Waiting for the Internet’s ‘Mad as Hell’ Moment
Now that TV is the place for serious people with long attention spans, we’re really in trouble
Dear reader: This article ended up being longer than I set out to make it, and you, the average Medium reader, are notorious for not finishing articles. So I’ll make a deal with you, based on a tactic I stole from John Oliver. Finish this article, and at the end I’ll give you that which you most crave in your online existence: a GIF of a cute little hamster eating a miniature burrito! Mmmkay? As Oliver says, the GIF is “as magical and as uncomplicated as you think.”
They’re telling us that we’re living in a “golden age” of television. Game of Thrones! House of Cards! Army of Darkness! OK, so that last one wasn’t a TV show, but you get the idea. TV is now a place for serious people to talk about serious things and be taken seriously. Right?
These days, the answer everyone gives seems to be yes. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing; now there’s more room for serious, cinematic serialized dramas on TV. But a big picture look at the melding of TV, internet, and other media may also have darker implications for society at large. A recent article by Alexander Zaitchik at Salon has pointed this out. In my opinion, Zaitchik completely nails it, while also touching on a theme that deserves to be expounded on in greater detail, perhaps on a website with less constraints for article length and less — zero — pay for its authors (hello Medium!). Ipso facto, the rationale for this article. Here we go.
At the dawn of human history, humans were hairy, smelly creatures that couldn’t run particularly fast and were generally easy prey for cool looking animals like lions, and even less-cool-looking animals like hippopotamuses (hippopotami?). They did have two obvious advantages: uncannily large brains and hands that would allow them to easily build and manipulate tools. But these attributes could only allow humans to obtain important things like food and fend of predators if they worked together with other humans. How?
Communication. Sure, some other animals had basic forms of communication, but we humans took it to a whole new level, using our powers of communication to enhance our inherent tool-building skills and eventually go beyond mere hunter-gatherer clans to form advanced societies.
Now then, what do those societies need in order to continue to be societally effective and do other society-ish things? Obviously, they need to keep communicating, but about what? Perhaps they can have important discussions about the course that society should take (politics, economics, and all that good stuff). Or maybe they just want some entertainment. But there are many kinds of entertainment. Loosely categorized, these include “serious” entertainment, which is much more likely to feature implications that bleed into the political sphere, as well as a wide array of attention-grabbing activities that are just good clean fun, if sometimes a bit shallow.
These two main types of entertainment were present from pretty early on. The Greeks came up with drama, as we all know, as well as epics (as in poems, not fails). The Romans came up with the Coliseum and the nifty idea of staging blood sports in front of thousands of people. This wasn’t just a Eurocentric thing; for instance, Mesoamerican civilizations came up with a game called “tlachtli” that was a lot like basketball except that if you lost you were executed.
But the Roman example is particularly pertinent since they were the ones who on record as coming up with the idea of “bread and circuses” (circi?), the idea that the masses could be kept under wraps by bare bones supplies and plenty of mindless activities to gossip about. Seemingly non-political entertainment like gladiator matches had implications for society after all, but they ended up having the inverse effect of “serious” drama and literature that tacked issues of government and politics. While art and literature could potentially drum up support for widespread political participation, gladiator fights helped to ensure that the unwashed masses didn’t try to meddle with the activities best left to the ruling class.
As these genres of communication and entertainment evolved, the actual way communication took place was still via basic forms: speech, and later writing, though all writing had to be produced by hand on either stones or flimsy documents like papyrus scrolls. Reading and writing weren’t particularly fun, and they were generally left to nerds who later realized that the fact that they were part of a small, elite group and could use their rarified skill set to gain a disproportionate share of power. In Europe, that’s one of the reasons there was a Dark Age (another was that the whole “bread and circuses” thing kind of crapped out).
Then something important happened. Around 1450, a German guy named Gutenberg invented something called the printing press. You may have heard of it. It didn’t change the grammatical structure of language at all, but it made it a lot easier for text to be printed onto paper quickly.
All of a sudden, reading was a thing. In Europe, people started to write in their native languages instead of Latin. News and discoveries spread quickly. Written drama and poetry became a serious form of entertainment. In the centuries that followed, revolutionary ideas like the enlightenment were hatched. Some countries united, in many cases spurred on by a common language, others fell apart. A new form of government, the representative republic, became more common — evidence that the elitist bread and circuses strategy had been made less effective.
Writing was no longer just for the elite; it trickled down to the middle class, and to a certain extent, the working class. It had many advantages over spoken communication: it could be read and re-read for comprehension, easily referenced and cataloged, easily preserved and fact checked. But it was also a solitary activity, devoid of the energy present in spoken communications.
Spoken communications would eventually strike back. In the 19th and 20th century, a string of innovations would steer the future of communication back toward the audio-visual. There was the telephone, the radio, and the movies, all of which happened within a span of 20 years or so in the late 1800s.
It was the dawn of a new age — again. The post-Gutenberg landscape had given a massive advantage to written communications: books, newspapers, even forms that didn’t use a press such as letters. But these still had to be transported physically to readers. Electricity allowed for communications to happen instantaneously.
Granted, this happened first for writing as well in the form of the telegraph, but the telegraph never caught on for long messages; think of it as a 19th century version of Twitter. The telephone meant that people could have instantaneous conversations with anyone, anywhere. And radio allowed for important people to broadcast news and entertainment to a large audience with zero down time.
Like the printing press, these media had an effect on politics. Take, for example, the “Fireside chats” given over the radio in the 30s by US president Franklin Roosevelt, who ended up being the longest serving president in US history. It was the return of the good speaker, who suddenly didn’t have to depend on petrifying his or her ideas in crusty old books and could blast the general public with firebombs of charisma.
Needless to say, it was a bit one-sided too. Regular users could talk with friends over the phone, but they sure as hell couldn’t broadcast via radio without the capital to buy lots of equipment, and the talent to use it. Though there had always been “gatekeepers” (elite media owners who decided what information would and would not make it to the public) even when the press was king, radio and film reinforced that by establishing themselves as dominant media forms, and setting the entry bar to these media forms even higher.
In this era, film remained the outlier. Though it was the only new medium able to harness the awesome power of moving images, it was unable to broadcast those images instantaneously. But that changed too. In the 50s, a little thing called Television was implemented, and voila! Widespread, instantaneous distribution of sound and image to a funny looking box that everyone soon would put in their living rooms. It was the decline of the printed word, and for that matter, earlier innovations like radio and film.
If you’ve made it this far, you probably have a long attention span, and thus it’s pretty likely you have some idea who Marshall McLuhan is. But in case you don’t, here’s a brief sum-up: he was a professor from Canada who was famous for his landmark 1964 book, Understanding Media, about TV and other media. In the title of the first chapter of the book, which has become probably the most famous chapter title ever, he stated that “the medium is the message” — in other words, technology shapes human life. He also distinguished between “hot” and “cool” media: hot media exclude participation, cool media prompt higher levels of participation.
After devising this intriguing and potentially very useful system of media classification, he then uses it to analyze television in a perplexing, Freakonomics-y way: he calls it a “cool” medium. Why, Marshall, why? His case is a bit shaky. For instance, in relation to film (a hot medium, of course) the television image is lower quality. Therefore, TV is a cool medium. Huh? What happens when we invent the UHDTV 48 years later? His response is that the higher quality would make it a different medium. There you have it, folks. The TV you’re watching today isn’t really TV.
McLuhan felt that television and “the electric age” brought people together, unlike writing — as well as earlier electronic media — which isolated and divided, and were therefore hot. TV, a cool medium, would foster greater participation (apparently the ability to channel surf counts as “greater participation”) and turn us all into one big happy global village. Okay, so he wasn’t that sappy about it, but that was the basic idea.
But if “the medium is the message”, and technology controls our collective fate, would television really steer us toward greater participation in the societal decision making process? Or would it merely deliver bread and circuses, or at least just circuses, to our households at light speed?
The answer was a little bit of both. By 1964, TV had already had plenty of game changing moments. Edward R. Murrow used it to take down McCarthyism. Richard Nixon managed to avoid being bumped from the VP spot in 1952 with the televised “Checkers” speech, then lost the presidency to Kennedy after botching a televised debate eight years later.
(Side note: one might also make the case that TV helped to build the coming hippie movement and is thus a force for democracy, though that notion is likely dispelled by looking outside the US. The Soviet Union had TV, and in Argentina, where I currently live, TV was seized by the dictators in the 70s for propaganda purposes.)
But politically minded TV may have been the exception. The 2005 movie about Edward Murrow, Good Night and Good Luck, illustrates this perfectly. As Murrow is bearing down on McCarthy, his bosses are turning the screws on him to do more puff pieces, such as an interview with the then-closeted Liberace. Right as the McCarthy drama fest finally runs its course, Murrow’s boss announces that he’ll be pulling the plug. Informed that he will have only five shows left on air, Murrow retorts, “You won’t like the subject matter.” Burn!
There was still the possibility that the corporate overlords who reigned supreme over the content of the airwaves might act as philosopher kings, programming worthwhile material for the good of the general public. But whether they actually did or not was a coin toss. Heads, the public got Ed Murrow. Tails, they got Liberace. And in general, the public seemed to prefer tails.
But in the decade that followed Understanding Media, TV had its fair share of backlash. In 1970, Gil Scott Heron oh-so-famously said that “the revolution will not be televised” — the revolution will, however, “put you in the driver’s seat”. I’ll bet that Heron probably didn’t think that TV was a very cool medium.
Then, in the 1976 movie Network, Howard Beale (played by Peter Finch) issued the line that’s been stuck in your head since you looked at the opening photo of this article: “I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it anymore!” Why was he mad? Because he was “a human being, goddammit!” And he wanted everyone watching his show to shout out their windows that they were “mad as hell” too. If you don’t get the references, just click through the link above to watch the original clip.
Now, to be fair, the counter-cultural-ness of this was called into question somewhat by the fact that it was released by a major movie studio. But nonetheless, it struck a chord. A good chunk of the American people realized that by that point, the purpose of TV in practice was not to educate so much as to stupefy.
Fast forward a couple of decades. TV has undergone some big changes, namely cable, which has prompted the creation of channels such as MTV and CNN (I imagine that if that network’s founders could see ahead to 2014 and the CNN coverage of the Malaysia flight, they might have had second thoughts about founding it). But the real news is a new technology that for a brief and irritating period of time was known as “the information superhighway”, or just “the internet”.
The technology allowed text and computer files to be sent instantaneously, though in the beginning it was really slow, and your computer had to make a sound that was something like a police car trying to gargle mouthwash for a few seconds in order to connect. Nevertheless, it was the single biggest innovation for written text since Gutenberg. Communication, after going through revolutions and counter-revolutions, was about to go through a counter-counter-revolution. A whole boat load of internet-based innovations, from smartphones to torrents to social networks, were not far behind.
What has the internet done? First of all, it has no doubt increased the importance of reading, an activity that people thought was on the way out just a few decades ago. It’s also shifted the way both audio and video material is viewed. In short, it takes all the inventions we’ve talked about: the printing press, telegraph, telephone, radio, film, and television, and wraps them up into one tasty information sandwich on your home computer and smartphone.
It also offers the possibility for average citizens to publish material and reach a broad-based audience without corporate printing presses or TV stations. The participation it allows makes it the ultimate “cool” medium, though old man McLuhan, if he were still around, would probably have called it “hot” because he liked being counterintuitive and didn’t much care for the written word. The so-called gatekeepers are theoretically shaking in their boots.
Now that so many different media have been rolled into one, the difference between the internet and TV is less a question of hardware and more a question of your state of mind. With a kickass TV show like Game of Thrones, you just can’t download it as a torrent, you’ve got to watch it on your UHDTV. The lines between TV and internet sufficiently blurred, the internet then becomes a magnet for all content that is unnecessary or trivial — the bread and circuses — and serious, intelligent media migrates to TV.
This isn’t to say that stupid crap doesn’t still feature on television (I’ll have more on that in a bit, when I examine #catfish). There are even some systemic advantages TV still retains as a mass purveyor of dumbness. But, slowly but surely, that dumbness is migrating to its new natural habitat: the internet. And just like that, TV goes from making people “mad as hell” to being in a golden age, if only because we’ve finally found a more effective repository for stupidity.
Now that TV has entered its new golden age, we can all go home and be quiet, right? Not if Zaitchik, the Salon writer I’ve been waiting this whole article to quote, has anything to say about it:
“Staring at images on a little screen — that are edited in ways that weaken the brain’s capacity for sustained and critical thought, that encourage passivity and continued viewing, that are controlled by a handful of publicly traded corporations, that have baked into them lots of extremely slick and manipulating advertising — is not the most productive or pleasurable way to spend your time, whether you’re interested in serious social change, or just want to have a calm, clear and rewarding relationship with the real world around you.
But wait, you say, you’re not just being a killjoy and a bore, you’re living in the past. Television in 2014 is not the same as television in 1984, or 1994… The rise of on-demand viewing and token progressive programming has complicated the picture. But only by a little. The old arguments were about structure, advertising, structure, ownership, and structure, more than they were about programming content, or what time of the day you watched it. Less has changed than remains the same.
But here’s the real danger, nestled nicely in the next paragraph:
Open a window on social media during prime time, and you’ll find young journalists talking about TV under Twitter avatars of themselves in MSNBC makeup. Fifteen years ago, these people might have attended media reform congresses discussing how corporate TV pacifies and controls people, and how those facts flow from the nature of the medium. Today, they’re more likely to status-update themselves on their favorite corporate cable channel, as if this were something to brag about.
Allow me to paraphrase. Back in the day, the powers that be had an imperfect but workable recipe for turning our brains in to nice steaming bowls of beef stew using television. But some people saw through that plan. Today, TV is really just as dumb as ever, but it is out-dumbed by the internet. When these two forces work together… Ding! Stew’s ready.
I know what you’re about to say. “Mr. Reed, you sir are not only a hypocrite for using the internet to criticize the internet, but you’re wrong! The internet has ushered in a shining new age of open information and hacktivism! Surely it’s good that people are reading again, is it not? And have there not been despotic governments brought to their knees by the ever just, ever vigilant force of an internet-empowered populace?”
The short answer to the question of whether or the internet has produced social good is, “yes”. The long answer is, “yes, for those people who manage to wade through the porn pop ups and Nigerian prince scams to find it.”
There’s also the issue of what “social good” really means. If it means the ability to rapidly crank out finger-wagging articles at a snooty Ivy League blowhard who writes in Time magazine that he won’t apologize for his white privilege, then it’s a significant social good. If it means helping to organize community groups with high-minded short term goals like picking up trash and finding homes for cute baby kittens, the internet has probably allowed for a small but noticeable boost too. If it means the kind of transformative, long term change that Zaitchik believes (and I believe) is necessary — as he puts it, “pulling off a civilizational Houdini trick [that] will require not just switching energy tracks, but somehow confronting the ‘endless growth’ paradigm of the Industrial Revolution that continues to be shared by everyone from Charles Koch to Paul Krugman” — the internet has done virtually nothing.
Want to hear something discouraging? Sure you do. I just looked up two subjects on Twitter. First, the aforementioned multisyllabic douchebag who loves white privilege. Second, #catfish. Don’t know about #catfish? Here’s all you need to know.
Based on my own online viewing habits, I would have thought that whitey would have held his own, generating a good amount of hate to fill up the Twitter feed. But no. In just one minute of examining, #catfish got 20 hits and the Ivy League twerp got just one.
But wait, you say, how about looking at an important issue that doesn’t involve just scolding a bratty white kid, but that affects us all in a big way? Fine, you asked for it: #catfish vs. #climatechange. When I looked, climate change was getting about two tweets per minute. Not bad, but still one tenth of #catfish. A stat that is both sad and ironic, since a lot of catfish will probably die as a result of climate change.
Is it right for me to be this pessimistic about the internet? What about the reading aspect? Isn’t it good that people are reading text again, instead of being glued to moving images as Orwell and Ray Bradbury predicted? I guess so. But there’s also the fact that the internet is possibly making us worse readers, as this review of 2010’s The Shallows asserts. The internet promised to be the return of reading, a medium theoretically better for thoughtful consideration, but in the end all it did was make reading even shallower than watching TV. These days, anything over 1,500 words is considered “longform” and must always be accompanied by a ton of cool ass GIFs, à la the New York Times’s “Snow Fall,” in order for anyone to pay attention. Which reminds me, if you’ve made it this far, you’re an exceptional human being. Don’t worry, you’ll get your hamster burrito GIF I promised soon enough.
What of the internet’s awesome power to bring down oppressive regimes? What about the Arab Spring? What about that Egyptian guy who was so grateful to the internet for helping to oust the country’s dictators, he named his daughter “Facebook”? Sure, events such as the Arab Spring — or for that matter, Occupy Wall Street — would have been harder or even impossible without the internet. But what good did it do in the end? Egyptians used the internet to tear down a dictator, and two years later, they got another dictator. Occupy Wall Street protesters set out to protest inequality, and they got more inequality. Served with a side order of pepper spray and wrongful assault convictions.
What about the power of the internet to “get rid of the gatekeepers” and make everyone his or her own printing press, film studio, etc? There’s plenty of truth to this, and it’s one of the aspects of the internet I’m least cynical about. There’s no doubt that the internet has made possible a great number of high quality journalistic and artistic outlets that couldn’t have existed before, among many other irrefutably positive things.
But ultimately, once the general public was given the power to be its own gatekeeper, it made the same choice as the old gatekeepers in Good Night and Good Luck made between Murrow and Liberace. Theoretically, content that serves the greater good should be getting the pickup it never could when the elite gatekeepers were keeping it from us. But instead, the user generated content that goes viral is stuff like fat guys singing the Numa Numa song and cats playing the piano. Which I’ll be the first to admit is fun. But it doesn’t seem to leave any room for the important stuff to go viral, except for perhaps the occasional case of police brutality. And all the Upworthy “YOU WON’T BELIEVE WHAT HAPPENS NEXT!” headlines have done nothing to change that, except perhaps make you feel like a guinea pig in their twisted psychological experiment after they dupe you into clicking on their crap.
And there’s something even more sinister about the gatekeeper-removal aspect of the internet: the gatekeepers really haven’t gone anywhere at all. They’re just hiding behind hashtags like #catfish. Removing the barriers to content creation has at best done little to nothing, and at worst, made us an active part of our own misinformation. The gatekeepers have figured out how to keep us incessantly publishing social network posts about their useless bullshit, and if it’s really necessary to keep us at bay, they have their ways. What ways, you ask? Here’s a two word answer: net neutrality. Here’s another: NSA spying.
And so it is. We’ve come full circle — or should I say say, full circus. The internet, the biggest revolution in written text since Gutenberg’s printing press, has perhaps undone much of the progress the printing press has made. There’s a universe of information at our fingertips, yet we seem nearly as susceptible to “bread and circuses” as we were in Roman times, when most people couldn’t even read.
Is the medium really the message? Are we masters of our fates, or is our course predetermined by our technological milieu? The answer is, as it has been throughout this essay, a little bit of both. Perhaps Rome would not have been taken over by Augustus if there had been a hashtag #EtTuBruti. Or perhaps people would be too busy tweeting about gladiator matches to care.
Or maybe technology is bad. Maybe today, without the mind-melting combination of TV and the internet, we’d be less distracted, and able to come up with more effective solutions to climate change and the fact that our society is founded on the physical impossibility of perpetual growth. Maybe we need just the right kind of technology; after all, no one complained about the printing press killing attention spans, but everyone complains about TV and the internet doing so. Or it could be that, no matter what kind of media we use, we’re subject to the same greed and ambition that eventually brought down the Roman Empire. All the technology in the world — or none of it — will never change the fact that we’re human, all too human.
Nevertheless, I still have a few shreds of hope left. Despite the TV/internet death cycle and absurdities like #catfish, humanity can get better, we can confront its long term issues, and technology has a role to play. But the internet needs a “mad as hell” moment. People need to be shaken out of their hashtags and convinced to pay attention to the things that matter.
It’s something so important that we might need to say it with old media, the way Network used film to comment on television. How about a TV show? After all, TV’s having a “golden age” right now, and the internet most certainly isn’t.
But somehow I have a feeling that the best we can hope for is a GIF file, or maybe a couple of tweets. Oh well. At least it makes for a catchy tagline: “I’m as mad as hell, and I’m going to tweet about it!”
Postscript: You made it! Congratulations! Here’s your GIF of a cute hamster eating a miniature burrito, you’ve earned it:
Postpostscript: Another hat tip to John Oliver for digging this clip up. I didn’t realize this earlier, but Oliver’s new show is dedicated to “subjects that Americans, either out of ignorance or owing to an aversion to facing hard truths, [are] talking and thinking much too little about.” Could this be the internet’s “mad as hell” moment? Maybe, though I think it’ll probably come some time during season 2. Long live the Golden Age of Television!
