, and came across this paragraph, which I find fascinating.

“Cartography or mapmaking is the study and practice of making representations of the Earth on a flat surface. Cartography combines science, aesthetics, and technical ability to create a balanced and readable representation that is capable of communicating information effectively and quickly. Cartographic representation involves the use of symbols and lines to illustrate geographic phenomena. The cartographic process rests on the premise that the world is measurable and that we can make reliable representations or models of that reality.” from a PowerPoint presentation by Shawn Bard titled “Cartography Tips & Tricks,” to be presented at Milsoft’s 2008 National Users Conference later this month.

Now, I don’t have a great interest in cartography, but I am interested in how confident Mr. Bard is that he can accurately model the real world using his cartographic techniques. I don’t doubt that he’s correct. What intrigues me is that nearly everyone in the US has a profound confidence in our ability to know the physical reality before us, but many are skeptical that we can have any knowledge of moral reality. We have restricted categories for what counts as knowledge. What can we know? If we didn’t learn it from one of our five senses, we say it isn’t true or isn’t dependable. But we believe we can know courage when we see it. We can know love. We can know these when we see them in others, and we can have experiential access to these in ourselves. When a man loves a woman, his affection is not merely the summation of his external actions. He can do everything right and yet have nefarious motives. His love cannot be known merely through an observation of his behavior. There is simply more to it than that. The same applies to morality. We can know that a man does wrong when he performs an upright act entirely for the sake of the praise he will receive. Something is faulty in such a soul. How do we know? Intuition, perhaps? Reflection? Revelation? What’s important to note is that our knowledge is not physical, nor arrived at through physical mechanisms. Yet it’s true. We know it as surely as we know the the world is real.

Written at 1:16 pm         ||         2 Comments

My roommate, Matt, on the topic of receiving gifts from women: I’ve learned that when an attractive young lady comes up to me and says, “I’ve got something for you,” what she actually means is, “I’ve got something for you to give to someone for me.”

Written at 7:26 pm         ||         1 Comment