TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/051490/0514640.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 6.2 KB | 122 lines

                                                                                ESSAY, Page 98

History? Education? Zap! Pow! Cut!


By Pico Iyer


    In his new novel, Vineland, Thomas Pynchon, that disembodied
know-it-all hiding out somewhere inside our nervous system,
performs an eerie kind of magic realism on the McLuhanite world
around us. His is an America, in 1984, in which reflexes,
values, even feelings have been programmed by that All-Seeing
Deity known as the Tube. Remaking us in its own image (every
seven days), TV consumes us much more than we do it. Lovers woo
one another on screens, interface with friends, cite TV sets
as corespondents in divorce trials. And the children who have
grown up goggle-eyed around the electric altar cannot believe
that anything is real unless it comes with a laugh track: they
organize their emotions around commercial breaks and hope to
heal their sorrows with a PAUSE button. Watching their parents
fight, they sit back and wait in silence for the credits.
History for them means syndication; ancient history, the
original version of The Brady Bunch.

    All this would sound crazy to anyone who didn't know that
it was largely true. As the world has accelerated to the fax
and satellite speed of light, attention spans have shortened,
and dimension has given way to speed. A whole new aesthetic --
the catchy, rapid-fire flash of images -- is being born.
Advertising, the language of the quick cut and the zap, has
quite literally set the pace, but Presidents, preachers, even
teachers have not been slow to get the message. Thus ideas
become slogans, and issues sound bites. Op-ed turns into photo
op. Politics becomes telegenics. And all of us find that we
are creatures of the screen. The average American, by age 40,
has seen more than a million television commercials; small
wonder that the very rhythm and texture of his mind are
radically different from his grandfather's.

    Increasingly, in fact, televisionaries are telling us to
read the writing on the screen and accept that ours is a
postliterate world. A new generation of children is growing up,
they say, with a new, highly visual kind of imagination, and
it is our obligation to speak to them in terms they understand.
MTV, USA Today, the PC and the VCR -- why, the acronym itself!
-- are making the slow motion of words as obsolete as
pictographs. The PLAY button's the thing. Writing in the New
York Times not long ago, Robert W. Pittman, the developer of
MTV, pointed out just how much the media have already adjusted
to the music-video aesthetic he helped create. In newspapers,
"graphs, charts and larger-than-ever pictures tell the big
story at a glance. Today's movie scripts are some 25% shorter
than those of the 1940s for the same length movies." Even TV
is cutting back, providing more news stories on every broadcast
and less material in each one.

    There is, of course, some value to this. New ages need new
forms, and addressing today's young in sentences of Jamesian
complexity would be about as helpful as talking to them in
Middle English. Rhetoric, in any case, is no less manipulative
than technology, and no less formulaic. Though TV is a drug,
it can be stimulant as well as sedative. And the culture that
seems to be taking over the future is a culture so advanced in
imagemaking that it advertises its new sports cars with
two-page photographs of rocks (though the Japanese, perhaps,
enjoy an advantage over us insofar as their partly ideogrammatic
language encourages them to think in terms of images: haiku
are the music videos of the printed word). Nor would this be
the first time that technology has changed the very way we
speak: the invention of typography alone, as Neil Postman
writes, "created prose but made poetry into an exotic and
elitist form of expression." No less a media figure than Karl
Marx once pointed out that the Iliad would not have been
composed the way it was after the invention of the printing
press.

    Yet none of this is enough to suggest that we should simply
burn our books and flood the classroom with TV monitors. Just
because an infant cannot speak, we do not talk to him entirely
in "goos" and "aahs"; rather, we coax him, gradually, into
speech, and then into higher and more complex speech. That, in
fact, is the definition of education: to draw out, to teach
children not what they know but what they do not know; to
rescue them, as Cicero had it, from the tyranny of the present.
The problem with visuals is not just that they bombard us with
images and information only of a user-friendly kind but also
that they give us no help in telling image from illusion,
information from real wisdom. Reducing everything to one
dimension, they prepare us for everything except our daily
lives. Nintendo, unlike stickball, leaves one unschooled in
surprise; TV, unlike books, tells us when to stop and think.
"The flow of messages from the instant everywhere," as Daniel
Boorstin points out, "fills every niche in our consciousness,
crowding out knowledge and understanding. For while knowledge
is steady and cumulative, information is random and
miscellaneous." A consciousness born primarily of visuals can
come terrifyingly close to that of the tape-recorder novels
of the vid kids' most successful voice, Bret Easton Ellis, in
which everyone's a speed freak and relationships last about as
long as videos. Life, you might say, by remote control.

    If today's computer-literate young truly do have the
capacity to process images faster than their parents, they
enjoy an unparalleled opportunity -- so long as they learn to
process words as well. They could become the first generation
in history to be bilingual, in this sense, fluent onscreen as
well as off. We need not, when we learn to talk, forget to
communicate in other ways. But only words can teach the use of
words, and ideas beget ideas. So just as certain tribes must
be taught how to read a TV set, we must be taught how to read
the world outside the TV set. Much better, then, to speak up
than down, especially when speech itself is threatened. Nobody
ever said that thinking need be binary. Nobody, that is,
except, perhaps, a computer.