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Todd Gitlin
Media Critic; Professor of Journalism, New York University; Author, Media Unlimited
You may have read earlier this year that a man in upstate New York who had been arrested on the charge of conspiracy to commit credit card fraud was sentenced not only to perform restitution but to spend ten months at home without television. Whereupon his lawyers went before the federal Court of Appeals and argued that such deprivation would constitute cruel and unusual punishment. No doubt annals of jurisprudence will proceed to demonstrate whether the law will certify what we all understand to be the truth, embarrassing as it is to admit. And yet who doesn't feel that we have submitted with more or less "dis-ease" to a headless itch, a longing for a kind of experience that is for us both a distraction and a necessity? Who of us does not recognize that the life we live, however larded with brave talk about values and thought and ideals, is not actually a life dedicated to immersion in the endless torrent of images, songs, sounds and stories?
What I've tried to do with Media Unlimited is to think about the obvious, and I submit that this is a very difficult thing to do because no sooner have you tried to get your mind around what normally eludes your mind than you face the automatic question, "Well, isn't this something we already know?" I've been haunted during the time I was writing Media Unlimited by a student who reacted, when I presented some version of this in a class one day, with a kind of nervous semi-shrug and "So? Tell us something we don't already know." So what I've tried to do is to make the obvious startling, at least startling enough to goad me to try to come to grips with this enormity. What I'm calling an enormity is a way of life, and the way of life that I refer to is that in which the major activity that absorbs waking hours away from work - but to some degree within the work and the commute to and from work - is encountering media.
If people are how they spend their hours, then who we are is a people whose household has a television set on for more than seven hours a day and with additional VCR, CD, tape player, video game equipment at home, with two-thirds of American children possessed of a television set, a VCR, a CD player and a tape player in their bedrooms, not to mention the billboards, the signs, the screens on buses, the videos playing in the doctors' waiting rooms, the soundtracks in the elevators and restaurants. With all of this, how are we to say that this happened? Because for most of human history, oddly enough, this is not how people lived.
Now I don't mean to say that this just happened, nor do I mean to say that it's simply the result of a plot on the part of people in the attention-getting industries. The attention-getting industries are, of course, Hollywood and equivalent studios and the music operations and the companies that specialize in elevator music and the advertisers who are in the business of trying to procure access to our eyeballs and eardrums. By themselves, they would not have been able to induce us to do something that we didn't really want to do - I am not one who believes that people are brainwashed into undertaking a form of life that isn't in some measure congenial.
This rumination led me to try to understand how it came to pass that a civilization devoted to ideals of freedom had become, without quite acknowledging it, a civilization whose practice is ensconcement in or on the couch, enclosure within headphones and the delirious fascination with the next gadget, the next promise of the next image, the next sound.
If we think about what's at stake financially for corporations and in terms of soft power on the part of governments or religious groups, it's easy to understand why there are institutions that are in the business of trying to get our attention. But the more interesting part, at least to me the more challenging part, is, What's in it for us? What's really going on? I believe, and I say this partly from research but also partly through as honest a self-scrutiny as I can perform, that the main thing that's in it for us is feeling - feeling of a particular sort that does not hold us so deeply as to prevent us from moving on with relative ease to the next occasion for feeling.
Sometimes what we feel is fascination, sometimes fear about the violence that is potentially or actually unleashed, sometimes the satisfaction of feeling connected to the human race, sometimes the joy of a giggle in a sitcom. Sometimes we feel many other things, including something that many of us call grief, which may or may not be that - that's another question. But overall it seems to me that what we look for are feelings that are more satisfying than the previous round of feelings.
We have developed an attachment to devices that enable us to roam around through the enormous torrent of media images and sounds in search of the appropriate feeling. Thus the remote-control device, which is perhaps our most unacknowledged little technology - there are said to be five of them in the average household in America - or the scan button that enables us to move from one song to another. We're all familiar with the itchiness of our fingers, the desire to scan or mute or hyperlink ourselves away from the last round of feeling supplies toward something more promising. What each of these decisions amounts to when strung along in the course of the day is a sort of perpetual soundtrack or image scan, or the combination thereof, which serves the purpose of relieving us from some of the burdens of modern life that we have come to take as normal. Our hunger for this sort of disposable feeling, or "feeling-lite," is in part a counterbalance to the demands to be calculating and rational in our working lives.
Up the Dose
There's an irony here. As with other drugs, when a certain threshold is reached, we need a bigger supply of the drug in order to feel something. This dynamic is part of what has been at work in intensifying the flow of media over recent years, intensifying the quest for technologies that enable us to move with ease to the next song or story or stimulus. In order to get our attention, the attention-getting industries discover, it won't do to give us yet another "Survivor" show; what they must do is give us famous tainted women boxing or the equivalent. It's a combination of the intense projects and strategies of the attention-getting industries and our own, if you will, frail and halting itch to find something alluring, something intensely un-intense, to keep ourselves in shape to live the lives that we have agreed to live.
The thrust toward new technologies and new formats, new styles, new celebrities is an accelerating speed-up, and speed is an important part of this story. There's probably no more common complaint among people with, as we say, "busy lives," than we don't know how to do all the things we want to do and we feel beleaguered by our gadgets, whether it's cell phones or "strawberry" gadgets - or other fruit gadgets - or multi-tasking equipment. The irony of the speed-up is that we feel ever more urged to do more things at once, which is cognitively not a gift to our competence at anything but serves to keep us in a certain sort of vague and hazy buzz of semi-attention.
That little crawl that runs across the CNN screen and increasingly other cable networks is always an alert that somewhere, something else is happening, or perhaps about to happen, or has just happened that suggests we ought not to be content where we are. It's the endless approach to, and then experience of, and then postmortem of, a sort of cultural buzz, whether it's the Super Bowl or it's the "Who's going to be nominated for the Oscars?" A little snippet of war news gives us perhaps a vague sense of satisfaction that we know something, or that we really are good citizens, while feeding our guilty pleasures with the reports on the Oscars or on the celebrity boxing match.
The speed-up, the desire to live more semi-lives or quarter-lives at the same time, is also built into the dynamic that I'm trying to describe. I think it's interesting that while we all feel besieged or enflamed or even burned out by it, we are also drawn to it; we are rather willing seductees, if that's a word. What do we do about it? I find myself in the curious position, having published a book that points a finger at a condition that is perhaps not the acme of civilization, of being asked to be a self-help adviser. And I'm not in that business. I don't think there's anything individuals can do about such conditions except to try to navigate more wisely and so on. We could talk, perhaps, about my idea of wisdom in this, but it's not that I want to impose it on anyone. My more urgent desire is to invite people to stand apart, just as a matter of an imaginative exercise, from these lives that we have come to think of as satisfying and to ask how it is that we got here and what it is that collectively we might do about it.
Finding Strategies
There are a variety of strategies that we all use in order to feel that we are at least in some measure in charge of this, this onrushing stream, that we can find dry land when we choose. It flatters us to think that we are the ones with our itchy little thumbs on the buttons. So we become, for example, fans; we use our attachment to a given star or a given style or a given genre as a measure of our independence. We're this kind of person but not that kind of person. Or we become critics - I stand here as a fellow sinner - somebody who in some measure thinks that if I can find fault with this particularly shoddy performance or that particularly egregious piece of news distortion, I have somehow exempted myself from the force of living amid all the attempts to capture my attention. But criticism is itself simply a way of getting some occasional relief from the flow without actually changing the fact that the flow is always coming at us.
Exhibitionism is another interesting strategy that growing numbers of people are turning to: the desire to be more than an acceptor or a collector of signals but a producer, somebody who believes that by establishing a 24-hour web-cam and exhibiting oneself, or being a studio guest, or showing up at a ball game with a sign saying "Hi, NBC, I'm a such-and-such fan." We've all learned to some degree to be ironists; we well understand that all this is going on and we, wanting to believe that we are exempt from it, trivialize it. We say, "Well, there goes ‘Nick at Nite' again." Here we are being rather bemused by the foolishness or strenuousness or egregiousness of some media phenomenon that we dislike, and thus we imagine that we have ridden high. There are other devices that people use, but my point is that this is part of a landscape and that while we have our strategies for managing it, the strategies are not so much the point. The point is to take a good long stare at the kind of collective life we're living.
Having said that, I want to try to respond belatedly to my student who said, "So?" If part of the enormity of the torrent is simply that there is so much of it and that we are spending so much time with it, there are some other consequences that we ought to be rather serious about. First of all, the kind of feeling that's delivered over by the incessant media flow is not a particularly deep feeling; it's not a binding feeling. We may consider it a form of connection, but it's rather easily relinquished and that's part of its point, that it doesn't really demand very much of us. Now what that does to the coloration, the gravity of the rest of life, is an interesting question when we spend so much of our time in a sort of emotional holding pattern, where we are invited, and feel disposed, to accept the invitation to feel nothing much of anything but some snippet of feeling that we can put on and off with ease. I think that this undermines the capacity to live with one's full senses. One of the things about media is that they are visual and auditory, but we have other senses that are going undernourished in the process. And I think the kinds of relationships that we fancy we want to have with others are weakened insofar as we have to funnel our feeling through the media experience that, after all, is not inviting us to bring our deepest or strongest being to bear on it.
There's a political problem also: It's self evident that when we are spending so much time in the torrent of images and sounds, there are plenty of things that we must be giving up. Evidently one thing many people are giving up, and this is happening now at lower and lower ages, is exercise, and so we're getting to be a rather fat people. But another thing that we are giving up is involvement in all kinds of social and political activities. There's a lot of evidence that was compiled, most compellingly by the political scientist Robert Putnam in his book, Bowling Alone, to the effect that the amount of time spent watching television in particular - he wasn't especially talking about other media - is itself a significant part of the explanation for the withdrawal of Americans over the last couple of generations from civic and political activity of all sorts.
This torrent, because of the particular way in which it slightly engages us and also disposes us to move on quickly to the next stimulus, contributes to what I've come to think of as a national attention deficit disorder. And I'm not talking about the sort of thing that's administered Ritalin for control, although that's a part of it. I'm talking about a disorder of thinking, an impatience with argument or even, as I've discovered over years of teaching, an unwillingness or inability to distinguish between an assertion and an argument. I see an impatience with the process of sorting through evidence and assessing evidence and taking counterarguments seriously. Thus I offer as a rather feeble, a rather disturbing, example the abysmal quality of political so-called debate in our society, as measured by the pride of one candidate who won a minority of the votes but the majority of the votes that counted, namely at the Supreme Court, someone who was rather proud that he couldn't string an argument together, let alone compile facts into patterns from which arguments could be amassed.
A certain disorder of thinking and of sequence is evident throughout the culture, through politics, in the styles that have become normal, even in our reading. My former research assistant, Mark O'Callavita, helped unearth the fact that if we look at the structure and the length of sentences in best-selling novels going back for decades, the sentences had been getting shorter and simpler. They'd become more like sound-bytes and less like the work of adults intended for concentration and consideration.
A Customs Parable
These are some of the consequences that we should not be complacent about. But in the end, even these consequences are not the big story. The big story came to me in the form of a parable. A customs official goes to work, and on his first day on the job a truck driver comes through and the customs official asks him some questions. The truck driver answers them, and the official waves him through. The next week, the same truck driver shows up, and this time the customs official is a little suspicious and asks him some more questions. The man answers and the guard waves him through. The next week the guy's back, and this time the customs official orders him out and pats him down - no apparent problem. Next week, he orders him out of the cab of the truck and brings in some X-ray equipment, and eventually better and better equipment. Never is anything contraband found in the truck or on the driver, and this goes on for years until the day when the customs guard is about to retire. On the day he's leaving - for the purpose of my parable - there rolls up the truck driver and once again the guard goes up to him and says, "Look, I know you've been smuggling something all these years and I've got to satisfy my curiosity. I will never tell anyone but please, just so that I can leave and retire in peace, tell me what you have been smuggling." To which, of course, the truck driver says, "Trucks." And I take this in the following spirit: The media have been smuggling the habit of living with intense attention to media.
