Junk on TV
And why we should take it more and less seriously
Welcome to The Wycliffe Weekender!
I’m re-reading Amusing Ourselves To Death by Neil Postman. I have a Twentieth Anniversary Edition of the book which is now twenty years old. So the book is, in fact, forty years old. One might think that the media landscape has changed so much and so quickly that the book is out of date. Not a bit of it. It is as fresh and relevant as ever.
It’s a classic because it’s easy to read but serious. And yet does not take itself too seriously. I loved this early on:
…to avoid the possibility that my analysis will be interpreted as standard-brand academic whimpering, a kind of elitist complaint against “junk” on television, I must first explain that… I appreciate junk as much as the next fellow, and I know full well that the printing press has generated enough of it to fill the Grand Canyon to overflowing. Television is not old enough to have matched printing’s output of junk.
And so, I raise no objection to television’s junk. The best things on television are its junk, and no one and nothing is seriously threatened by it. Besides, we do not measure a culture by its output of undisguised trivialities but by what it claims as significant. Therein is our problem, for television is at its most trivial and, therefore, most dangerous when its aspirations are high, when it presents itself as a carrier of important cultural conversations. The irony here is that this is what intellectuals and critics are constantly urging television to do. The trouble with such people is that they do not take television seriously enough.
How very Chestertonian! I’m really looking forward to reading the rest of this book twenty years after I read it before. And then discussing it at the next Zoom chat on 23rd February. It’s for Loyal Lollards: that is, paid subscribers to The Wycliffe Papers.
Loyal Lollards will also receive a free e-copy of my 40-day devotional for Lent, Psalm Psupplement, which will be on sale from Shrove Tuesday.
