Korzybski and I

Some of you may note the allusion in the title of this post, Korzybski and I, to the play and movie, the King and I. The similarity extends beyond both forms of special K, as you can see:

Alfred Korzybski

Yul Brynner

Of course, Alfred Korzybski passed away before I was born, so I had no chance to know the man, but I know his work, and have been influenced by his writings and ideas, most notably his general semantics. And as some of you may know, I served as Executive Director of the Institute of General Semantics for 3 years, from 2008 to 2011.


So, this past December, I was invited to join the Board of Trustees of the IGS, and accepted. And it occurs to me that I never got around to adding a post about the anthology I co-edited with Corey Anton, who is presently Vice-President of the IGS. The volume, entitled Korzybski And..., was published in 2012 by the IGS, so this is more than a little overdue. 



You may have noticed the Amazon order links for the book over on the left, though, and here they are again:

But no doubt you'd like a little more information about what's in the book, and that's perfectly understandable, so here are the contents:


Acknowledgements

Chapter 1: Situating Alfred Korzybski
                Corey Anton and Lance Strate

Chapter 2: Korzybski and Gottfried Leibniz
                Bruce I. Kodish

Chapter 3: Korzybski and Friedrich Nietzsche
                Zhenbin Sun

Chapter 4: Korzybski and Charles Sanders Peirce
                Isaac E. Catt

Chapter 5: Korzybski and Martin Heidegger
                Corey Anton

Chapter 6: Korzybski and French Structuralism
                Jean-Yves Heurtebise

Chapter 7: Korzybski and Stuart Chase
                William Henry Sharp

Chapter 8: Korzybski and S. I. Hayakawa
                William Henry Sharp

Chapter 9: Korzybski and Albert Ellis
                Martin H. Levinson

Chapter 10: Korzybski and New Trends in Psychotherapy
                  Ramiro J. Álvarez

Chpater 11: Korzybski and Marshall McLuhan
                  Lance Strate

Chapter 12: Korzybski and Cultural Studies
                  Geraldine E. Forsberg

Chapter 13: Korzybski and New Visual Language
                  John S. Caputo, Robin Wynyard & Heather M. Crandall

Chapter 14: Korzybski and Cartography
                  Bini B.S.

Chapter 15: Korzybski and Cyberculture
                  Thierry Bardini

Chapter 16: Korzybski and...
                  Deborah Eicher-Catt

Index 
About the Authors 



 It's an interesting and diverse group of essays, one that leaves lots of room for follow-up at some point in the future. And herein ends my little exercise in what Korzybski referred to as time-binding.

Yahoo for the Tube!

So, back on May 28th, the E-Commerce Times ran a story, written by Erika Morphy, on Yahoo's plans to create a video sharing service to compete with YouTube. The story, entitled Wheels Greased for Summer Yahoo-Tube Debut, is worthy of being mentioned here on Blog Time Passing because, you guessed, it included quotes from me.

Here's the blurb that precedes the beginning of the article:

Yahoo wants to give YouTube a run for its advertising money by launching its own channel for user-generated videos. Yahoo shouldn't have much trouble attracting advertisers if its product offers nonexclusive deals at more attractive rates. Getting inventory is another story, however. It won't be easy to get content creators and viewers to think twice about where to upload and devour videos.

And here's how it begins:

Yahoo is in advanced talks with video producers to launch its own online video channel this year, a product meant to rival Google's YouTube, according to Ad Age, which cited unnamed sources briefed on the company's plans.

The news has intrigued the online video and advertising industry because it would introduce some very welcome competition into this channel, owned largely—but not completely—by Google.

Yahoo reportedly hopes that generous revenue-sharing arrangements will attract producers and content creators to try out its new platform. YouTube takes a 45 percent cut.

Yahoo will offer the option of a fixed ad rate that will be 50-100 percent higher than YouTube's average net ad rate, according to Ad Age.

Sound good? Or maybe too good to be true? I weigh in on the matter in the next section of the article, which has the heading "Winning Over the Masses":

While these numbers may pique the interest of producers, Yahoo will be hard-pressed to trump Google's ownership of this market, Lance Strate, professor of communications and media studies at Fordham University, told the E-Commerce Times.

"The name YouTube is practically synonymous with user-generated online video, and it will be very difficult for Yahoo to make a dent in Google's dominance of this sector," he told the E-Commerce Times.

"The bottom line is that if you want your video to viewed by the largest possible audience, you'll upload it to YouTube. No one comes close to the number of views, viewers, subscribers and uploads that YouTube has, and even if everyone stopped providing YouTube with new material today—a highly unlikely scenario—it would take a very long time for Yahoo to come close to the enormous archive of videos that YouTube has amassed over the past decade."

Now, let's hear from someone else:

The hill Yahoo proposes to climb is indeed steep, said Warp 9 CEO Andrew Van Noy, who suggested that Yahoo get a little more imaginative as it tries to face off against Google.

"Assuming the rumors are true, I have a difficult time imagining any video platform posing an immediate threat to YouTube," he told the E-Commerce Times. "It's going to need to make concessions in order to challenge one of Google's flagship products."

In addition to better ad rates, Yahoo could offer advertisers analytics or partnership opportunities with major media publishers, Van Noy suggested.

"Another idea could include cutting down on the length of ads, which many YouTube users often complain about," he said.

And at this point, a new section begins with the heading of "The Real Problem With Scale":

Yahoo had better expect to post a loss as it moves into this space, Guido Lang, assistant professor of computer information systems at Quinnipiac University, told the E-Commerce Times.

It took Google about five years to turn a profit on YouTube, he noted—and that followed experimentation with a number of different videos ads, such as pre- and post-roll ads, as well as YouTube channels and video-editing features.

"Google's experience has shown that it is extremely difficult to monetize online video. You need scale—both in terms of content and in terms of audience—to make it work," said Lang. "I'm not sure that Yahoo will be able to bring that kind of scale to the table."

And the article ends by returning to me for the final section, under the heading of "Some Inroads":

Yahoo's plan may not be completely hopeless.

There are alternatives to YouTube, and a significant number of individuals have grown dissatisfied with YouTube over the past several years, Fordham's Strate pointed out.

"YouTube has addressed some of the grievances by lifting restrictions on the length of amateur videos, but many serious video creators have migrated to Vimeo and Blip.tv to obtain a better quality of service," he said.

Still, "one of the main complaints about YouTube is the increasing presence of advertising," noted Strate, "and Yahoo does not appear to be considering purchasing one of the YouTube alternatives or providing an ad-free environment."

And now, so they don't go to waste, here are the comments I provided, via e-mail, in their entirety, so you can see the larger context from which the article's quotes were excerpted:

The name YouTube is practically synonymous with user-generated online video, and it will be very difficult for Yahoo to make a dent in Google's dominance of this sector. The bottom line is that if you want your video to be viewed by the largest possible audience, you'll upload it to YouTube. No one comes close to the number of views, viewers, subscribers, and uploads that YouTube has, and even if everyone stopped providing YouTube with new material today, a highly unlikely scenario, it would take a very long time for Yahoo to come close to the enormous archive of videos that YouTube has amassed over the past decade.

An important and often overlooked aspect of YouTube's value is that it functions as a search engine second only to Google search itself. When you want to find out about how to fix a washing machine, change a spark plug, cook a turkey, or learn about string theory or Web 2.0, YouTube is the place to find the largest collection of informative, instructional, and educational videos, and video represents a mode of communication well suited for how-to instruction and any explanation that benefits from illustration and animation. Moreover, YouTube has been moving into Netflix and Hulu territory by providing feature films and original television programming.

Of course, there are alternatives to YouTube, and a significant number of individuals have grown dissatisfied with YouTube over the past several years. YouTube has addressed some of the grievances by lifting restrictions on the length of amateur videos, but many serious video creators have migrated to Vimeo and Blip.tv to obtain a better quality of service. But one of the main complaints about YouTube is the increasing presence of advertising, and Yahoo does not appear to be considering purchasing one of the YouTube alternatives, or providing an ad-free environment.

The chances of Yahoo having any significant impact of YouTube are small, in my opinion. Before purchasing YouTube, Google launched its own Google Video, but gave up on it in favor of YouTube. MySpace tried to establish its own video service, but that never caught on and couldn't stop the social network from imploding. Yahoo does not appear to be offering anything particularly new or different from YouTube. They may offer better deals on revenue-sharing and advertising, but the only things that matter as far as monetization is concerned are eyeballs, and it's YouTube that has the online audience's attention, and will be securing more of it as television and the internet continue to converge, and viewers spend more time watching YouTube videos on their TV screens.

Yahoo may be looking for some synergy through integration with their earlier acquisition of Tumblr, but if all they have to offer is a pale shadow of YouTube, Yahoo Video won't amount to much. It is highly unlikely that Yahoo Video will offer a serious challenge to YouTube, but they could perhaps develop a distinctive identify if they were to incorporate live streaming, short video clips along the lines of Vine, professional programming along the lines of Hulu and Netflix, combined with the amateur uploading that is YouTube's stock-in-trade.

And that is that. Will YouTube reign forever over the video-sharing world? Of course not. All good things must come to an end, as must all bad things, and everything in-between. But when, and how that will happen? That is the question. And I don't have an answer, but I don't think it's here and now, as much as Yahoo might want to have its revenge on Google for beating them out in the search engine business a decade ago. YouTube may well remain the dominant force for some time to come, and only succumb to changes in hardware at some point in the future.

Anyway, aside from all this, is more television and more video exactly what we need right now?

On Jewish Characters in American Television Series

 In my previous post, A Jewish Take on Amusing and Amazing, I discussed the Jewish Standard, an award-winning weekly periodical serving northern New Jersey and Rockland County, New York, and shared with you the piece they published on Amazing Ourselves to Death, based on an interview with me conducted by the paper's editor, Joanne Palmer.

The interview ranged across some very interesting territory, and as a result, Joanne invited me to write an occasional op-ed piece for the paper, and I was quite happy to agree. And since one of my areas of interest is media and popular culture, I decided to use the the awarding-winning AMC cable television series Mad Men as a jumping off point for getting into a pet peeve of mine, concerning Jewish stereotypes. 

I should add that the focus is on Jewish males because that's what I am, and of course there are stereotypes of Jewish women as well. But it hits me on a personal level when I see a stereotype of a group I belong to and say to myself, I'm nothing like that. And what really brought it all home for me was the similarities and the differences between Mad Men and another series about an advertising agency that included a Jewish character in a secondary role, The Crazy Ones. That was the foundation on which the rest of this essay is built.

The op-ed piece was published on May 16, under the title of Advertisements for Ourselves, with the subtitle, "Jews in Mad Men and Beyond" (and I am identified as a professor of communication and media studies at Fordham University in the Bronx, and president of Congregation Adas Emuno in Leonia). I should add that at the time I started writing the piece, we were only into the first couple of episodes from the first half of the final season of Mad Men, and I actually had to rewrite and add a bit after I  had competed it and sent it over to editor, due to a major plot development involving the series' Jewish character.

Anyway, here's how the piece begins:

Mad Men is back.

Don Draper

The AMC series created by Jewish writer, producer, and director Matthew Weiner has returned for its final season, having taken us through that most transformative of decades, the 1960s. And while the main character, Don Draper, isn’t Jewish, there is something hauntingly familiar about the story of a man who adopts a different name and identity to hide his true background, and then works his way up from poverty to a comfortable middle-class existence. Reflecting the experience common to all European immigrants during the first half of the 20th century, Draper personifies the belief that in America it is possible to shape and fashion your own individual identity, to recreate yourself in your own desired image.

In some ways he seems to echo the Jewish-American novelist Norman Mailer, who was known for his media savvy and penchant for self-promotion. In fact, he called his 1959 anthology of short pieces Advertisements for Myself.

Speaking of advertisements, in case you're interested in the book, here's a quick way to get a hold of it:

Returning now to the article:

The message of commercial advertising, taken as a whole, is that we can become whoever and whatever we want to be simply by buying the right products. And the title of the series is a pun based on the fact that New York City-based advertising firms all used to be located on Madison Avenue. Much like Hollywood, it was an industry in which Jews were quite prominent. In fact, Thomas Cahill included advertising in his celebratory book, The Gifts of the Jews, a remark that generated some criticism among reviewers.

And once again, for your convenience, in case you're interested:

And back again to the opinion piece:

Michael Ginsberg

But Mad Men avoids this association. Draper and his partners are WASPs, and it’s not until season five that they hire a Jewish copywriter, Michael Ginsberg. Much like the famous beat poet Allen Ginsberg, Michael is quite talented and creative, although his gifts are not given the respect that they deserve by Draper and his partners. There even are instances where he is used simply as a token Jew—for example in an attempt to secure an account from Manischewitz. Still, the character is given a compelling background—he was born in a concentration camp. And like Draper, Ginsberg tries to disguise his origins. His ethnicity, however, makes it impossible for him to construct an entirely new identity as Draper did.

HAL Reading Their Lips from 2001

In the most recent episode, “The Runaways,” Ginsberg again parallels Draper in suffering a nervous breakdown, but in much more extreme fashion. He succumbs to paranoid delusions and engages in self-mutilation; the catalyst for his action was the agency’s addition of a mainframe computer. The episode includes an homage to the scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey, where the homicidal computer HAL reads the lips of the two astronauts he is supposed to be aiding, thereby learning of their decision to shut him down.

Stanley Kubrick on the set of 2001

Presumably Ginsberg had recently seen this movie, which was released on New Year’s Day 1968. It is worth noting that 2001 is considered one of the greatest films ever made, and its director, Stanley Kubrick, one of the most important film directors of all time. Kubrick was one of many prominent Jewish-Americans who grew up in the Bronx during the early and mid-20th century, and the strong distrust of authority evident in his films would have struck a resonant chord with any child of the Holocaust. Moreover, the Nazis, being meticulous record keepers, were quite fond of the technological forerunner of the computer, tabulating machines of the sort produced by IBM, the company that became the pre-eminent computer manufacturer of the postwar era. (It often has been noted that moving each letter of IBM back one step in the alphabet yields HAL, the name of the computer).

While Michael Ginsberg is a minor character on Mad Men, he remains a major example of Jewish stereotypes. He is clever and funny, but also awkward and often inappropriate in social situations, and otherwise nervous and neurotic. (In his case, his neurosis intensified into psychosis.) It was probably the influence of all of those immensely popular Woody Allen movies of the ‘60s, but for a long time it seemed as if any Jewish-American male character who appeared on a TV sitcom or dramatic series was cut from the same cloth: whiny, nervous, short, unattractive, not handy or athletic, smart and intellectual, but not exactly leadership material. After all, William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy may have been Jewish, but Captain James Tiberius Kirk was just another WASP, and his first officer, Mr. Spock, was an alien from the planet Vulcan—albeit one who incorporated some Jewish influences. While the Enterprise was populated with a veritable melting pot of crew members, there never seemed to be a Shapiro or Levine out there on the final frontier.

Gabe Kotter

Josh Lyman

Of course there have been exceptions, like Gabe Kotter on Welcome Back, Kotter, Barney Miller on Barney Miller, Jerry Seinfeld on Seinfeld, and Josh Lyman on The West Wing, but these characters’ ethnicity—and especially their religion—was rarely mentioned or acknowledged.

Barney Miller

Jerry Seinfeld

Speaking of Barney Miller, you might want to check out my previous post on that series, A Sitcom to Remember, in case you missed it. The subject of stereotypes comes up in the course of a wide-ranging interview with me on that series from the 70s.

Miles Silverberg

At the same time, the Jewish identities of stereotypical characters, such as Miles Silverberg on Murphy Brown, Joel Fleischman on Northern Exposure, and Ross Geller on Friends, were continually on display, and very much an integral part of their characters.

Joel Fleischman

Ross Geller

This fall, a new sitcom was introduced, a vehicle for Robin Williams, called The Crazy Ones. Clearly inspired by Mad Men, the series is set in a Chicago-based advertising firm and features several Jewish actors, including Sarah Michelle Gellar (of Buffy the Vampire Slayer fame), Amanda Setton, Brad Garrett, and James Wolk. What is remarkable about Wolk’s character, a copy writer named Zach Cropper, is that he is extremely confident, likeable (he is the favorite of the agency head, Robin Williams’ character Simon Roberts), handsome (he is a veritable ladies’ man), and maybe a little bit shallow, although certainly a talented and innovative professional. And he is Jewish. In fact, in an episode called “Zach Mitzvah,” it turns out that he once was a very successful bar mitzvah DJ, and he reprises that role in order to please a client.

The Crazy Ones (left to right: Gellar, Williams, Garrett, Setton, & Wolk)

Not only does the Cropper character counter the typical stereotype of the Jewish male, but another character, art director Andrew Keanelly, embodies many of those stereotypical attributes. He is intelligent—but also insecure, awkward, and jealous of the favor shown to Zach. You might expect his character to be Jewish—but he is identified as not Jewish.

For this reason, I believe that The Crazy Ones merits our respect and recognition. Unfortunately, however, the series failed to catch on with television audiences and garner the kinds of ratings its creators had hoped for, and so CBS has cancelled it. And truth be told, it’s no Mad Men. But as far as Jewish characters go, Zach Cropper has been altogether refreshing. Series creator David E. Kelley has a track record of creating interesting and unique Jewish characters in programs such as Picket Fences, Chicago Hope, The Practice, Boston Public, and now The Crazy Ones. For that he deserves our kudos.

And that is where the column ends. As an opinion piece, it is meant to provoke further thought and discussion on the topic, not to close it off. 

Stereotypes are a tricky subject, and this is an area where general semantics makes a major contribution, in reminding us that any generalization, about any group or category, is bound to be selective and subjective, more a projection of the individuals invoking the stereotype than a reflection of those being stereotyped. Stereotypes are a by-product of the process of abstracting, a process that takes us away from concrete reality, and in this case a focus on the individual person. 

While we do need to be able to make generalizations, we have to remember to ground them in factual evidence, to keep them open to testing and to continue to test them over time. Popular culture makes use of stereotypes because they are easier than trying to create unique characters and convey them to audiences, and because audiences recognize stereotypical characters without much effort. It would be difficult, if not impossible, to eliminate them entirely from our popular narratives, so if they are being used, they need to be used in a careful, thoughtful manner. 

We need to keep in mind that every stereotype is, indeed, an advertisement for some portion of humanity, and therefore, an advertisement for all of humanity.

Purge the Merge! Part 2

So, in my previous Purge the Merge! post, I commented on the negative impact of the merger/takeover of TimeWarner Cable and Comcast, and as if that was not enough, then came the proposed acquisition of DirecTV by AT&T. And this time, the request for a comment came from the E-Commerce Times, and here was my response:

The proposed acquisition of DirectTV by AT&T comes on the heels of the proposed purchase of TimeWarner Cable by Comcast, and both moves represent a consolidation of the telecommunications industry that favors corporations, not consumers. While there might be some gains in efficiency of service from the mergers, they give the companies more power, more control over pricing and over the content they provide.

The loss of competition, even indirect competition, in any industry is bad news for consumers, and for citizens. It is true that the differences between cable, satellite, and phone service have all but dissolved, and because of the historic bias of these services, telephone companies have fallen behind cable companies in providing content, that is, television programming and other forms of entertainment. Acquiring the second largest Satellite TV company would help AT&T catch up as a content distributor, but at the cost of consumer choice regarding which services they might obtain.

The most troublesome issue in all this is the continued assault on net neutrality, and consolidation of the telecommunications industry can only the strengthen the hand of the corporations that are trying to undermine the founding principles of the internet as a public service, choke off services, channels, and sites that they do not have a financial agreement with or do not care for, and give special fast service to those that they favor, either economically or politically.

The FCC is the only government agency empowered to regulate the telecommunications industry, and during Reagan's presidency it was stripped of much of its powers, and has never quite recovered, but it still has the potential to slow down or maybe even stop these acquisitions. 

Now, let's take a look at the actual article that was published, entitled AT&T May Be Suiting Up to Battle Comcast, by Erika Morphy, dated May 13th. The article begins with this highlighted paragraph:

If AT&T were to acquire DirecTV, it would be bad news for consumers, said Entrevo Managing Director Topher Morrison, author of Collaboration Economy. "The advantages are almost all for AT&T, and very few for the customers. They will bill this as their ability to provide better service and wider selection, but that's just a fancy way of saying they will charge the consumer more."

It then begins in earnest with the following explanation:

AT&T has been negotiating to buy DirecTV for close to US$50 billion, based on reports that surfaced Monday. The deal, which has not been confirmed by the companies, could close within a few weeks.

The current option on the table, according to anonymous sources, would be largely a stock trade but it would include some cash, with AT&T offering in the low- to mid-$90s per share for DirecTV. That would be roughly a 20 percent premium over its current stock price, and it would value the company at close to $48 billion.

Some sources have put the reported offer at $100 per share, but also have noted that the amount of the offer and other terms related to the deal could well change.

The merger would be the largest in the telecom sector in years, and if it were to go through, it would significantly realign the players in the industry, placing AT&T in an optimal position to compete against Comcast, which currently is trying to get its own $42 billion acquisition of Time Warner Cable past regulators.

Now, how about a colorful metaphor from a reputable academic source (but no, not me):

"Think of it as Gorgon upscaling to meet Godzilla, otherwise known as 'Comcast,'" said Rich Hanley, associate professor and director of the graduate journalism program at Quinnipiac University.

"The DirecTV acquisition would give AT&T a steady revenue stream and more customers to upsell other services to present a suite of entertainment and broadband offerings that can help in its battle with Comcast," he told the E-Commerce Times.

The regulator issues could take a while to work through, he added, "so don't expect anything new any time soon."

Not a very critical view, maybe even a little sympathetic to AT&T. Indeed, at this point a new heading appears, "A Regulatory Obstacle Course," and here we see a glimmer of hope for the situation:

AT&T certainly can expect just as rigorous an examination from the Justice Department and the Federal Communications Commission as Comcast is receiving.

Regulators will be seeking to ensure that an AT&T-DirecTV combination won't increase prices or lead to restricted options for consumers, Marc Price, CTO for the Americas at Openet, told the E-Commerce Times.

Some reasons regulators might be more likely to favorably view this merger include the emerging competition for video content from Amazon, Apple and Netflix, as well as the prospect of nationwide services from Comcast, he said. "Competition will ensure choice and competitive pricing."

In fact, one reason AT&T likely is pursuing this idea -- a reason that could become a talking point as it negotiates with regulators -- is that if it wants to be competitive, AT&T will need a nationwide video delivery service to complement U-Verse, Price pointed out.

"DirecTV's satellite service provides this capability," he said.

And now, on to the next section, "The Question of Net Neutrality," and an excerpt from the comments that I provided:

However, that analysis assumes that telecom providers would be unable to restrict consumers from viewing content from any source, including a competitor's.

Acquiring the second-largest satellite TV company would help AT&T catch up as a content distributor, but at the cost of consumer choice regarding available services, Lance Strate, professor of communications and media studies at Fordham, told the E-Commerce Times.

The consolidation of the telecommunications industry "can only strengthen the hand of the corporations that are trying to undermine the founding principles of the Internet as a public service, choke off services, channels and sites that they do not have a financial agreement with or do not care for, and give special fast service to those that they favor, either economically or politically," he said.

 And that's it for me, but there is one last section to the article, one that echoes my sentiments, "The Consumer Loses":

Even leaving the ongoing battle surrounding Net neutrality out of the equation, a DirecTV acquisition is bad news for consumers, according to Topher Morrison, author of the book Collaboration Economy, and managing director of Entrevo.

"The advantages are almost all for AT&T, and very few for the customers. They will bill this as their ability to provide better service and wider selection, but that's just a fancy way of saying they will charge the consumer more," he explained.

Consumers don't even need DirecTV anymore, he said, pointing to the very competitors that are likely motivating AT&T in this move.

"I can watch every show I want online through collaboration apps like Netflix, Hulu and Amazon Prime," said Morrison. "AT&T needs to ask themselves how they can partner up with their customers—not their competitors."

And hats off to Morrison, really, I couldn't have said it better myself. Why not see your customers as partners and collaborators, rather than products and patsies? 

And of course, the point here is not in how much I get quoted, I just provide my raw comments so that they don't go to waste, and also to show how journalism works. But the important point here is the disservice being done to us as consumers, and more importantly to us as citizens, by all this merger-mania.

Newton Minow, where have you gone? The sharks in the water are circling all around us!

Amazing Ourselves from Second Nature

So, they say that three times makes a pattern, and in that trinitarian spirit, I would like to share one more view on Amazing Ourselves to Death, to follow up on A Jewish Take on Amusing and Amazing, and the Catholic view from Fordham Notes Amazing. This one comes from Second Nature, which describes itself as "an online journal for critical thinking about technology and new media in light of the Christian tradition."

Entitled Lance Strate’s “Amazing Ourselves to Death”: A Review, the article posted on May 5th is the first full book review, and the author, Peter Fallon, was one of Neil Postman's students as well. Peter is also a media ecology scholar and the author of several books, Printing, Literacy, and Education in 18th Century Ireland: Why the Irish Speak English, The Metaphysics of Media: Toward an End of Postmodern Cynicism and the Construction of a Virtuous Reality, and Cultural Defiance, Cultural Deviance: Collected Essays. 

Anyway, the point is that Peter is not only well qualified to review my book, but could well have written his own version of it, as well.

So, let's see how Peter begins his review. Perhaps with an engaging anecdote?

Years ago at NBC News, Gene Shalit told me a story about the difficulties of being an arts critic on television. In 1974 he delivered a less than appreciative review of the sentimental Joe Camp movie Benji, about a lovable, stray and cloyingly cute mixed-breed dog and his unlikely adventures. As he always did at the end of his “Critic’s Corner” segment, he segued into a commercial spot with the tag line, “Now, it’s time for this message. This is TODAY on NBC.” Later, he recounted, he was walking past the Guild Theatre on 50th Street, where Benji happened to be playing, and noticed the marquee. Below the huge letters spelling out the name of both the movie and its eponymous mongrel/star, he saw what was, in truth, an actual quote from his “Critic’s Corner” review: “It’s time for this message. – Gene Shalit, TODAY Show.”

A good one, Peter. And I am really flattered about the way that he connects the story to the subject of his review:

With this cautionary tale in mind, and recognizing that for a closed-minded minority of techno-utopians Neil Postman was a reactionary and a Luddite, a relic of a literate age nostalgic for a simpler time, I never the less wish to report about Lance Strate’s Amazing Ourselves to Death: Neil Postman’s Brave New World Revisited: It’s time for this message. Like Postman, Lance Strate understands that while the medium may be the message, some messages transcend media, defy media, and resist reduction to mere afterthought. Postman’s (1984) critique of the American television culture of nearly thirty years ago was such a message; Strate’s reconsideration and updating of that critique is not a new message, but constitutes, rather, a continuation of Postman’s message in Amusing Ourselves to Death (AOTD).

This seems like a good place to pause briefly and add in the really cool graphic that accompanied Peter's review:

Okay, now as he was saying:

After finishing the book I sat quietly and thoughtfully trying to think of a couple of appropriate adjectives to sum up my initial reaction to it. (Adjectives, I’ve come to believe, are the heart of any critical review, and the wrong adjective can take what was intended to be a glowing review and make it tepid and half-hearted; by the same token, a carelessly chosen adjective can make what was intended to be an incisive and critical review appear to the reader little more than an exercise in puffery.) The first descriptive word that came into my head was “important,” but to that closed-minded minority I mentioned above this word will appear to be a very subjective judgment. Another adjective that came to mind was “authoritative.” Again I corrected myself, remembering that we’re living in an age where the concept of authority has been rendered impotent by a media ecology that places subjective, personal opinion on an equal level (at the very least) with what was once called “expert opinion”–the informed opinion of someone who has systematically studied, in a disciplined way, with the use of empirical methods, some phenomenon or group of phenomena in the physical, natural, biological or social sciences.

I finally settled on a descriptor that I believe is unquestionably true and, therefore, unquestionably objective: mature. Lance Strate’s Amazing Ourselves to Death is a mature reconsideration of an important media theorist and cultural critic and what is perhaps his best-known book. It is also a mature consideration–one of the most mature, well-rounded, and unbiased I have read–of our current culture of amusement and diversion. Strate is neither cynical nor naïve in his attention to Postman’s observations or the culture that was the subject of those observations. He succumbs neither to nostalgia nor apologetics, but carefully and objectively delivers a point-by-point reappraisal of Postman’s argument and the evidence with which he supported it. He also provides contemporary evidence, where appropriate, to illustrate the continuing relevance of AOTD to today’s media ecology. It is precisely this kind of intellectual maturity that makes Strate’s book both an essential companion to AOTD as well as an important piece of scholarship in its own right.

So, I must admit that the adjective "mature" took me a little bit by surprise. Getting on in years, I hate to say it, but I resemble that remark. Of course, I remember the days when I was described as anything but... (for a long time, I  often found myself to be the youngest member of whatever group I was a part of). 

But one of the amazing things about Neil Postman was his ability to understand other people, and reveal to them something about themselves that they didn't know or realize until he pointed it out. For me, and this goes back to when I was in my early 20s, he once said to me, "you're like me, Lance, you take responsibility." And to be honest, I didn't think of myself as being a particularly responsible person, but he saw something in me that I had not seen in myself. So maybe Peter's description of the book as mature is also an insight of the same sort, something I had not previously considered.

Anyway, back to Peter's review: 

In many ways, this book is both an echo of Neil Postman and a reflection of his legacy. It is organized in two sections; the first serves as “echo,” a recap, a primer on the life, work, and legacy of Neil Postman. The second is a reflection, a deeply thoughtful interpretation and reconsideration, within the context of a complex digital culture, of Postman’s original critique of television culture.

Let me just interrupt here to point out that Peter has cleverly alluded to my first book, Echoes And Reflections: On Media Ecology As a Field of Study:
 



 Okay, back to Peter once more:

The first part of the book is comprised of four chapters: the first restates Postman’s original argument that “what we love will ruin us” (p. viii), that we are drowning in a “sea of amusements” (p. 156), our “serious discourse [dissolving] into giggles” (ibid.), our culture being “drained by laughter” (ibid.); the second is a biographical sketch of Postman himself which provides a useful and interesting context within which to situate his work and thoughts; the third considers media ecology as both meta-discipline and method; and the fourth surveys the changing technological (and intellectual, emotional, and spiritual) terrain leading up AOTD as well as that of the (nearly) three decades since its publication.

In Part Two Strate focuses on four major themes from AOTD–the news, politics, religion, and education – and reexamines them in the light of our contemporary digital, info-glutted, 24/7/365 media ecology. He finds much cultural grist for the intellectual mill, and finely grinds out a meal of critical insights that should nourish (if only they would taste) even the most militantly unquestioning believer in the universal efficacy of the technological solution. In a chapter called “Breaking the News” (Strate is an inveterate wordsmith and punster, and the double entendre is priceless) he considers Postman’s concern that serious discourse was falling prey to entertainment, and calls our attention to how even the idea of entertainment has changed in a crowded and boisterous free-market. In “The Tribe Has Spoken” Strate considers Postman’s argument that television transforms culture–and, consequently, democracy–in a way that the Founders never could have anticipated; and notes that we are now in the process of squandering the opportunities offered by the Internet and so-called “social media” to use the power of those media for our collective benefit. “Neon Gods” recalls Postman’s conscientious objection to the unlikely–but again widely accepted–possibility that television might constitute a “sacred space” wherein the internal experience of spirit may be fruitfully pursued, and points out that in the noisy, hyper-connected world of wi-fi, cellular, and mobile Internet, silent contemplation has become the quaintest of notions. And in “Grand Theft Education” Strate reconsiders Postman’s description of television as an educational curriculum with no prerequisites, without complexity, without context, dependent not on exposition but on images and sounds and music; he then considers the implications of the increasingly technologized pedagogies of today (what I like to consider, in Jacques Ellul’s words, an extremely cynical technological bluff) for the children–and citizens–of tomorrow. (As I write this the Washington Post has reported on a suburban New York school district where an elementary school has cancelled the annual end-of-the-year kindergarten play so as not to distract these four- and five-year-olds from what I am sure is highly technical work; play and socialization fall in favor of “preparing children for college and career with valuable lifelong skills…”)

In the final chapter of the book, Strate contrasts Marshall McLuhan’s view of understanding media with that of Neil Postman. Edgar Allen Poe’s “Descent Into the Maelstrom” was McLuhan’s guiding metaphor for navigating the treacherous waters of technological change. I’ve had many discussions and even arguments, some quite heated, with colleagues and scholars who insist I am misinterpreting McLuhan (and ignoring his Catholicism) in taking issue with his stance. But it was McLuhan (1997) himself who once said “A moral point of view too often substitutes for understanding in technical matters” (p. 66) and I take him at his word. The old sailor who survives the maelstrom by becoming one with its awesome and destructive flow does so at the expense of the lives of his brothers; he took no risks for them and saved himself instead. Strate, however, proposes Shakespeare’s “The Tempest” as a suitable metaphor within which to understand Postman’s approach to understanding media. Young, naïve Miranda, witnessing the results of her Prospero’s sorcery as storm-tossed sailors are thrown aground on her shore, is both amazed and amused by the spectacle of the first foreigners she’s ever seen. “O brave new world,” she says, breathlessly, “that has such people in’t.” These same words are uttered by John the savage in Huxley’s Brave New World in learning that he would leave his reservation and live in the World State he’d heard of in legend. The dystopic reality he finds, however, is too much for him and he kills himself.

Postman’s approach is to reject the responses of both Miranda and John, to be neither enthralled nor distraught by change, to neither serve technology nor recoil in fear of it. Instead, as Strate tells us, “Postman advocated respectful engagement, open dialogue, and being a loving resistance fighter” (p. 137). Understanding media, technology, and technological change, to Postman, is no different from understanding any aspect of human culture and the human experience: we create it; it does not thereafter shape us in its likeness. Our human intelligence, whether one sees it as evolved or a gift of Divine Providence, has provided us with the therapeutic intervention that serves as antidote to our animal nature: language. And our language allows us to both reason and feel, to make judgments and to empathize. Our literacy is the key to our critical faculties, to understanding that it is we who are agents of change or of stasis, we who are responsible for creating the world we live in, we who construct the realities in which we reside.

It’s time for this message.

And what a great way to connect the end of the review with the opening anecdote. And thank you Peter, that was truly wonderful.

Oh, and there are some end notes:

—

Get the book:

Amazing Ourselves to Death: Neil Postman’s Brave New World Revisited
Lance Strate
New York: Peter Lang, 2014
ISBN 978-1-4331-1930-9
Works Cited

McLuhan, M. (1997). Forward Through the Rearview Mirror: Reflections on and by Marshall McLuhan. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Postman, N. (1985). Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. New York: Penguin.

Strate, L. (2014). Amazing Ourselves to Death: Neil Postman’s Brave New World Revisited. New York: Peter Lang.

And since you bring it up, here are the Amazon links:

 

And when it comes to noting all the ways in which Neil Postman was right about the impact of electronic media on society and culture, well, I guess you could say that comes as second nature too.