Neil Postman: "Voting...Is The Next to Last Refuge of The Politically Impotent"

I've been curtailing my blog and news reading for a few months now. I'm curtailing it even more as I read Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death. The thesis of Postman's brilliant book is simple: Orwell was wrong and Huxley was right. Orwell warned that we risked having our freedoms crushed by dictatorship; Huxley warned that we risked throwing our freedoms away in an orgy of distractions.

Postman wrote his book in 1985, 10 years before the New York Times heralded the Internet as a consumer tool. What he has to say is even more relevant in the age of the feed reader and the 24-hour news cycle than it was two decades ago. Information, says Postman, can be judged by how it impacts our lives. By this bill, most of the daily information we consume is sound and fury:

You may get a sense of what this means by asking yourself another series of questions: What steps do you plan to take to reduce the conflict in the Middle East? Or the rates of inflation, crime and unemployment? What are your plans for preserving the environment or reducing the risk of nuclear war? What do you plan to do about NATO, OPEC, the CIA, affirmative action, and the monstrous treatment of the Baha'is in Iran? I shall take the liberty of answering for you: You plan
to do nothing about them.

But...but...but I can vote, right?! I need all of this information to be an informed citizen! Sorry, but Dr. Postman saw that one coming:

You may, of course, cast a ballot for someone who claims to have some plans, as well as the power to act. But this you can do only once every two or four years by giving one hour of your time, hardly a satisfying means of expressing the broad range of opinions you hold. Voting, we might even say, is the next to last refuge of the politically impotent. The last refuge is, of course, giving your opinion to a pollster, who will get a version of it through a dessicated question, and then will submerge it in a Niagara of similar opinions, and convert them into - what else? - another piece of news. Thus, we have here a great loop of impotence: The news elicits from you a variety of opinions about which you can do nothing except to offer them as more news, about which you can do nothing. (pp.68-9)

The Internet at least has the redeeming feature that it supports organizing around causes. But how much can we accomplish in these national causes? What can you do about, say, the war in Iraq on the level of the Internet, except sign a petition and bitch on your blog? Blogging and commenting provide every individual an international forum for spleen-venting, but do little in the way of affecting true change.

We can make greater, longer-lasting impacts in our local communities. Instead, we lose ourselves in the flood of information available online, believing that we're "educating" ourselves. As Dr. Postman notes, this is junk education. It's education as entertainment. Why did blogs become popular? Because Joe Schmoe Blogger scored mainstream press write-ups and six-figure book deals. Apply Dr. Postman's utility test to Joe Schmoe's literary output, and it's clear that Joe won the Internet equivalent of American Idol through a blend of 99 parts amusement to 1 part utility. That Joe dolled up his amusement in the guise of the day's headlines doesn't make it any more useful than a week's worth of LOLCat pictures. It's all sound and fury, signifying - and changing - nothing.

Fear and Loathing in Blogging

I was reading the review that my wife's colleague James Rocchi wrote of Gonzo, the new Hunter S. Thompson biopic from Alex Gibney. This part seemed particularly relevant to blogging:

Gonzo also tackles the essential quandary of Thompson's work -- how an angry young man becomes an irrelevant old one, how the writing that made him a celebrity was then unmade as his celebrity got in the way, how living up to your public persona can devour the private person underneath. Many at Sundance complained that the film was too reliant on clips from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Where the Buffalo Roam. But I'd suggest that a smart film about Thompson had to include moments from those films, and extensively, just as Gonzo interviews British illustrator Ralph Steadman and talks about Garry Trudeau's co-opting of Thompson's persona for the 'Uncle Duke' character in Doonesbury; any discussion of Thompson's life has to, by extension, include all the reflections and refractions and recreations of it. Thompson was larger than life, and then his life got so large it was no life at all, and then he took his own life.

I wonder if this is why blogging is such a short-lived preoccupation for most people. Blogging can be a slow, pitiful slog with few rewards. As easy as it is to get started, it's difficult to get noticed unless you craft some sort of wild persona.

Maintaining a persona is physically and emotionally exhausting. The persona is a temporary construct in time and space, a static representation of the way you're thinking and feeling at a given point in your life. The construct, however, is temporary. As your thinking evolves, and your interests shift, the differences between your persona and your current phenomenal self grow. You end up torn in twain. You feel the Internet wants the persona, they want your snark-filled opinions on celebrity gossip, or your bitching about your children - even if you're itching to discuss the election, or have grown wary of the hatred leeching into your online voice.

I don't think it has to be that way. If I did, I wouldn't be blogging again. But I think it's a trap any writer can sink into. Killing a blog isn't a bad thing; sometimes, it's the only way to go home again.