In Amusing Ourselves to Death, the summa of television critique published twenty-four years later, Postman argues that serious television is an impossibility and, to the extent places like PBS try, no one watches it. Unlike print, which “encourages rationality,” television can produce only entertainment with no intertextuality, whether they be sitcoms or “news” shows. Commercials were the modal form of the medium, and politics were reshaped in the soap ad’s image. For Postman, this led to the election of Ronald Reagan and the fact that “Americans are the best entertained and quite likely the least well-informed people in the Western world.” People who read the news were substantially more informed than those who spent the same amount of time watching it. If reading continually reteaches you how to think, television is a perpetual anesthetic. Philosophy, history, complex thought are all impossible on the tube: “Its form works against the content.”
Some of Postman’s views place the work very much in 1985. Jacob Javits, the liberal Republican from New York who supported civil rights, called for Medicare for all in 1970, and sponsored the War Powers Resolution, is now lamented as one of the few from a vanished species of smart, good politicians. For Postman, Javits was the apotheosis of the empty television-commercial politician with nothing to say. Things can always get worse.
With television firmly in place, and the internet rising in the 1990s, some began to perceive that the Gutenberg era of print was historically determined and that the conditions that caused it were coming to an end. Sven Birkerts’s 1994 The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age puts it thus:
Suddenly it feels like everything is poised for change; the slower world that many of us grew up with dwindles in the rearview mirror. The stable hierarchies of the printed page—one of the defining norms of that world—are being superseded by the rush of impulses through freshly minted circuits.
Later, he continues:
Visual and nonvisual technology in every way encourages in the user a heightened and ever-changing awareness of the present. It works against historical perception, which must depend on the inimical notions of logic and sequential succession. If the print medium exalts the word, fixing it into permanence, the electronic counterpart reduces it to a signal, a means to an end.
Some of Birkerts’s predictions, like that facts would supplant fiction, turned out to be wildly untrue. But he saw to the core of what was coming:
We can expect that curricula will be further streamlined, and difficult texts in the humanities will be pruned and glossed. One need only compare a college textbook from twenty years ago to its contemporary version. A poem by Milton, a play by Shakespeare—one can hardly find the text among the explanatory notes nowadays. . . . As the circuit supplants the printed page, and as more and more of our communications involve us in network processes—which of their nature plant us in a perpetual present—our perception of history will inevitably alter.
Moving further from his present into our future, Birkerts predicted that
the isolated reader may remain, but the audience is gone and is not likely to reappear. And this loss impinges heavily, very heavily, on the quality of our cultural life. It assures that there will be a sharp split between extremes—between an academic elite and a mass population—with no mediating center.
Two decades after Birkerts published The Gutenberg Elegies, I found Jim Paul’s neglected 1996 fiction, Medieval in LA, in the used section of Powell’s. Interspersing textual selections from and about the Middle Ages with accounts of a creative professional visiting Los Angeles, the book held that we were already reentering a medieval world of image mysteries. Around the same time, I noticed a cash register at a fast-food restaurant that used pictograms instead of text. As we entered the early Trump years, with the rise and rise of short-form video, I started hearing from virtually every academic I knew that their students’ ability to read anything longer than a few pages was disappearing.