Lecture Series: Lecture 3:Challenges to Education, Part II, The Image Culture

What if our arguments incite no passionate attacks, but only yawns? In our day, it is not as if truth is a matter of controversy, igniting heated debate on both sides of an issue. One is much more likely to find people willing to summon their passion in defense of their football team rather than in defense of their worldview, if they know what a worldview is. Your views about truth are not offensive to the typical pop-culture clone; they are just boring and irrelevant.

Neil Postman wrote a controversial and ground-breaking book detailing what he believed was a cataclysmic cultural shift away from a "word culture" to an "image culture." In this lecture, we will discuss the merits of some of his ideas.

But before we get into the basic outline of his work, let's consider an important historical movement, beginning with the time of Christ. And the way we will do this is to consider a key philosophical question: Where must we go to find the truth?

Jesus' day was an "oral culture," meaning that few people had access to books. Books were expensive and tedious to create, and were usually made of the skins of animals or papyrus, a plant substance from Egypt. They were meticulously hand copied by scribes who often dedicated the whole of their lives to this science.

In Jesus' day, the answer to the question about where one can find truth was simple, "in the scribe, or prophet, or sage, etc." The medium and the message were wholly integrated in the person who knew it. So, when Jesus says, "I am the truth," he means this literally, but also as an invitation to seek the truth that is not in a book, but rather is in Him.

In 1456 a remarkable event occurred. Discovery channel listed this invention as the most important invention in the history of man: You guessed it, Gutenberg invented the first movable type printing press. Before this event, the purchase of a Bible would cost a nobleman a year's salary. After its invention, even common peasants began to have access to the text. Culture shifted from "oral dependency" on a few intellectual aristocrats to the independence that comes with the written age. In short, culture ceased to be merely oral and became a written or book culture. And a slight but significant shift occurred: The medium and message began to be separated. The scribe or the sage were no longer needed because all one needed was a book, thereby allowing ideas to become disembodied and decontextualized from the original speaker. One did not need to go to the village shaman for healing; one could go to the library. One did not need to go to Jesus because He was now confined in a book, and one could go to him at one's leisure.

The downside of this is that an encounter with truth became not only disembodied from the speaker but also freed from its context in relationships. For example, if a person wanted to know whether he should divorce or not in Jesus' oral culture, and came to Jesus for advice, he would find himself embroiled in dialogue that would leave him without the possibility of misinterpretation. In the written age, one brings his questions about divorce to the text, but it doesn't answer back, so one is left with the possibility of interpreting it according to one's desires. God becomes not a person to encounter, but an idea confined to the pages of a book that I go to at my convenience and interpret according to my whims.

Of course the intention of the advocates of the written word were pure. Primarily they sought to capture permanently the essential truths of God and human nature, etc. They sought to use a medium--the written word--that they felt was well suited to this aim. In other words, their desire was simply that the medium would always be subservient to the message. And perhaps they were right. Perhaps most if not all of Jesus' teaching has been well preserved in the texts of Scripture. That is not presently my argument. My only argument is that one has certain liberties with an inanimate object like a text that one would not have with the living person of Jesus Christ standing in front of you. This shift from an "oral culture" to a "word/written culture" is significant.

One other interesting point about the word culture. It was generally believed, despite the challenges in finding the authors intended meaning in what he or she wrote, that the authors meaning could be found in the text. Finding meaning was paramount. In fact, it could reasonably be stated that, in practice, once an authors truth was discovered, the text itself could be discarded, because it had done its job in leading the seeker to the truth.

But culture shifted again, according to Postman, with the advent of television. If the culture of Jesus' day was an "oral culture," and that culture was replaced by a "word/text culture," then the culture that has displaced them all is the "image culture." The core premise of Postman's book appears to be the nature of the relationship between medium and message in such a culture. If in the oral culture, the medium and message are deeply integrated, and in the written culture the medium serves the message, then the image culture essentially discards or trivializes the message in favor of the medium. Note well the inversion from the written age, from sublimating the medium under the message to sublimating the message under the medium. According to Postman, now the medium is everything and the message is little more than an occasion or an excuse to engage the medium.

A simple evaluation of this by culture:

The oral culture and ethical instruction: If a controversial ethical question arose, the people would turn to the village prophet/scribe/sage for advice, or hold a town meeting in which the wisdom of various elders could be heard.

The written culture and ethical instruction: If a controversial ethical question arose, the people would "hit the books." Then the problem of interpretation would come up, in which case experts might be consulted, but they would be experts on the text.

The image culture and ethical instruction: If a controversial ethical question arose, the people would listen to the wittiest, most moving, most engaging person or story. The image of the speaker would win and not the best idea, for what can that even mean? This is why in our day Bill Mayr and John Stewart have more dutiful disciples than does Jesus. This is also why the "image pastor" will have a huge church in our day, but the "idea pastor" will always have a small one.

On a practical level, Postman notes that it is simply naive to think that medium and message are or can be unrelated. And yet many Christians say things like, "It doesn't matter how you present the gospel, as long as the gospel is presented." But how something is presented is essential. Students often complain that it is difficult to absorb the droning of a monotone teacher, but what about a preacher who tells only funny stories for 20 minutes and then a 5 minute "message?" What about a death metal band inaudibly screaming, "JESUS LOVES YOU?" Is the medium aligned with its message in these cases?

Postman's basic message in this is that television comes freighted with inherent limitations. It is inferior to the written word in its ability to convey deep and complex truths. Obviously television uses words, but Postman notes that they become "accessories to images."

By way of illustration, Postman discusses the fact that TV preaching is neither good TV nor good preaching. Generally no one watches it because it is merely a "taking head" projected superfluously under the pretense of "spreading the good news." The true motive is often megalomaniacy (a desire for glory, or worse, money). And so, on the one hand the medium is not suited to the message. People rightly wonder what the point can be of merely watching the preacher remotely rather than just going to the Church and hearing it in its community context. And on the other hand, the message is often shaped to the demands of an image/entertainment medium, so that the preacher abandons depth to maintain broad commercial interest, and to fit the message into the appropriate time constraints.

In his book, Postman notes four major changes in the way people think due to the advent of the image culture. They are:

1. People can no longer process complex linear arguments.

I would suggest that much of this has to do with an ideological shift and not merely a methodological shift, but certainly both have conspired to undermine linear thought. By that I mean that postmodernism has itself created a culture that celebrates contradiction, relativism and thus sheer randomness of thought. The typical student today has a hundred incompatible ideas swirling about in his head simultaneously, and he will parrot each depending on the context. And he will do this uncritically, in a state of absolute obliviousness to the fact that the idea he argued yesterday discredits the idea he argues today. Now combine this ideological randomness with an audio visual environment pulsating constantly with randomness, and one has all the necessary ingredients for the creation of a culture which is itself wholly without grounding in truth or concern for truth; "driven and tossed by every wind of doctrine," as Paul says. One can see the impact of this by merely considering how few products of the entertainment culture pursue math and the sciences. When was the last time you saw a frat boy pop culture clone working as a physician? When was the last time you met a fashion obsessed young woman working for NASA, or even for a good pharmaceutical company? People must shut off the noise if they are to run deep in anything.

To illustrate this change from an ability to traffic in complex linear argument to the reality of our own time, Postman discusses the Presidential debates of the past and sermons of the past.

In the election battle between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas, the two men would debate sometimes for hours on end. And their audience was comprised of mainly blue collar workers, whose capacity for complex argumentation, vocabularies and attention spans are frankly baffling to most of us today. The language of men like Jefferson, Lincoln and even John Muir, if spoken in the typical high school classroom today, would be nearly incomprehensible.

Sermons in Puritan America were at least an hour in length, and often took on the character of literature read aloud. No doubt many of you are familiar with the legends of Jonathan Edwards, the famous Puritan minister in Massachusetts during the first great awakening in the 18th century. It is told that he had a rather severe vision problem and would hold the manuscript of his sermon close to his face and simply read it, occasionally glancing down at his audience to be sure they were still present. He was also a scholar, and not particularly charismatic in his delivery. His sermons were all substance and little style. Try this in any local church today and half the audience will either be passed out or busying themselves on their cell phones. And of course they will be sure that the problem is with the preacher and not them. He would be the one to have "lost touch."

2. The current image-media culture creates an environment that shocks people into a "techno-stupor."

I have students whose attention to varying forms of illuminated screens is almost totally unbroken throughout a typical day. And if they had the choice, some would spend their whole lives interacting with digitized reality rather than people, books, ideas, silence.

Some people today wake up to the screen, look at the screen while driving, while in classes, between classes, while eating lunch with five others also staring at screens, on the way home, at home, and finally the hum of the screen provides a lullaby as they fade into sleep.

Postman suggests that all of this input is too much for us to manage, and so we go into a passive-mind state. Perhaps an illustration is in order. Imagine that someone is shooting puzzle pieces at you machine-gun style, and it is your job to process these pieces and fit them into place. Perhaps at first you make the attempt, but before long it becomes futile. They are coming at far too great a speed for you to do anything meaningful with them. So you cope by standing there and letting them hit you and fall to the ground. Perhaps a few stick to your clothing here and there randomly, but you have given up trying to manage the puzzle pieces to construct some coherent picture.

Reading is a slow and deliberate process which allows one to manage the various pieces of information flowing towards the reader. As such, reading requires an active mind in order to sort and synthesize information. This is in no way required of most image-oriented entertainment media. All one need do is sit there and "receive." A thin smattering of information is retained while a thousand shallow impressions are made. The result is that the knowledge of the child of the image age is a mile wide and an inch deep while the readers knowledge is often deep, but only as wide as deliberately selected.

Ted Coppell put it this way, "How does one explain, or perhaps more relevant, guard against the influence of an industry (popular media) which is on the verge of becoming a hallucinogenic barrage of images, whose only grammar is pacing, whose principal them is energy? We are losing our ability to manage ideas; to contemplate, to think."

3. Many cannot function in abstract thinking because the media requires no meditation on concepts like "beauty," "truth," "deception," and the like.

Plato suggested in his own day that the average man was not concerned with "the forms;" his term for abstract and unchanging principles. For Plato, only the philosopher cares about such things as "the good life," and "justice," and "piety." The average man cares only about his physical safety and his physical appetites. It turns out that Plato had a rather low view of humanity. My question is this: If Plato is right, would the emergence of the image culture move the culture towards a contemplation of the abstract or away from it? It sure seems that the image orientation of our culture does not facilitate abstract thought. Plato's questions to the average man of his own day would be seen as irrelevant to survival and pleasure. Plato's questions in our day are simply not entertaining. In his own day, the average worker walked past Plato because he had no time for philosophical speculation. In our day, the average man has abundant time for Plato, but simply prefers Stephen Colbert. Apparently Plato's image fails to sell among the young American demographic.

If you question Postman's point here, consider a simple question: When the words "success" or "feminine beauty" are raised, do you think of an image or an idea? Have you worked out a philosophy of success or feminine beauty, or do you need not contemplate such things because various images are already assigned to those words--in fact, these images have supplanted any prior definitions for these words. Are you aware of the historical development of these words? Are you aware of the cultural discussions over the meanings of these words? Do you even care? Surely a cursory observation of our culture confirms Postman's point here.

4. Memory is reduced to a cluttered mass of superficial and unrelated pop-culture sound bits.

The great Christian evangelist of the Calvary Chapel movement Greg Laurie put it this way, "We remember the things we ought to forget and forget the things we ought to remember." The typical person in our culture has immediate access to a million trivial pop culture sound bits. He can quote movie lines at will with his buddies. He sings along with his favorite musicians. He is even seen to be witty if he can supply a funny line from a film or TV commercial at the right moment in conversation. But ask this same person to recognize the teachings of Plato, Jesus or even the literature class he just attended, and you will be met with a "deer in the headlights" expression.