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The Age of Missing Information |
Author: Bill Mckibben
Published: 2006-06-13 |
List price: $14.95
Our price: $10.17
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Customer comments on this selection.
 how television has shaped the modern psyche
bill mckibben wrote this book in 1992 with some revisions in 2006, but his observations are even more relevant now than they were 16 years ago. he had his friends tape 24 hours worth of tv on all the available stations(one chanel each) and then spent a year going over the information all these shows tried to purvey. this he compared with the information he was able to glean by spending a 24 hour period alone on a mountain, observing nature. he makes a convincing and detailed argument that television distorts our sense of time, of what is possible, of what is important. it has desensitized us to to pressing issue of our time, that we are more interested in unending economic growth than in sustainable, non-exploding harmony with our environment. this is a no-brainer of course but he is quite astute about the subtle ways t.v. has molded our psyches so that we don't even notice its devastating effects. it should be required reading in all modern sociology classes, communications classes and for anyone who cares about keeping the earth alive.
A plea for mental silence
I introduce a précis of this book with a bit of trepidation. But here goes: Bill McKibben records 24 hours worth of programming from every single one of Fairfax, Virginia's 93 television stations. Then he watches all of them, eight hours a day, for basically a year. On another day he heads off into the mountains and writes about that. Compare and contrast.
I hesitate because this will give you at least one immediate idea, namely that McKibben is wasting your time or condescending to you, or both. Thankfully McKibben himself was well aware of this possibility, and avoided it studiously. He knew that people would be afraid to read a book with that setup, so he violated most expectations that you could have brought to it.
It's a fun book, profound, and a quick read. If you've read David Foster Wallace's essay "E Unibus Plurum" (collected in "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again"), you'll have one of the threads, namely a look at TV's involution. In "E Unibus Plurum," Wallace noted that television shows increasingly only referred to other television shows: you don't need to know anything about the culture of the outside world to understand all of the jokes. Wallace, at some level, thought this was cute. He was singularly unwilling to say that television is garbage; instead, he took television to be a great object for scholarly study. McKibben has no problem calling calling out the low quality of most television.
He goes well beyond that, into a lot of thoughts about TV that never would have occurred to me -- certainly not as eloquently as he put them. For instance, television has shrunk history: if it occurred before the era when things could be televised, it might as well not exist. The History Channel makes some exceptions, but they're few and far between. We're expected to know about as far back as the Zapruder video, and that's it.
Or take nature videos. They've done a great deal of good for the environmental movement, but they've convinced people that nature is either a) cute and cuddly, b) so ugly that it wraps back around and becomes cute, or c) red in tooth and claw. Real nature is boring: lions spend most of their time sleeping, not shredding flesh. Television has made it hard for us to appreciate a quiet moment in the woods. McKibben's time on a mountain is an attempt to bring some of that back.
He makes a rather disturbing claim midway through: for all our economic progress, nothing very profound has changed in the lives of Americans in the last 40 years. At the beginning of the 20th century, "People learned to talk across long distances on telephones, to travel easily and routinely. School became standard, even in remote areas. ... Birth control allowed limits on reproduction. Easy refrigeration changed the way we thought about food. ... Medicine eliminated most childhood deaths, and made all lives healthier and more secure."
What are the big life-changing innovations from the 1960's to now? We've been reduced to little technological fixes and excessive convenience: "An ad, endlessly repeated, touts Glassmates, which makes it easier to remove fingerprints on glass and spots on mirrors. "Every day I clean them. *Spray* on the cleaner, *scrub* with one paper towel, *dry* with another. *Three messy steps*," overcome with a single blow -- these are the kind of dragons we have left to slay."
Yet this is what our economic logic forces: companies must grow, even if there's really nothing we need to buy. The stock market demands growth, and growth that exceeds the mere rate of births. The advertising tells you that you need a larger car, more stuff in your house, a smaller, blacker iPod to replace the one you bought a year ago, and Glassmates.
I don't know if McKibben is right that we've reached a point where valuable technological innovation is rare, but it's certainly compelling. In fact, the biggest innovation that's arrived since "Missing Information" is the Internet, and it's not clear that the net fundamentally alters McKibben's story. Certainly there are those of us who believe that the net is a force for great good and great social change, and that it differs fundamentally from television. Really what this book calls for, though, is *silence*. McKibben thinks that we should spend more time building meaningful lives and meaningful communities. That involves unplugging. Whether it's unplugging the TV or the computer seems immaterial to the argument.
 Still missing
If you haven't stumbled into Bill McKibben's work, do. He is very good at asking questions and clearly explicating his search for answers.
The work which first won him international acclaim, THE END OF NATURE, explores the unavoidable truth that the wild only exists at the whim of humankind these days. Whether we micromanage a game park, use a wetland as a water filter, or call an area "wilderness" and more or less keep our hands off, everything everywhere is impacted by our activities. A thoughtful and not unhopeful book, this one will make you see "nature" differently.
 pretentious diatribe
What kind of an experiment was this cable watching thing supposed to be? The guy goes on a hike and imagines he comes back full of some eternal "wisdom" and then sits down and watches TV for 1700 hours straight, and comes to the conclusion that the 1700 hours of TV watching were not particularly rewarding...! give me a break! well duh-of course watching tv for a month straight isnt rewarding!
Its amazing that people sit down and write big books making these sorts of obvious points. In the end mcKibben succeeds in shining a damning light on our culture - not through his "experiment" but by publishing the book. A culture, where people can pretend to be clever intellectuals by making the kind of social experiments and delvering the kind of half baked "insights" as McKibben does, is in serious, serious trouble.
Disturbing
This book is a meditation on the effects of television on society. After living in an area with no TV reception for a few years, McKibben embarked on massive project to try to understand what information television conveys and how this affects society. He had a very novel approach for this project: he identified Fairfax County, Virginia as having the greatest number of cable TV channels at the time (almost 100), so he recruited a Fairfax volunteer for each channel to record the entire day's broadcast on a video cassette recorder. The day chosen for the recording was May 3, 1990. On the day the tapes were being recorded, McKibben went hiking near his home in the Adirondacks, and kept a careful journal of all his observations up on the mountain. Then, for the next year, McKibben watched the TV tapes of May 3, for 8-10 hours a day, taking notes and analyzing what kinds of information they contained. In this book, he reports on the kinds of messages that were being spread through the broadcasts, and contrasts this to what he learned by observing the natural world on the mountain. The methodology may sound a little trite, but the project was very well executed, and McKibben leaves us with many disturbing points to ponder.
Some critics of TV say that TV is bad because watching all the violence on TV makes people, especially children, violent. Others point out that the gratuitous violence is lamentable, but worse is the fact that watching TV contributes to hyper-consumption. McKibben takes the criticisms of the media to a much higher level. In this extended essay, he points out how much TV plays a role in how we see the world, how we expect it to work, and how the essential mismatch between the TV version and reality leads to unhealthy expectations or apathy. He argues that TV has become a guiding force of unparalleled strength, but where is it guiding us to? As he points out "Why do we do the things we do? Because of the events of our childhood, and because of class and race and gender, and because of our political and economic system and because of `human nature'-but also because of what we've been told about the world, because of the information we've received....What you do day after day is what forms your mind." If you spend your days watching TV, you are relinquishing control of the forces that will guide you to the broadcasters, whose interest is purely commercial, not helping you or society to be better.
McKibben notes out how stories repeated during childhood contribute to one's system of ethics. In older societies, such tales were told by elders around the campfire, or read by parents to young children. But since the 1940's, the TV has taken over both the role of the campfire and the trusted elders. Instead of being brought up on moral or Biblical tales, today's children are raised on a fare of endless re-runs, from the Brady Bunch to Leave It to Beaver, to Gilligan's Island. Some of these shows contain moral lessons that we might deem acceptable, but they can lead children to develop unrealistic expectations of the world (McKibben reminds us that no one is ever shown working on the Brady Bunch, not even Alice the maid). The only show I watched with great regularity as a child was MASH, and as McKibben pointed out the moral lessons conveyed by the program, I realized that I had indeed incorporated exactly these elements into my value system, a fact which I find very disturbing. What other legacies did early TV watching with leave me?
Although the chapters of the book are arranged by the time of day during the 24 study period, each one also has a topical focus. For instance, McKibben points out how nature programs distort watchers' expectations of life in the natural world, leading us to believe that every moment will be filled with rare thrills. He discusses the focus on money collection rather than on spirituality in much of the religious programming, and points out the inherent distortion of TV news in giving equal time to both slow news days and big events. He also meditates on the loss of knowledge of the real world and practical skills, such as the ability to predict the weather by reading the sky or to grow and prepare one's own food. All in all, the book contains much to ponder or discuss.
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