Notes from the boundary: Peter Hart: Television news & its effect on our psyches / Smartphone addiction

Apologies to those of you who follow this blog, for the third appearance of this topic. I had my doubts about it, but – having given up watching TV news and reading newspapers – I felt emboldened to republish it. If you ask where I get my news from, it is the radio. And, living in the uk, it is principally pm and The World Tonight that I listen to: excellent programmes both.

But, let me be honest: I am not entirely sure that I will not occasionally watch Channel 4 News. At an hour long, and with a team of reporters second to none, it deals with issues in far greater depth than any other UK news channel. Further, its investigative journalism – often carried out over periods of weeks or months – has succeeded in uncovering a considerable number of highly 'inconvenient truths'. It has Olympic Gold, strictly! And so it is that I cannot maintain some absurd consistency.

_____________________

Lay at least the skin of three hundred years between you and today!

Nietzsche The Gay Science

I worry that my own business [television] . . . helps to make this an anxious age of agitated amnesiacs . . . We Americans seem to know everything about the last twenty–four hours but very little of the last sixty centuries or the last sixty years.

Bill Moyers, quoted in Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (1985)

It may be wondered if any single invention has so impoverished world culture and the lives of people as television. For decades that ‘magic box’, that insidious screen, has been the focal point in the sittings rooms of millions upon millions of homes. In this environment we passively sit and watch – or as often as not half watch: our attention being “distracted from distraction” by a multitude of inessential concerns. Not for nothing is Trivial Pursuit so popular. And, if it is ’the news’ we are watching, what are we learning? To all intents and purposes – in the broader sweep of history – not a great deal. For television is a distorting medium par excellence: what your see is not the world. We do not stand in the reporter’s shoes – we sit in the comfort of our sofas. We are shown footage of horrific things, and distress ourselves about that over which we have no control. We attend to the minutiae of private tragedies (for a dose of the ‘Princess Di effect’). Occasionally, a ‘feel–good’ factor is introduced: some miraculous feat or outstanding achievement (else we might switch off). And then, night after night, we switch on ‘the news’ for more of the same; and if nothing dramatic has happened we feel disappointed, because the content is not as high octane as we have become habituated to, and does not fulfil the promising urgency of the introductory music, which aims deliberately to hype us up. But, finally, I have to ask myself just how much are we really learning. Yes, we are thoroughly up to date with current affairs, but to what extent does that constitute an education? ‘The news’ is only too easy to watch: it only requires to be turned on. During the war in former Yugoslavia, I read Andro Ivac’s The Bridge over the Drina. This historical novel, covering some four hundred years of Balkan history up to the outbreak of WW2 (and the ending of the ‘rotten ripe’ Ottoman / Turkish Empire), gave me a deeper understanding of the underlying causes of the conflict than all of the television, radio, and newspaper coverage I saw or read.

‘breaking news, breaking news’, runs along the bottom of your television screen. It can wait. If you were on holiday you would not necessarily hear about it. Do you fear that those who need to know will not know, and will not have taken appropriate action?

“But I want the hottest news.”

“Then get yourself a Smartphone, and stay tuned 24/7!”

__________________________________________

At the Chicago riots of 1968, the demonstrators shouted, “The whole world is watching!” And the whole world was. What they were watching was first rate TV drama & they hadn’t the slightest interest in translating this into response. Public reaction came only in print.

We wear our media. They are our real clothes.

Edmund Carpenter, Oh What a Blow That Phantom Gave Me! Bantam, 1974

__________________________________________

I am not suggesting that we should cut ourselves off from current affairs completely – far from it. But how much do you need to know? Suppose a drug cartel has been busted in Mexico City. Well, this has happened before and it will happen again: it is not an unusual occurrence in large Latin American cities surrounded by sprawling, lawless slums. Long ago you learnt of the danger of straying outside of the centre of such cities, as also of the ruthlessness of drug barons. So, unless you are an academic studying these matters, why clutter your mind with such ‘sensational’ and – to you – useless ‘information’? It is nothing more than ‘snack–viewing’: tit–bits for the mind.

~ __________________ ~

“Have you heard of the latest shoot–out between the police and the Mexican drug barons?”

“Can’t say I have. Did you find yourself in the firing line?”

~ __________________ ~

“There’s been a dreadful earthquake in Turkey.”

“Hm . . . tectonic plates on the move, I suppose. I seem to remember that there was an earthquake a few years back. Doubtless there will be another in a few years time. These things happen . . .”

~ __________________ ~

“Have you heard that celebrity x is divorcing celebrity y?”

“No!”

~ __________________ ~

The last word may go to Henry David Thoreau:

We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate . . . We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the old world some weeks nearer to the new; but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad flapping American ear will be that Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough. Walden

Postscript

The Very Rev. Abbé Ernest Dimnet, Canon of Cambray Cathedral (1948) wrote of the following conversation he had when travelling on a train from Paris to Orléans. In the corner, on his side of the compartment, there was:

. . . a child of twelve dressed in black . . . reading a square little book also habited in black canvas by some amateur bookbinder. I never saw anybody read like that. It seemed as if the old–fashioned but pretty and dainty figure were trying to lose itself into that book. In time my curiosity about a book that could be read with such intensity became irresistible. I made a brief feint of talking with the father and then suddenly turned to the little girl and asked: “What are you reading?” The eager little face looked up, summoned, as it were, from far away regions. “Monsieur c’est l’Histoire Romaine” (brief pause), “et je vais arriver à Jules Cᴂsar!” – “How do you know you are coming to Jules Cᴂsar?” – “Oh! I have read this book many times. I have never forgotten the emphasis on: “et je vais arriver à Jules Cᴂsar!” No prospect of Christmas, or a degree or a first visit to Paris ever produced emphasis of that quality.

From The Art of Thinking, Jonathan Cape, 1929

It is impossible to imagine such a scenario today. The smartphone has destroyed any possibility of a return to such concentration.

On trains and on buses I have seen what I can only describe as ‘attempts to read a book.’ There were of course variations in the making of this effort, but the behavioural pattern was the same. At the start of the journey – fifteen minutes or so of reading; then a wandering of attention, and the fishing out of the smartphone; ten minutes later the smartphone palls and the book comes out again; but the required concentration proves too much, and out comes the smartphone for the remainder of the journey . . . To 'kill it off’, effectively!