I've talked before about Robert Putnam's book Bowling Alone, the Collapse and Revival of American Community. Putnam investigated a dramatic reversal in our desire to engage in community minded activities that occurred in the mid-60's. These activities ran the gamut from voting and being active in PTA's to having friends over for a card game and joining a bowling league. In chart after chart, Putnam showed how this community-mindedness peaked in the late 50's and early 60's and then went into a long and steady decline over the last half century. As TV invaded our front rooms, we abandoned the community hall, the voting booth and the local chapter of The Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks (one of the biggest fraternal organizations in the world). We stopped spending time with each other. Our definition of entertainment moved from the active to the passive.
This expectation to be passively entertained has spilled into other areas of our society as well. How we perceive our world may have changed from an environment we interact with to a parade that we simply sit back and watch go by. Neil Postman, in his book Amusing Ourselves to Death, speculates that as America turned from a culture revolving around the printed word to one revolving around images (especially images that jump cut from one to the other, set to a pounding aural beat, saturated with high impact stimuli like violence and sex) we have become a society of attention deficit watchers that have high expectations of being passively entertained, no matter where we are:
What I am claiming here is not that television is entertaining but that it has made entertainment itself the natural format for the representation of all experience. … 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.
This trend shows up in our consumption of news, political issues and education. Classrooms now are not the Socratic arena of debate so much as they are a theatre, where the professor or lecturer is expected to entertain with a bag of tricks including animated Powerpoint presentations and multimedia content. Consider the difference in the campaigns of two politicians from Illinois. In 1858, debates between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglass took 7 hours and the entire audience stayed put in the hall, their butts glued to hard wooden chairs for the entire time (the bladder control alone boggles the mind). 151 years later, we had trouble making it all the way through a 37 minute YouTube video of a Barack Obama speech.
This expectation to be passively entertained has spilled into other areas of our society as well. How we perceive our world may have changed from an environment we interact with to a parade that we simply sit back and watch go by. Neil Postman, in his book Amusing Ourselves to Death, speculates that as America turned from a culture revolving around the printed word to one revolving around images (especially images that jump cut from one to the other, set to a pounding aural beat, saturated with high impact stimuli like violence and sex) we have become a society of attention deficit watchers that have high expectations of being passively entertained, no matter where we are:
What I am claiming here is not that television is entertaining but that it has made entertainment itself the natural format for the representation of all experience. … 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.
This trend shows up in our consumption of news, political issues and education. Classrooms now are not the Socratic arena of debate so much as they are a theatre, where the professor or lecturer is expected to entertain with a bag of tricks including animated Powerpoint presentations and multimedia content. Consider the difference in the campaigns of two politicians from Illinois. In 1858, debates between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglass took 7 hours and the entire audience stayed put in the hall, their butts glued to hard wooden chairs for the entire time (the bladder control alone boggles the mind). 151 years later, we had trouble making it all the way through a 37 minute YouTube video of a Barack Obama speech.
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