Simple living: avoid mass media

Many years ago I read Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death for the first time, and I thought about something that had happened not too long before. I was fussing at my very young son because he was dawdling as we were getting him ready for bed. I forcibly speeded things up, carried him upstairs, hurriedly read him a bedtime story, gave him a quick kiss, turned out the lights and went back downstairs. Why the rush? It was nearly 8pm, and there was a show on television I wanted to see.

Debbie read the book as well, and we talked about it, and decided that it would be a good idea to simply get rid of our television. We did, and in the long run it turned out to be a very good idea. At first the evenings stretched before us, with two very young children and not much idea of what to do besides watch TV programs. We read, and talked, and played with the kids, and eventually we decided we preferred it that way.

We did make one important mistake. The TV had proved to be a very good babysitter—we could put the kids in front of it, turn on a video, and they would sit there entranced—and so we decided that we would keep a small TV hooked to a VCR in the playroom, and use it for children’s videos. It stayed that way for a few years, until we moved to town and had easy access to a video rental store, at which point we started renting videos for ourselves occasionally. Soon after that watching videotapes and then DVDs became a regular thing for us; it didn’t consume nearly as much time as broadcast television had, but it did occupy several evenings a month, and it was a default activity for the kids on a rainy afternoon.

We ended up cutting out videos, but the way it happened was different. Even though we still planned to watch them, we were having more and more difficulty finding the time to do so. Often we would return a rented video without having watched it, or buy a video just to put in a stack with a bunch of others that were still wrapped in cellophane. And the older kids would duck out of video watching sessions to do something else—which just highlighted the fact that the rest of them were mindlessly killing time, and we were allowing it. Finally we put an end to it all by giving away the 200+ videos we had accumulated.

We aren’t pious about being video-free. We have a shelf full of music instruction videos. Occasionally we will rent an old movie for the kids as a treat, but months usually go by before we do it again. I liked the Lord of the Rings movies well enough to want to have the videos, but once bought it took us forever to get around to watching them, and then in hour-long sessions spread over a number of weekends. Debbie has been re-reading the Jane Austen novels and wanted to see some of the films; we bought a stack, and occasionally Debbie and Maggie will spend a Sunday afternoon watching one.

What pleases me about our second go-round with getting video out of our life is that this time they were actually crowded out. We had managed to find other more edifying things to do, and there wasn’t room left for video-watching—and we weren’t inclined to make any.

We have been less deliberate about eliminating other mass media from our lives, but it has happened anyway. We haven’t taken a newspaper in years. Our subscriptions to news magazines lapsed for good a few years back. Talk radio, once a constant companion, is now something I tune away from. What little we know about the news of the day comes from the internet, and we tend not to follow recent developments even there.

Purveyors of the news thrive because people think it is important to have an opinion on matters which don’t touch them directly and which they have no way of influencing. In Amusing Ourselves to Death Neil Postman explains it this way:

In both oral and typographic cultures, information derives its importance from the possibilities of action. Of course, in any communication environment, input (what one is informed about) always exceeds output (the possibilities of action based on information). But the situation created by telegraphy, and then exacerbated by later technologies, made the relationship between information and action both abstract and remote. For the first time in human history, people were faced with the problem of information glut, which means that simultaneously they were faced with the problem of a diminished social and political potency.

You may get a sense of what this means by asking yourself another series of questions: What steps do you plan to take to reduce the conflict in the Middle East? Or the rates of inflation, crime and unemployment? What are your plans for preserving the environment or reducing the risk of nuclear war? What do you plan to do about NATO, OPEC, the CIA, affirmative action, and the monstrous treatment of the Baha’is in Iran? I shall take the liberty of answering for you: You plan to do nothing about them.

You may, of course, cast a ballot for someone who claims to have some plans, as well as the power to act. But this you can do only once every two or four years by giving one hour of your time, hardly a satisfying means of expressing the broad range of opinions you hold. Voting, we might even say, is the next to last refuge of the politically impotent. The last refuge is, of course, giving your opinion to a pollster, who will get a version of it through a desiccated question, and then will submerge it in a Niagara of similar opinions, and convert them into—what else?—another piece of news.

Thus, we have here a great loop of impotence: The news elicits from you a variety of opinions about which you can do nothing except to offer them as more news, about which you can do nothing.

Or, as a friend of mine once put it, we know more about the situation in Rwanda than we do about the situation in the house next door. News purveyors like it that way—and we like it that way.

One of the things we’ve gained from eliminating mass media is perspective. We don’t waste any time thinking about things that are not under our control and are not likely to affect us. With an attitude like that, the news of the day becomes useless and irrelevant. The world’s burdens have been lifted from our shoulders, and we have lots of time to spend tending to matters that are close to home. This is a simplification that we would urge on every last one of our friends.

One side note: as we became detached from the mass media, it became ever more obvious how much the news is packaged up as entertainment. This hit home fairly hard a week or so after the 9/11 disaster. Not being plugged in, I had had almost no exposure to the media coverage that had followed it. Then a copy of World magazine arrived in the mail, with a fifty-page section of photos recounting the event. I flipped through it, and found myself thinking: these photos are beautiful. And they were—crisp, colorful, artfully framed, dramatic.

But then it occurred to me that these beautiful pictures were of planes ramming into buildings, fires bursting out, people running away screaming, even people leaping hundreds of feet to their death. This was pornography. I tossed the magazine into the trash before anyone else in the family saw it, and had our subscription cancelled that day. But thanks to World magazine and our news-as-entertainment culture, I’m still carrying around some images in my mind I wish I could erase.