A Nobel Prize In Literature for Bob Dylan? Give Me A Break!

60s song writer Bob Dylan deserved recognition - maybe a ifetime Grammy - but not a Nobel in Literature.

Okay, let's get serious here: Bob Dylan is a great musician, one of my favorites from the 60s and the Vietnam War era - who's earned many kudos e.g. for songs like 'Blowin' in the Wind' and 'Hey, Mr. Tambourine Man'. . But a Nobel Prize in literature? No way, that's like awarding the Nobel Prize in Physics to Bill Nye, the Science Guy for all his popularizing contributions over the years. Nye's popular expositions have been useful to advance public learning and appreciation but don't warrant a Nobel. Not when so many excellent physicists like Steven Weinberg and Arthur B. McDonald might be waiting in the wings. In the same vein, Dylan's popular rock songs have done much to advance consciousness - using a musical medium - but don't warrant a Nobel, even given his more recent work.

So I agree with the New York Times op-ed take ('Notebook', Oct. 13):

"Yes, Mr. Dylan is a brilliant lyricist. Yes, he has written a book of prose poetry and an autobiography. Yes, it is possible to analyze his lyrics as poetry. But Mr. Dylan’s writing is inseparable from his music. He is great because he is a great musician, and when the Nobel committee gives the literature prize to a musician, it misses the opportunity to honor a writer.

As reading declines around the world, literary prizes are more important than ever. A big prize means a jump in sales and readership even for a well-known writer. But more than that, awarding the Nobel to a novelist or a poet is a way of affirming that fiction and poetry still matter, that they are crucial human endeavors worthy of international recognition"


Many will object, but the truth is that reading is taking a hit, and a celebration of actual literature would have signaled respect for reading, without conflating it with music or entertainment.  Yes, folk rock hits like Dylan's as well as Joan Baez, did do a lot to implant peace memes in a war era, but they succeeded because of also being entertaining and great to listen to. Be that as it may, there were a number of worthy candidates the Nobel Committee for Literature could have considered, including:

Adonis (Syrian poet, essayist)

Ngugi Wa Thiong’o (Kenyan novelist, playwright, short story writer, and essayist)

Jon Fosse (Norwegian novelist and playwright)

Ko Un (South Korean poet)

Haruki Murakami - Japanese novelist

Julian Barnes (English novelist and essayist)

Don De Lillo - author of 'Libra' - a fictional portrayal about the setting up of Lee Harvey Oswald in the Kennedy assassination

Margaret Atwood (Canadian novelist- author of 'The Handmaid's Tale')

Most Americans would not have heard of any of these, but that's the point. They might, on learning of the award, been enticed to read their works.  Moreover,  no black authors have won the Nobel since  Nigerian Wole Soyinka in 1986.  So why give it to a 75-year old white guy who has accumulated all the fame he needs?

In fact, I would argue that Margaret Attwood deserved the Nobel in Literature before Dylan,  simply for her novel,    'The Handmaid's Tale'. This was  a cautionary future tale about what transpires when evangelicals take over the U.S. government, outlaw abortion and force pregnant women to carry to term - or be severely punished.

Each of the above, in my humble estimation, would have been  more suitable for a Nobel Literature award than Bob Dylan.  The Literature Prize has also often gone to writers who have been punished for fighting for civil rights, and all three (Ko Un, Adonis and Ngugi ) have been imprisoned.  Adonis and Ngugi have both lived in exile. What has happened to Dylan? Was he sent into exile in Canada for trying to avoid the draft in the 1960s? Nope. Was he ever imprisoned for taking a stand? Nope.  He just produced some terrific poetry set to music for which he merits props and maybe another special music award, but not a Nobel.

The Nobel, in whatever area -  let us agree - represents the ultimate 'winner take all' prize. That win is nearly entirely invested in fame and gravitas that can propel a hitherto unknown career to greater heights. The ultimate 'winner take all'  aspect means you don't award it to a guy who already has a ton of (music) awards and all the global recognition one can conceive.  

Beyond that I have a problem with awarding the Nobel to a guy whose work you can just listen to on an Ipod. How difficult is that? Reading any good literature ought to take time and effort, and also compel the reader to put his smart phone away at least for a bit to commit to the page. No selfies, no texts, just reading the masterful work of another. Giving the Nobel to a glorified rock singer does nothing to change that, and believe me the percentage of readers is getting lower.

As recently as two years ago The Atlantic’s Jordan Weissmann noted:

The Pew Research Center reported last week that nearly a quarter of American adults had not read a single book in the past year. As in, they hadn’t cracked a paperback, fired up a Kindle, or even hit play on an audiobook while in the car. The number of non-book-readers has nearly tripled since 1978.”

This is absolutely incredible! But it also helps to explain why so many polls taken recently appear to show the mindlessness that Thomas Jefferson worried about in terms of citizen responsibility. A lot of this mental regression is tied to the retreat from a literary culture highlighted by Neil Postman in his book,  'The Disappearance of Childhood'.    As far back as thirty years ago Postman warned how adult Americans were apparently regressing in mentality toward childish pastimes and preoccupations.

Postman’s main contention (so germane today with the digital youth generation) was that only adults are privy to the secrets locked into the printed word. If a supposed adult wanted to emphatically separate himself from the world and concerns of the child, he had to demonstrate it mentally - by his reading fare. That meant accessing a realm in printed material that the child mind wasn't equipped to process or understand. Tweet and snapchat all you want and "friend" a million buddies on Facebook, you're still a de facto, intellectual child.

Now, go read the first chapter of  Tolstoy's 'War and Peace'. If you succeed - meaning you can answer comprehension questions about it later- we will reconsider your status. (University degrees may or may not count given how inflated most grades are today, because of the teacher evaluation system).  Any person can basically access an electronic medium if they apply even minimal effort.  That includes cell phones, tv, video games and twitter. Any person- even a ten year old kid-  can also employ those media to blab nonsense, gossip or indulge in aimless chatter. But what defines the adult mind is whether it can tackle a serious print work such as William Shakespeare's King Lear.

In his Chapter Seven (‘The Adult Child’), for example, Postman lays out a summary of his thesis on the disappearance of childhood in tandem with defining the modern conception of “adult” and what it has evolved (devolved?) into after the emergence of video culture. As he puts it, the modern idea of the adult “is largely a product of the printing press.” Further, almost all the attributes we associate with adulthood “are those either generated or amplified by a literary culture”. These include:


- A capacity for self-restraint

- A tolerance for delayed gratification

- A sophisticated ability to think sequentially and conceptually

- A preoccupation with both historical continuity and the future


Want to know in a nutshell why the Trump backers are so devoid of facts? Well, consider all the attributes above and ask yourself when was the last time you recall seeing any embodied in the Donald.  This is a character who wouldn't even read his daily press briefs during the primary campaign. (He might now, but given how many red herrings he's spouted one wonders.)

Postman then goes on to note that as electronic (visual) media assumed center stage “different attitudes and character traits come to be valued and a new, diminished definition of adulthood begins to emerge”. This new stunted version of the adult reaches its apotheosis (nadir?) in the adult child having arrived with the television-video age - which primary characteristic flattens out all differences between ages. (If Postman were alive today he'd doubtless identify Trump as the ultimate "man child".)

In other words, one required literary heft and markers - say in ability to read weighty fictional works(like James Joyce's Ulysses , or Milton's Paradise Lost, or Leo Tolstoy's War and Peacce) to finally separate adults from children, adult minds from childish imitators.  Thus, literary culture and mature works provided the truest litmus test to distinguish an adult from a child. Coloring books? Not so much because any kid of five or six could do that.  Today, we are lucky to be able to see the average adult read even light fictional fare, say like Jonathan Franken's 'Freedom', or Don De Lillo's 'Libra'.

The Nobel Literature Prize award to Bob Dylan did nothing to stanch the flow of millions to more electronic - social media titillation, net addiction and twitter, selfie storms. It did nothing to halt the flood of more adults to what my psychologist friend Pat Banister called the "child subculture". That enclave where magical thinking and fanciful flight from reality reigns, and too many adults prefer the refuge of coloring books to reading a book like Franzen's 'Freedom'.

The Nobel Lit Committee muffed it  by giving its award to someone who didn't need it, as opposed to a long time writer whose recognition might have spurred greater interest in actual literary fiction.. In effect, the Committee snubbed all real writers, including the ones listed above. Whether people will take even less time to read as a result of this snub  remains to be seen. What we do know is there is an exponentially increasing obsession with electronic devices - whether for 'Pokemon GO', distracted texting or just watching youtube videos of kittens punching doggies.

The Nobel cognoscenti had the golden opportunity to introduce people around the world to the vast diversity of literature they might access - say via a Google search.  In effect, providing the potential to enhance their mental maturity as opposed to feeding more childish obsessions. Instead, the Literature Nobel went to a guy mainly known for 50- year old folk rock songs that have already propelled him to multiple music awards including the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

A sad day for those who appreciate genuine literature and would have liked to have seen it recognized!

CERN Set To Rupture Dimensions And Unleash Demons? Total Balderdash!

One of the demons people fear is likely to be released if CERN's Large Hadron Collider Is back  up and running.

What is it about basic physics experiments, i.e. into the basic nature of the universe, that drive an element of humanity into total paranoia and hysteria? Now that CERN is ready to commence experiments once more with the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) it's been noted that wacky, halfwit speculations are circulating the memosphere like a virtual brain virus (WSJ, April 5, p. A1 and A10).

One nutty blogger actually tried to pin last year's deadly Nepal earthquake on LHC trial tests, while a headline of an opinion piece published by the Coldwater MI 'Daily Reporter' screamed: "We Should Be Very Careful About CERN!". Why?  Because you don't understand its working principles?

Meanwhile, as the WSJ piece put it (A10):

"Last summer, Internet chatter about CERN's role in hastening Doomsday spiked"

Showing again that too many without adequate knowledge have way too much time on their hands.

Acknowledging the frenzy, CERN's cognoscenti put up a FAQ on its website called "The Surreal FAQ" and in its one of many deadpan rejoinders to the nonsense assured one and all "it won't open a door to another dimension" also adding: "Shiva, a gift from the Indian government represents the life force and we have lots of statues. Our logo is meant to represent particle accelerators, not Satan"

Sadly even having to acknowledge no obeisance to an entity ("Satan") that doesn't exist anyway.

Then there are the dime store psychologists, never mind they lack even a dime store exposure to psychology. The WSJ piece cites a Michael Barkun - an emeritus professor of Political Science at Syracuse University who offered the chestnut that "CERN has a special ability to attract the conspiracy subculture".

But as I noted in my post from two days ago it was Dr. Pat Bannister in the 1970s who distinguished a conspiracy (sub-) culture from the genuine conspiracy research community. And the yokels proposing CERN's LHC opening up "doors to other dimensions"  and unleashing "demons" are definitely of the first category. They are basically adult children who lack a grasp of even basic physical concepts and hence concoct whole cloth nutso nonsense that some - like Barkun - generously describe as "conspiracies".  A better word for them is unsupported, unverifiable bullshit.

According to Barkun quoted in the WSJ (ibid.):

"Any time you have forces that are high energy and invisible, like those in the Large Hadron Collider, they lend themselves to these kind of interpretations"

Which is debatable. It is rather more plausible that such off the wall interpretations will come from those with a minimal science background, or even reading background. Which are exactly the points made by those such as Neil Postman and Pat Bannister. If you think and operate at a cartoon level, and your reading is at a comic book, superstition or cartoon level,  eschewing anything "difficult",  you will emerge as a child. Then you will entertain childish ideation.

This is the specific case of the Raelians also cited in the WSJ piece.  According to the article: "They see life on Earth as the creation of scientists from another planet, and announced last year they would stage a demonstration at CERN's campus to protest the LHC's destruction of tiny life forms contained within particles"

No, you just can't make this shit up. These dopes truly believe subatomic particles like quarks harbor miniature life forms. As one CERN spokesperson put it: "I guess they more or less see particles as planets with very small people on them:"

Clearly the Raelians ignore the fact these life forms would have far more to worry about being gobbled by ordinary dust mites. Fortunately, they must have come to their senses as they never showed up.

Some of the blame I think might be placed on CERN for willingly participating in fantasy fiction fare that weak minds might find believable. For example, CERN chose to participate in the 2009 film 'Angels and Demons' which spun a yarn about using antimatter created in the LHC to construct a super bomb. In fact, CERN's physicists contributed to the script! Bad idea, because even a loose association like that would trigger neurons in the collective brains of a paranoid child subculture that grew up with video games and X-men comics. Then they might conjecture such fictional participation was concealing a real one.

Kate Kahle, who oversees social media for CERN (and has a physics degree), was quoted in the WSJ piece admitting she "tried to engage directly with serial conspiracy theorists with mixed results." She recalled one of the responses to her denial of occult mischief: "Was that a 'no' to the portal or to the demons?"

Of course, Pat Bannister would have advised  Kahle  from the outset not to waste her time because none of the occult lot she addressed were at the level of  mentally mature adults. That is,  who could grasp her words within a rational setting as opposed to an irrational one embraced as more real by semi-literates, unread in even classic fare like 'Beowulf' or The Odyssey'.  (Far less factual scientific books like Hawking's 'Brief History of Time',  or Peter Sturrock's 'The UFO Enigma: A New Review of the Physical Evidence', (It would be like arguing with a kindergartner whether the 2nd derivative can be used to obtain the maximum of a function.)

Again, the conspiracy culture approaches its conspiracy thinking - if that is what it can be called - from a cartoon level of simple analogies and caricatures: i.e. good vs. evil, '666' means antichrist,  high energy machines imply dimensional ruptures etc. No genuine research or investigations of any scientific or mathematical validity go into it. Bannister herself would point out the very mention of "demons" immediately discloses the person as possessing the mental age of a 5 or 6 year old.  Hence, no serious person would treat such a "conspiracy" as the rational product of a sound or mature mind.

Kahle's error lay in making that assumption (of dealing with rational minds) as opposed to overgrown babies who combine an extravagant imagination with a sense of profound entitlement to have their codswallop respected. Much like too many in Google groups who believe just because they can express an absurd opinion on the Kennedy assassination they can expect it to be accepted.(Or they base their opinions on a work of fraudulent scholarship like the Warren Report.)

In the end, CERN's high energy experiments will be performed and no untoward effects - like mini black holes or cosmic ruptures- will be manifested. At that stage one hopes the regressed infants and their ideation will settle down, and perhaps muster enough curiosity to read a real science book, as opposed to a comic.

The Reversion Of Too Many Adults To The State Of Children - Appalling and Pathetic

Let us concede that any adult who spends many hours of the day coloring images (using colored pencils or crayons) in a coloring book is in some form regressed: either actually retarded, or less excusable, wasting time by deliberately reverting to childish pastimes to try to escape the psychological or other burdens of adulthood.  Thus, the latest pastime of too many elders spending time with coloring books like children is nothing to applaud and kind of embodies the regression of too many Americans to a proto-toddler state.

This occurred to me while reading a WSJ piece about early education expert Erika Christakis who many will recall as being at the center of a Halloween brouhaha at Yale last year. It began when Yale's Intercultural Affairs Committee advised students they ought not present themselves wearing feathered headdresses, turbans or war paint - or modifying skin tones (to appear as a minstrel performer) . The aim was to try to steer students into being more sensitive in their choice of costumes or apparel.

In response, Ms. Christakis dispatched her own email wondering whether such oversight and advice was really needed. She wrote:

"Whose business is it to control the forms of costumes of young people to get them to act responsibly?"

Adding:

"Free speech and ability to tolerate offense are the hallmarks of a free and open society".

(Attributes one wishes were more in evidence last month at a Denver Art Exhibit when a HS student had to withdraw her painting under a hail of criticism - when it depicted a police officer in a KKK hood, pointing a gun at a small black kid with his hands raised high in the air, screaming "Don't shoot!". Avoiding the bane of 'political correctness' ought to apply to every group, in other words.)

Anyway, many Yalies  became enraged and called for Christakis and her husband to be removed from their positions as heads of undergraduate residence at Yale. Ms. Christakis then resigned from her teaching position.  In the WSJ piece, she admitted she stepped down not only because of the email kerfuffle but also she felt more broadly that "the campus climate didn't allow open dialogue"

In other words, it more or less treated staff and students as impudent and out of control barbarians who had to be directed toward more judicious actions and couldn't be depended on to act responsibly on their own.  This perhaps was simmering all the time as she delivered her honest opinions at the outset observing, "adults now act like children, reading Children's books, dressing like college students" and I might add, coloring inside the lines in assorted children's style coloring books (though the clever marketers call them 'adult coloring books' - yeah, right!)

This in turn evoked the book by Neil Postman entitled, 'The Disappearance of Childhood', which noted as far back as thirty odd years ago how adult Americans were apparently regressing in mentality toward childish pastimes and preoccupations.

In his Chapter Seven (‘The Adult Child’), for example, Postman lays out a summary of his thesis on the disappearance of childhood in tandem with defining the modern conception of “adult” and what it has evolved (devolved?) into after the emergence of video culture. As he puts it, the modern idea of the adult “is largely a product of the printing press.” Further, almost all the attributes we associate with adulthood “are those either generated or amplified by a literary culture”. These include:


- A capacity for self-restraint

- A tolerance for delayed gratification

- A sophisticated ability to think sequentially and conceptually

- A preoccupation with both historical continuity and the future

- A high valuation of reason and hierarchical order


Postman then goes on to warn that as electronic (visual) media assume center stage “different attitudes and character traits come to be valued and a new, diminished definition of adulthood begins to emerge”. This new stunted version of the adult reaches its apotheosis (nadir?) in the adult child having arrived with the television-video age - which primary characteristic flattens out all differences between ages. A typical observation by Postman (p. 101) serves to clarify and lead to a fuller exposition:


“Television redefines what is meant by ‘sound judgment’ by making it into an aesthetic rather than a logical matter. A barely literate ten year old can interpret and at least respond to the information “given off” by a (political) candidate as easily and quickly as a well-informed 50 year old."

In other words, one required literary heft and markers - say in ability to read weighty, dense books (like James Joyce's Ulysses , or Milton's Paradise Lost, or Jean -Paul Sartre's Being and Nothingness) to finally separate adults from children, adult minds from childish imitators.  Thus, literary culture and mature works provided the truest litmus test to distinguish an adult from a child. Coloring books? Not so much because any kid of five or six could do that.

Some eight years before Postman's book was published Dr. Pat Bannister was also doing theory of mind research wherein childish, regressed tendencies could be separated from more mature ones. I already noted her theory that conspiracy awareness evolved to neutralize the penchant for precocious lying, or more mature conspiracy planning.  Thus, it afforded a mechanism by which surreptitious activity might be neutralized or at least outed ex post facto.

While Bannister's work didn't receive much prominence at the time (and still hasn't, having never been codified in electronic formats like so much else) she did do a lot of research into theory of mind before there was such.  One aspect involved identifying a childish "conspiracy subculture"  which obsessed over things like alien autopsies and Roswell aliens being stashed away at Area 51.  Tragically, those enmeshed in this subculture were also more likely to be driven into paranoid ideation as a result of strong religious stimuli (much like what befell the forlorn folk at Jonestown, Guyana in November, 1978).

By contrast, those with genuine theory of mind grounding as embodied in the investigation of real world conspiracies (like the JFK assassination, Iran-Contra, BCCI) were more likely to be thoroughly familiar and comfortable with an extensive literary culture. They possessed truly adult intellects, in other words, and not childish substitutes.  JFK was a real President, after all, unlike the supposed aliens in Area 51. His assassins from the CIA and Staff D operation were also quite real, unlike the supposed ne'er do wells at Area 51 hiding the aliens from scrutiny.

To her credit, Bannister never bought the narrative circulating at the time that acceptance of a conspiracy, as in the JFK case, provided a "pacifier" to those faced with an otherwise random, senseless act of violence. On the contrary, she saw JFK conspiracy analysts as the real adults for their willingness to pierce the veil of secrecy of a shadow state - and exposing the horrors of what that actually meant. It was rather the lone nut purveyors who wished to keep American citizens at the level of malleable infants: "Look! It's one crazy guy, one off! Nothing to fret over! Nothing happening there! Now go back to sleep!"

Lastly, actual files and documents have helped unearth the warp and woof  - as well as plausible participants -  in the Kennedy assassination (e.g. George Johannides, David Atlee Phillips, disaffected Cubans like Sergio Archacha Smith etc.) while no similar files or document trail have unearthed any alien artifacts or records from Area 51.  Does this mean that no such artifacts or aliens exist? No, only that there is as yet no factual basis to suppose so. This is why Bannister coined the term "conspiracy culture" to distinguish it from "conspiracy research community". The latter she envisaged as the province of mature, rational adults. The former was the realm of adult children who fancied themselves adults but who really weren't. The very nature of their conspiracy hunches often exposed the naïve, incomplete, and woefully unsophisticated knowledge base. (For example, the present day Raelians who see the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) as a devilish means to destroy tiny life forms contained within particles. Not appreciating that the size of such particles precludes the existence of life forms existing on them.)

If she were alive today, I am certain Bannister would also include a mathematical facility along with literary mastery as attributes needed by genuine conspiracy researchers. Thus, Richard Charnin's work on the Poisson statistical analyses leading to identification of suspicious witness deaths in the JFK case would have been applauded as totally adult. I am sure Neil Postman, if alive, would also have given that work his wholesale backing as representing the product of an adult mind- and an appreciation of it as a test of rational adulthood.

  As for the adults engrossed in their coloring books, Bannister would have despaired and likely thought: "Good god, anyone would be able to pull off even a basic conspiracy on these people!"

Like Postman and Christakis, she feared the mass regression of adults to the state of de facto children, especially with the oncoming emphasis on the visual by way of TV. Like Christakis, she believed true adults needed to be able to make their own decisions and also have the maturity to live with them, come what may. When I last saw Pat Bannister in January, 1974 (at the Barbados Psychiatric Hospital in Black Rock, St. Michael, while visiting a friend's daughter) she asked about my future plans.  I told her I planned to go into space and solar physics research. She applauded that and responded: "Good for you! If I hadn't chosen psychiatry that's likely something I would have done!"

Newsflash! Your Kids ARE Digital Zombies!

If these kids aren't digital. zombies, then what are they? Certainly not living in the present and attending to the larger world.

Bill Maher, in his last ('New Rules') segment of Real Time Friday night,  merits kudos for calling out all the selfie stooges - including the recent mobs in Philly and NYC trying to capture Pope Francis on their smart phones - looking through their mini screens - instead of taking in the moment directly. (Not to mention the assorted kids with a 1 in a million chance to actually meet and see the Pope facing backwards and doing selfies with him.).

But the ubiquitous selfie is but one symptom of the zombification of the nation, especially its younger generations.  We also behold texting zombies - heads buried in their phones- walking along side walks, crossing busy streets or even driving cars - oblivious to the reality around them. They also display an alarming .similarity to actual zombies in their sidewalk shuffles and guttural, incomprehensible responses when you attempt to make conscious contact, e.g. "Urrrgh", "Unhhh".  Can we then agree if it walks like a zombie, and expresses itself like a zombie it is, for all intents, a zombie?

The WSJ's Alice Gopnik ('No, Your Children Aren't Becoming Digital Zombies', Oct. 10-11, p. C2) doesn't believe so. She cites study after study purporting to show there are no ill effects and all is pretty close to normal. She also revives the old "happened in older generations" Mcguffin, by trying to compare the behavior  we're seeing now with smart phones to the telegraph! Are you kidding me? She seriously quotes a hand wringer from the year 1858 about the telegraph being too "unsifted, superficial and too sudden for the truth".

But of course,  this is a false analogy,  irrespective of what any critic of the time said or wrote. For one thing, the telegraph was not ubiquitous like smart phones are today. You had to actually enter a post office or wireless station to send a message off, and even then there were absolutely NO images...only terse wording. There was no way - given the costs - one could use it to communicate with peers minute by minute or second by second as texters can now. Hell, there was no speed of long distance communication such as allowed and enabled today by the Global Positioning System (GPS).

Hence, Gopnik compares chalk and cheese.

The point she misses in her Pollyanish prose is that there is indeed cause to worry given how the dominance of imagery has weakened communication as well as literacy skills in adults.  I already have noted this in previous posts referencing the findings of Neil Postman in his masterful book, 'The Disappearance of Childhood’.

Postman’s thesis is subtle to grasp because it is two-pronged. He showed how the continued intrusion of visual media via television (and now smart phones, I-phones and the internet)  has stripped childhood of its innocence, even as he showed the same media has effectively rendered adults as children. The effect has been to create “adult-children” and ‘child adults”.

Thus, nearly all current TV fare adults can watch, like 'Survivor', kids can also watch. The visual medium itself - integrated into the use of iPads, TVs and smartphones, makes the reduction of the world to a visual medium the same for all ages. Hence, child adults, and adult children. Taking selfies, as the scenes of Francis also showed, are as much the province of kids as adults. Thus, one beholds a regression of modern day adults to the state of children - again via their over use of electronic media.

Many may be surprised, but in fact the era of true adulthood only seemed to last a short time, certainly in western culture.

In the period following print typography, a new world of symbolic abstraction based on the printed word emerged, and the human adult with it. As this adult became more solidified and print became the basis for separating the adult mind from the child’s – the social construction of “childhood” had to be created. This was to more easily distinguish child activities and media from what adults consumed. Thus, it was expected even as recently as 60 years ago that no child would be paging through Playboy, or for that matter Sartre's Being and Nothingness, and no adult in his or her right mind would be glued to 'Howdy Doody' or 'Superman' on the tube. In either case, there would be cause for serious intervention (in the child reading Sartre case, it would be positive, say the kid  skipping 7-10 years of school to go directly to first year university.)

Postman's point is that before about 300 years ago the “child” as such didn’t exist in the social sphere. The child before about 1650 was treated as a small adult, had to work in the coal mines along with his more mature relations, as well as toil in the fields. There were no child clothes, child games as such or child distinctions.

The arrival of print changed all that because it disclosed the need for the young to be properly trained to assume a role in a world in which lack of print mastery exacted great social costs. The mastery of print required also a certain skill set totally contingent on the ability to process the printed word including: the ability to sit still and focus  for protracted periods, the ability to sequentially process abstract (phonetic) symbols, the ability to master logical –rational thought.

The point missed by those like Gopnik is that the child-adult transition is now nearly impossible because of the ubiquity of electronic media. This indeed, has been proven in research such as by Mark Bauerlein, ('The Dumbest Generation'). showing FB users, for example, have been conditioned to accept a "single-minded attachment or obsession which has contributed to an artificial,  solipsistic view of the world"

Thus, instead of being a channel of information and genuine knowledge consolidation, the monitor screen becomes a mirror for the users’ own limited selves and under-developed psyches. That Facebook would insinuate itself into a life to the extent of excluding so much else in the world is not surprising, and Bauerlein shows how this is done by blocking out all unwanted material on one's FB pages. Most of this material turns out to be dealing with complex issues of news, global conflicts etc - hence the elimination indulges the child yen for a pain-free world minus any negatives.

But Facebook is but one medium. We now know from research (that Gopnik totally ignores)  that legions of kids are already seriously addicted to  online games, and it's gotten so bad in China that the gamers have had to be interred in "boot camps", e.g.

http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2015/09/chinese-get-serious-with-their-net.html


As noted above, for the Chinese, screen addiction of any type is now classified as a clinical disorder and they've taken serious measures to break their young addicts of their screen dependence - whether it's to their smart phone, or laptop via some gaming app. At Daxing Boot Camp in Beijing, one of 400 rehab centers created to treat net addicts, calisthenics, group therapy. some mild ECT and a complete lack of screens. You can bet your bippy if the problem is severe in China this screen addiction is equally severe here in the U.S. all Gopnik's cited studies to the contrary.

Gopnik also neatly sidesteps how digital bullying has now evolved to the number one form, and we won't even go into the increasing prevalence of porn addiction - such that many teens (according to a recent Economist report, Sept. 26th, p. 59)) are having to seek help at sites like "No fap". The report cites a pan-European study from 2010 that found 14 % of 9 to 16 year olds had seen porn in the previous year - and this was prior to the advent of smart phones and iPads which make the stuff easier to access for kids.  Further, March Childline and NSPCC - two charities serving kids - found that one in ten British 12-13 year olds described themselves as "addicted to porn". If these stats are such in the UK you can be certain they are as bad or worse here in the U.S.

Gopnik, at the end of her piece asks:

"So why, despite the research and all those failed prophecies of previous technological doom are people so convinced that this time it's different?"

Well, because it is! In the old days drivers weren't killed at a 20 percent higher rate (reported last year) because of "texting while driving". You had to sit in your home with your trusty Smith Corona and type your messages out. You didn't do it in a car!  In the old days also kids couldn't bully their peers by long distance, sending nasty messages over the smart phone. You had to get up close and personal and settle issues with your fists right then and there. No hiding behind a screen.

And as for porn, it wasn't ubiquitous on some 800 million websites (hell, no internet even existed then) all accessible by smart phones, as The Economist notes. You had to actually get up off your duff and hoof it down to the corner 7-11 and plunk down 50 cents to buy the latest Playboy - and hope the counter clerk didn't ask your age.

So YEAH, it IS different in quality and quantity. A pity those like Gopnik don't see that, but then - working for the WSJ - her job is as much to feed and "grease"  the wheels of consumer frenzy (especially in time for Xmas) as it is to spout specious opinions.

See also:

http://www.salon.com/2015/10/11/turn_off_your_fking_phone_and_talk_to_me_sherry_turkle_on_why_im_not_the_darth_vader_of_social_media/
 

A Note to Selfie- Takers: Not At Baseball Games!

These selfie-obsessed sorority babes at a recent AZ Diamondbacks' baseball game merely showed how out of touch they are with the real world. Fortunately, no one was taken out by a line drive.

As most readers of this blog are aware, I detest the whole selfie -taking culture as a narcissistic, navel gazing socio-economic mutation of recent history with our young people (mainly) spending more time staring at themselves than looking beyond and attending to world events.  Even when the selfie-takers do apprehend external events it's often to make them part of their selfies, even catastrophic ones,  e.g.

http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2015/07/memo-to-selfie-takers-not-in-front-of.html

Thereby these image narcissists deform perceptions of the event by interjecting an unwanted, irrelevant, solipsistic aspect.

Perhaps my sister- in-law Krimhilde (an Eckist) best summed it up:

These are the creations and obsessions of the immature human, which remains steeped in narcissism, in self-absorption. No truly advanced or advancing human on the path to a higher spirituality takes a selfie. Our true motivation and mission in this life is instead to embrace selflessness. That means placing one's body in proper relation to one's spirit."

This came to the fore again this past week as a group of sorority girls from Alpha Phi Omega was caught ingratiating themselves in an orgy of selfies at a major league baseball game. On beholding them so involved in a superficial pursuit, devoid of attention to the game (why go to it in the first place?) the first thought that came to mind after their self-(ie) obsessing was the risk being taken in not paying attention. We've already had two incidents this year where one woman was clobbered by a flying bat (who wasn't paying attention to the game) and another knocked out by a foul ball lacing into the stands.

While morons have talked about putting up "protective screening" to shield idiots, the rest of us (baseball lovers) are asking: "Why the fuck aren't you watching the game instead of texting or engaging in random, distracted BS?"

The same question could apply to these sorority women. On that basis it was a welcome  intervention for many of us to hear the sports casters go off on them with the following light-hearted commentary:

“Do you have to make faces when you take selfies? That’s the best one of the 300 pictures I’ve taken of myself today!”

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 “Every girl in the picture is locked onto her phone. Every single one is dialed in. Welcome to parenting in 2015.”

"Take a selfie with the hot dog, selfie with the churro, selfie just of the selfie! Here’s my first bite of the churro, here’s my second bite of the churro.”

 “Can we do an intervention? How about if we send Baxter (the Diamondbacks’ mascot) out there and he just collects all the phones. You’re not getting them back till the end of the game.”

It was too hilarious for words, but then the no-nonsense PC police took notice, as in a recent piece in the UK Guardian and pulled up the announcers for their "misogyny" which is the most ridiculous nonsense ever belched out in a serious newspaper. The moralistic author went on to write:

"And so forth. The cringeworthy exchange persisted even after Arizona’s David Peralta led off the bottom of the fourth with a base hit, the horse apparently not dead enough."

Seriously? And further:

"On one hand baseball broadcasts, first on radio and later on TV, have long depended on light-hearted commentary of ballpark scenery to fill the many pockets of downtime during the average game. Yet something about Wednesday’s paternalistic rant felt creepy and excessive beneath its bouncy veneer.

From a fan standpoint, the failure to hang on every pitch of meeting between two also-ran clubs that have been out of playoff contention for weeks is hardly a mortal sin.."

 Which beggars the rational mind, because those detached, self-absorbed young women certainly merited a dressing down for their surreal antics in a setting not conducive  to "pompasetting". (In Bajan parlance.) To their credit, the announcers delivered it with humor. Only a politically correct nag would see it otherwise, but evidently this Guardian writer did (along with the selfie brigade defenders) As for blasé inattention during a game not being a  "mortal sin", maybe not. But to a baseball lover you attend a damned game - irrespective of its portents or implications - to watch it, not text incessantly, yak it up with your neighbor or take selfies of you and your munchies. If you don't really like baseball, and it's too boooooooorrrriug for your hi-techie, high-powered social life and truncated pace, then stick to 'World of Warcraft', re-doing your dorm or Facebook page. Besides, then you won't risk losing your front teeth or getting a busted nose if a foul ball hits you in the face.

Then, after busting the chops of the two sports casters the writer drags even more codswallop onto the page:

 "But even the most seemingly innocuous episodes of everyday sexism reinforce the idea of sports as a boys’ club, an outdated notion that serves no one. Certainly not a traditional sport whose problems attracting younger, more progressively minded fans are as thoroughly documented as the Mitchell Report. The median age of last year’s World Series viewer was 55.6 according to Horizon Media, up from 49.9 only five years ago. That’s an alarming trend for baseball’s power brokers even as revenues and franchise valuations soar."

Yadda, yadda, we've heard it all before. Look, here's the real skinny:  too many in today's world are driven to impatience so really have no time for anything substantive - whether reading a real book - like Sartre's Being and Nothingness, or attending to the thoughtful intricacies of a game they only partly understand and probably never played as youngsters.  To many of us 'old farts', however, that doesn't hold and that's why we still watch venerable sports contests like the Series. (Which I've watched nearly every year since 1957.)

But I believe the underlying issues go even deeper and the problems were first articulated by Neil Postman over 33 years ago in his masterful book, 'The Disappearance of Childhood’.

Postman’s thesis is subtle to grasp because it is two-pronged. He showed how the intrusion of visual media via television (and now smart phones, I-phones and the internet)  has stripped childhood of its innocence, even as he showed the same media has effectively rendered adults as children. The effect has been to create “adult-children” and ‘child adults”. To starkly illustrate his point, he compares – for instance – the favorite TV shows of different age groups, ca. 1980 (p. 131):

“The 1980 Neilsen Report on Television reveals that adults (defined as people over the age of 18) rated the following among their fifteen favorite syndicated programs: Family Feud, The Muppet Show, HeeHaw, M*A*S*H, Dance Fever, Happy Days. These programs were also listed among the top fifteen most favored by those between 12 and 17 years. And they also made the favored list of those between age 2 and 11!”

He concludes from this that the figures support his contention that what in 1980 amused the child also amused the adult. By extension, the selfie an 18 year brat can take, a 4 year old can as well. What happened?

In the era following print typography, a new world of symbolic abstraction based on the printed word emerged, and the human adult with it. As this adult became more solidified and print became the basis for separating the adult mind from the child’s – the social construction of “childhood” had to be created. Thus, before about 300 years ago the “child” as such didn’t exist in the social context. The child before about 1650 was treated as a small adult, had to work in the coal mines along with his more mature relations, as well as toil in the fields. There were no child clothes, child games as such or child distinctions.

The arrival of print changed all that because it disclosed the need for the young to be properly trained to assume a role in a world in which lack of print mastery exacted great social costs. The mastery of print required also a certain skill set totally contingent on the ability to process the printed word including: the ability to sit still and focus  for protracted periods, the ability to sequentially process abstract (phonetic) symbols, the ability to master logical –rational thought.

The mastery of print also separated child from adult in much the same way that current specialist domains, say in modern physics,  separate specialists from those outside the specialty discipline. Take solar physics for instance. The appropriate equation of transfer in a simple, plane-parallel atmosphere would be:


dI = j dx - σ I (Θ) dx = (j - σ I (Θ)) dx


where I (Θ) is the specific intensity. If you do not know the language of solar physics (or basic stellar physics) you will not know what specific intensity is, nor will you be able to produce the "moments of intensity" - say obtained by successive integrations over an element of solid angle - defined as (A/r^2) for a sphere. In other words, you will be like a "child" left out of esoteric knowledge granted to those in the "priesthood" of solar physics. Those who had to come up through years of dedicated training, education and research to be able to perform such tasks.

In other words, you'd be like the child relative to the adult in the new world where print mastery was foremost....and defined the adult.

Before the advent of print there were no children as such because there existed no means for adults to know exclusive information. What the adult knew the child knew, as all knowledge was in the "vernacular". With print this changed, because the introduction of abstract symbols split the access "codes". As adults mastered the printed world, children were excluded...analogous to how novices are excluded from the province of specialist research.

 Print literacy then, similarly demanded a specialized period of “childhood” education and training, apart from adulthood for which literacy had attained a peak. Thus, a child was not expected to master anything like Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost’, Thomas Mallory’s ‘Le Morte d’Arthur’ or Darwin’s ‘Origin of Species’ but the adult was.

The arrival of electronic visual media changed all that by making everything available to everyone but in visual form rather than symbolic. Attendant on this was the need for speed, for shortcuts in presentation, and as Neil Postman puts it, the insatiable demand for novelty. Thus, one eventually ended up in a “Jerry Springer” cartoon world shown on daytime TV airing problems on everything under the sun from a spouse’s sexual fetishes, to violent on- set altercations between races, to once private personal physical issues, to you name it.

And the damnable thing was that with this medium no barriers existed. The child glued to the TV (or now to his Surface or Ipad, could soak everything in as much as the adult. No symbolic barriers existed that had to be surmounted. All one had to know is how to flick the remote on, and change channels! Or to paraphrase Postman, “the six year old and sixty year old could equally access what was shown on TV.”


Seen in this light, the selfie taking sorority sisters can actually be seen as immature, self-absorbed children (at about the  6-year age). I would also warrant they'd be no more likely to sit attentively through a 9-inning baseball game (even at the Major League level) than they would be to read Tolstoy's 'War and Peace' - or even the complete  front sections of The Wall Street Journal or The Financial Times. Their flitting little brains wouldn't be able to handle it! And this isn't being "misogynist" or "sexist" because I daresay none of their male peers - similarly invested in the current social media world- would fare any better! They all have the attention spans of gnats, precisely because of the media in which they incessantly and gratuitously partake.

Heck, it's much easier to become swallowed up by the childish visual divsersions of the selfie which encourages rampant narcissism at every turn. "Look at ME! ME! ME! ME!"

But the worst offal to come from the PC Guardian columnist was this:

"Worse, these patterns embolden misogynists, like the third-rate aggregator who demeaned Wednesday’s offenders as “future world leaders” who got the dressing-down they deserved."

Well again, as noted earlier, the accusation of "misogyny" isn't even relevant because the flit-brained fan boys these girls likely hang out with share the same attention disorders. So, dismissing that complaint, the "third rate aggregator" may have had a point. Which elicits what kind of college majors these young women (or their frat boy friends) are pursuing. If it's public relations, marketing or something on that score - then I'd say 'case closed' and that "aggregator" has got it correct. Because I sure as shit wouldn't want some airhead marketer or PR front person dealing with Putin, or even Bibi Netanyahu!

Lastly, the writer is flat wrong for insisting that we beheld: "grown men mocking young women for enjoying themselves"

No. What I saw and heard were serious humans who have lived through some serious recent  times (including 9/11) expressing horror at the solipsistic vacuum these women inhabit. Thus, they responded they only way they could,  pulling up  these vapid brats (their own profs are probably afraid to)  who probably haven't even taken a single history course that interprets events without spin and PR.

IF these are our future leaders, may the Force help us all!

Be Part of the 'Black Friday' Herds? Hell NO!

I watched with mouth agape on the CBS News this morning as Thanksgiving Day shoppers bashed each other in Florida to get some limited desired product. Their antics reminded me of the words of Erik Larsen in his book The Naked Consumer  , p. 167.   that "consumers" crowded into small spaces for limited buys emulated a herd of panicked cattle. Or "mindless sheep". 

Well, that means some 33 million Americans mutated into herds and "mindless sheep" yesterday - Thanksgiving Day - as they stormed big box stores and fought over TVs, Xboxes, Notebooks and what not.  Hmmmm......what does it show? That too many are prepared to destroy a day for family conviviality (so long as politics is avoided) to grab some more "stuff" they probably can't fit into their abodes anyway.

This morning I saw similar mobs massing toward the local Kohl's as I went on my usual morning brisk walk. They were likely among the played idiots that believe getting a 30% markdown is a "bargain" despite the fact that stores typically rig prices to process 30 percent as a net win. As Rebecca Jarvis reported on her news segment two days ago, shoppers would need to get at least 40-50% off to make any real gain. But illusions reign in the American consumer's head.

In another take, the scenes of shoppers run amuck this morning reminded me of  teens in the midst of a rock frenzy (like the infamous Stones' appearance at Altamonte, CA decades ago.)  Out of control, without any semblance of reason, proportion or judgment. This is backed up by Benjamin Barber author of : 'CONSUMED: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults and Swallow Citizens Whole'- which ought to be required reading for everyone.  Barber documented how consumption infantilizes Americans.

Rather than being wary citizens, attending to how our gov't is cutting our rights by surveillance, etc. we have been infantilized to just consume.....and it has to be the right brand. Let's get that new Ipad! Let's get that new  smart phone, HDTV or X-box video game!  We've descended into virtual babies with nappies as we've gotten toy after toy and embraced the "Gimme!" idiom. Barber demonstrated how this rampant consumerism degrades a whole society to limit its civic role and attention, and ultimately lose participatory democracy .....to the corporatocracy. (The Neoliberal imperative, of course, applauds this.)

An even more trenchant take on the devolution of the American citizen to "consumer' is provided by Neil Postman in his book,  ‘The Disappearance of Childhood’ . In his Chapter Seven ‘The Adult Child’, Postman lays out a summary of his thesis on the disappearance of childhood (and adulthood)  in tandem with what it has evolved (devolved?) into after the emergence of video culture. Basically his premise is video culture puts children and adults on the same mental footing, with the net effect of regressing the adult to the child level.  In the 50s adults read books like Hemingway's "The Sun Also Rises"  and children watched "Mickey Mouse Club" and Davy Crockett.  Today both play Xbox games, work Ipads and tweet. Where's the distinction? The adult had become melded with the child.

Postman defined a number of truly adult attributes which include:


- A capacity for self-restraint

- A tolerance for delayed gratification

- A sophisticated ability to think sequentially and conceptually

- A preoccupation with both historical continuity and the future

- A high valuation of reason and hierarchical order


He then goes on to warn that as electronic (visual) media have assumed center stage “different attitudes and character traits come to be valued and a new, diminished definition of adulthood begins to emerge”. This new stunted version of the adult which reaches its apotheosis (nadir?) in the adult child has arrived with the television-video- computer- Twitter age which flattens out all differences between all ages.

What I beheld this morning with store mobs pushing and shoving and running over each other to grab an Xbox or Ipad showed me 6' tall, 190 lb. "children" who lacked every one of the attributes above. As I envisaged the future I can see not only that Thanksgiving will be sacrificed to consumer culture but probably Halloween in the next round.

NEWTOWN.....And the Disappearance of Childhood (2)

In his Chapter Seven ‘The Adult Child’, Neil Postman lays out a summary of his thesis on the disappearance of childhood in tandem with defining the modern conception of “adult” and what it has evolved (devolved?) into after the emergence of video culture. As he puts it, the modern idea of the adult “is largely a product of the printing press.” Further, almost all the attributes we associate with adulthood “are those either generated or amplified by a literary culture”. These include:


- A capacity for self-restraint

- A tolerance for delayed gratification

- A sophisticated ability to think sequentially and conceptually

- A preoccupation with both historical continuity and the future

- A high valuation of reason and hierarchical order


He then goes on to warn that as electronic (visual) media have assumed center stage “different attitudes and character traits come to be valued and a new, diminished definition of adulthood begins to emerge”. This new stunted version of the adult which reaches its apotheosis (nadir?) in the adult child has arrived with the television-video age which flattens out all differences between all ages. A typical observation by Postman (p. 101) serves to clarify and lead to a fuller exposition:


“Television redefines what is meant by ‘sound judgment’ by making it into an aesthetic rather than a logical matter. A barely literate ten year old can interpret and at least respond to the information “given off” by a (political) candidate as easily and quickly as a well-informed 50 year old."

As Exhibit A, look no further than the recent phenomenon of  4-year old Abigail Evans, about whose infantile election complaints much was made by our semi-inebriated, blow-dried media hacks who confused her bawling about “Bronco Bama and Mitt Romney” with how real adults interpreted their policies, and the polarizing arguments that ensued. Some in the media actually had the temerity to lead with crappola like: “We’re all Abigail Evans Now!” Uh, no we’re not, and if you think YOU are, Mr. Media Maven, you have more serious problems than can even be described by the latest Diagnostic and Statistics Manual.

But this media hyping is instructive because it eminently proves Postman’s point, that not only are: a) Children now the new “adults”, but symmetrically that (b) today’s adults are the new children, infantile, narcissistic and greedy as only ADULT children can be. Hence, a conflation exists such that childhood has essentially disappeared. I can’t cite every example and case that Postman does, but for anyone interested I suggest getting hold of his book, including his examples of how our corporate hyper-media sexualizes children in films, music and other areas. He notes this would have been unthinkable, for example, as recently as the “Little Rascals-Our Gang” era in the 1930s where teens and tweens were never seen wearing anything other than children’s clothing. And NO, in the 1930s you’d never ever catch a kid appearing as 12-year old Brooke Shields did in the 1978 Louis Malle-directed flick ‘Pretty Baby”. (One of several films he mentions (p.124), along with “Blue Lagoon”, “The Exorcist”, “Paper Moon”, “Carrie” and “The Omen”)


But what is it about video-TV culture that makes it so dangerous? The danger is twofold: 1) Television –video culture essentially opens the “barn door” and lets everything into the house without careful parsing or interpretation, and 2) TV does not call attention to ideas first but rather “atmospherics’, personalities and hot button emotional issues. This makes it almost impossible to have a sane political discussion, for example, in today’s TV sound bite venue.


Even worse, the presentation of TV news, in Postman’s calculations, amounts to a totally unbalanced retelling of the day’s top events without point of view or even import. Events reeled off from the TV anchors’ chairs end up as an endless stream of meaningless drivel. Postman details a typical night’s news viewing of WCBS on page 104, where he assays the time allotments as follows:


- 264 seconds for a story about bribery of public officials

- 40 seconds about Iran

- 22 seconds about Aeroflot

- 25 seconds about Muhammad Ali

- 53 seconds about a New Mexico Prison riot

- 174 seconds for an ‘in depth’ look at depression

- 18 seconds about Suzanne Sommers


As Postman puts it (ibid.):

“This way of defining the ‘news’ achieves two interesting effects. First, it makes it difficult to think about an event, and second, it makes it difficult to feel anything about an event. By thinking, I mean having the time and motivation to ask oneself: What is the meaning of such an event? What is its history? What are the reasons for it? How does it fit into what I know about the world? By feeling, I mean the normal human responses to murder, rape, fire, bribery and general mayhem”

Postman then goes on to make the point that the manner of presentation is such that events are presented without any historical continuity or other context, and in such rapid succession “they wash over our minds in an undifferentiated stream”. Postman’s other questions, observations are equally germane:

- What is the connection between Aeroflot and Suzanne Sommers?

- Why is Iran worth 40 seconds and the results of a basketball game 160?

- How is it determined that Suzanne Sommers gets less time than Muhammad Ali?


The effect of presenting a meaningless string of unrelated acts, events is that there is no sense of proportion to be discerned in the world. To quote Postman: “Events are entirely idiosyncratic; history is irrelevant.”

It is in this context that the aftermath of the Newtown slayings must be considered, and how the national media treated the young surviving victims. Because if events are ultimately “idiosyncratic” and can “just happen” while proportion is lacking in the presentation (so that feelings are also absent), then it means the media presenting the stories must create ersatz emotion where none would otherwise exist.

Thus, we saw in the wake of the Aurora shootings, microphones being shoved into the faces of victims while being asked “How do you FEEL?” How the hell do YOU think they felt, Mr. Media Hack? Thus we also, on Friday, beheld microphones shoved in the face of children who were psychologically victimized by the Sandy Hook killings.

Denver Post columnist Joanne Ostrow perhaps put it in the most salient terms (DPost, Dec. 16, p. 17A):

“Does it serve any journalistic purpose to put children on live television in the immediate aftermath of a mass shooting? Is it ethically permissible to put shocked parents on live TV, to give the nation a taste of the horror? Clearly it serves no purpose other than titillation to put shocked, underage and vulnerable people on TV to give the nation a taste of the horror.”

 

Exactly, but more importantly, to invoke Postman’s thesis: this has to be done to fabricate ersatz emotion because the very nature of video news on a 24/7 cycle is to neutralize and flatten all emotional response. Beyond that, the constant emphasis on the horror can play havoc with young, impressionable minds ….i.e. those of KIDS!


It is for this reason, Dr. David Schonfeld, Director for the National Center for School Crisis and Bereavement at Cincinnati’s Children’s Hospital has warned parents across the country to be careful about letting children consume media coverage of the events. Or indulge in obsessing over the events via Twitter, where real time events take precedence.


The problem is that it may already be too late for any of this, since the genie has already escaped the bottle. The omnipresence of a video connection wherever one goes, as well as a web connection or camera phone, has assured none of us can now escape the ever-present video reality. The most we can hope to do is temper it, and use it judiciously – or try to – and that means being aware of its effects, including how the news cycle is also “dumbed down” and trivialized by the intermittent presence of commercials. To quote Postman one more time (p 106):

“The news, in a phrase, is not an adult world view. Otherwise we would not be shown four commercials celebrating the affluence of America, followed by the despair and degradation of prisoners in New Mexico.”

Even worse, is that the commercially-dominant idiom fuels private consumption and accelerates the turn into infantile, ‘me’ behavior. Benjamin Barber, author of ‘CONSUMED’ is clear on the connection to capitalist-market privatization and infantilism (p. 159):
 

“Examining the dynamics of privatization, as we have done, suggests that private relates to public as childish stands to the adult. Prioritizing the individual and rendering the community private in a way that makes it look like an aggregation of individual wants and needs is a puerile way to construct the social world.”

 

As I’ve shown before this also applies with particularly strong force to 2nd amendment fetishists of the type who uphold owning automatic weapons and multiple-capacity clips. They – including the automatic weapons aficionados in Newtown itself, have placed their own childish demands and needs ahead of community security.

And, of course, author Mark Bauerlein ('The Dumbest Generation'), has already shown how the social media obsession has infantilized the under-30 generation by enabling them to create virtual worlds, Facebook pages etc. that “mirrors their own woes and fantasies, a pre-packaged representation of the world, a ‘Daily ME’”

In other words, a solipsistic world of puerile narcissism. Bauerlein (p. 137) underscores this by citing a quote from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, in an interview with the Wall Street Journal, purporting to reveal the secret of his site in terms of never having to “hear a dissenting word’:

“That’s kind of what we are doing here, but with ‘what’s going on in the world with these people I care about’. “

So, all the things that bother and bore them are blocked out. The people they don’t know and don’t want to know they can exclude at the touch of key. A new bomb may have been developed by Iran, and an earthquake may have killed thousands in China, but in the case of Facebook users it’s the old monkey show: “hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil” .

A delimited reality is confected which deliberately excludes the harsh outside world, and confines the personalized reality to chirpy “how r ya’s”, or gossip, mainly in deformed English which Bauerlein ranks just above the reading level of pre-school children’s books. Again, consolidating Neil Postman’s thesis that we’re all reverting to a conflated adult-child/ child adult society that likely will be unable to handle the next real mega-crisis.

By extension, the “news cycle” to which most of us are exposed, is infantilizing and regressive if it’s the only source from which we obtain our perspectives on the world. If don’t read widely, including newspapers, we will become the adult –children that Postman holds up to ridicule, the ones who inevitably end up in a Jerry Springer world, whether by choice or accident.

As for the children, as in Newtown and other places, one can only hope that their parents will now assure them some measure of genuine childhood as well as genuine security, and not thrust them too quickly into the adult scene ….including training them to fire automatic weapons and explode propane gas tanks at nearby “freelance” (unregulated)  ranges!

Calling all adults! Any? At all? We need you to show up and take responsibility! Not go out with your tyke firing rounds with automatic weapons at propane gas tanks!