Most of what we "know" is actually second-hand knowledge, information and insight that we obtain from others. Further, how we come to know anything is grasped in terms of symbols, and the meaning content of symbols is determined by the form in which they are socially shared. Because of technological innovations, such as the inventions of television and computers, these symbolic forms are being fundamentally altered. It is for this reason that Marshall McLuhan (1967) argued that the medium is the message; what's important is not, for instance, what people watch on television but rather that they watch it. Given their symbolic dependency, changes in both social systems and self-systems have resulted.
Communications determinists argue that culture and institutions are only subsystems of communications technology (for overview of media theories see Murdoch University's Centre for Research in Culture & Communication). Harold Innis (1951), for instance, observed how all mediums of communication are biased in terms of their control of time or space. Media that are durable and difficult to transport--such as the clay tablets upon which ancient Babylonians etched their cuneiform or the stone columns on which ancient Egyptians affixed their hieroglyphics--are time-binding or time-biased. Media that are light and less such as television waves, telephone messages, or the thin parchment carried by pony express riders in the 1860s--are space-binding because they are light and easily transportable. Innis argues that space-binding media encourage the growth of the state, the military, and decentralized institutions. Time-binding media, on the other hand, foster concern with history and tradition, and favor the growth of religion and hierarchical organizations.
So from where do Americans get their information about the events shaping the course of their lives? In addition to my own analyses of the 1995 Washington Post/Kaiser Foundation "Why Don't Americans Trust the Government" survey, take a look at the 1998 Pew Research Center's Biennial News Consumption Survey.
Our greatest fear is that the Internet will become a vehicle of free distribution of information.
Sociology of knowledge types must be having a field day these days. With the internet, information is no longer filtered by such traditional intermediaries as gatekeepers and opinion leaders. Have an ailment like Graves Disease and, with the resources on the WWW, one can be more up-to-date than one's overworked, HMO-ed endocrinologist. Want to check the veracity of a Presidential candidate's claims?
According to a study by search engine maker Inktomi and the NEC Research Institute, the year 2000 began with one billion pages on the Web. In the Presidential campaign of that year, candidate Al Gore argued that high-speed internet access "a fundamental civil right."
What this generation was bred to at television's knees was not wisdom but
cynicism.
--Pauline Kael (1919- ), American movie critic
Television--a medium. So called because it is neither rare nor well done.
---Ernie Kovacs
One half century after television's entry into American homes, the medium remains a favorite scapegoat for the multitude of perceived social and cultural ills arising in post-war American society. Its audience-attracting themes of violence, for instance, are seen to underlie the historically-increasing rates of aggression and homicide. U.S. News & World Report charged in 1955 that the very mind and character of Americans was being altered by television. Over the next twenty years the medium's potency to affect both identity and social structure was to attract the energies of scholars and popular writers alike. Among its suspected effects were (followed by year argument first appearing according to author's informal survey of popular literatures):
In the 1980s, the medium was accused of having effectively destroyed childhood as a developmental stage (Postman 1982). In 1990, a Gallup survey found nearly seven in ten Americans believing that they would be better off or at least not adversely affected if television was to disappear from their lives.
Such beliefs are reminiscent of the 1930s research which saw radio technology centralizing, standardizing, and massifying (Lazarsfeld 1940). Arnheim, for instance, writing a short decade after the radio became a commercial success, condemned the new medium and its listeners in scathingly contemptuous language:
Wireless relieves the listener from the necessity of `mental labours.' Instead of an individual with definite preoccupations who ... seeks certain things and rejects others ... the wireless listener bobs like a cork on the waves, hears one after the other on endless succession of totally unconnected things, and so entirely without a breathing space that he does not manage subsequently to ponder and consider what he has heard. Which suits him just as well (1936:264-65).
And so for the past forty years the radio generation has informed the younger television generations that they have been cognitively impaired by their viewing practices, with such symptoms as shortened attention spans, weakened linguistic abilities, eroded imaginations, impatience with deferred gratification, and inability to distinguish information from wisdom. On the other hand, radio was praised for its ability to evoke imagery, its creativity, and its ability to present dramatic events. In fact, television's "Golden Years," we're told, coincided to its early era when controlled by the radio elite. One wonders whether the next forty years will feature the television generations similarly belittling the virtual reality generations
There is a prevalent view that the printed page is the only truly intellectual medium. Other media are suspect in terms of their ability to satisfy educational needs and are portrayed as "mere" entertainment, at the least offensive end of the spectrum of contempt, to the creation of mindless followers whose very emotional state is molded by the non- print media, at the most hostile end of the specrum. There is, one suspects, a bit of the Protestant Ethic embedded in these critiques: if it is fun and easy it must be bad; intellectual stimulation must be difficult, time consuming, and "work."
Click here to see the percent of Americans watching four or more hours of television a day, by age and education. What measureable effects does such viewership have?
Let's consider the relationship between the hours of television
individuals watch daily and their responses to the NORC General Social
Survey question "In general, do you find life exciting, pretty routine, or
dull?" (variable LIFE) What do you hypothesize this relationship to be? When
thinking about your answer, reflect on two possible causal directions that might
underlie any correlation between these two variables:
Such findings are often the disappointments for those attempting to demonstrate television's causal effects using survey data. Typically there are extremely weak correlations between hours watched and individuals' stereotypes, beliefs and fears. And even if moderate relationships are located they generally are spurious, explainable in terms of individuals' education and age.
From what I hear, one current focus of media researchers is "media literacy." In part, an outgrowth of the likes of the missile gap of the old, Americans nowadays are supposedly more susceptible to the stream of electronic messages than those of other developed (particularly European) nations. Their lack of cognitive immunity from the emotional and irrational component of these messages derives from their media illiteracy.
There are, not surprisingly, a number of groups having a vested interest in this concept and "problem." For the academic field of communications studies, for instance, it is what defines the discipline and what distinguishes it from the myriad of social sciences--and what prevents the discipline from slipping to a media technologies training profession on par with medical technicians and dental hygienists. For those in English, media literacy provides opportunities for grant monies and for expanding the discipline's purview beyond critical/competitive reading/interpretation of paper-based works in an increasingly non- reading, paperless, multimedia world.
Nevertheless, there can be little question that the media ecology produces intriguing effects on its consumers' cognitions, values, identities and behaviors. Television, for instance, provides its viewers with role models in societal situations for which prior generations did not supply scripts, such as the 37 extramarital affairs that Dallas presented during the 1980s. But it is a proverbial two-way street: media power is a function of audience receptivity. Might it be the case, as Muriel Cantor (1987) argues, that people turn to television as a substitute for real experience because of their feelings of helplessness. Click here for studies of the effects of television and radio on the American voter.
And then there's the matter of understanding how mediums' information streams can be contextualized, or framed, by the viewpoints of presenters. If, for instance, a story item conforms to the mindset of those deciding what's "news" then it is more likely to be reported in the press (i.e., in 1992, making Presidential candidate Dan Quayle's "potatoe" misspelling in a grade school classroom a news story because it reaffirmed the belief that he was not the most intellectually gifted of the candidates).
