“Four score and seven years ago…” We all know this famous introduction to President Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. It is regarded as perhaps one of the greatest presidential speeches of all time. Yet if we heard this speech today we might not realize its power. Take, for instance, this small excerpt: “But in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead who struggled here have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract.” The sentence complexity and content found in these two sentences would likely not capture us today in the same way that the average 19th century citizen was. Lincoln’s audience could comprehend speeches like this because they made the effort to read, listen to hours of debate, and train themselves in intellectual pursuits. In recent years, technological advancements have contributed to a society where amusement is held above intellectual pursuits. However, condemning technology is not the goal here. Technology presents many wonderful things but it also calls for a larger responsibility on the part of its users. When responsibility is not taken we may find ourselves as Neil Postman claims, “amused to death.” Postman describes the difference between today and the 19th century in his essay, The Typographic Mind, as “thinking in an image centered culture” as opposed to a “word centered culture” (Postman 10). As society continues to modernize towards an image-centered culture the average students’ intellectual capabilities may be held back by the dependence on entertainment, instant access information, and advertisement.
Entertainment, according to the 2003 edition of Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, is defined as simply, “something diverting or engaging.” Today entertainment is television, video games, movies, and smartphones, all of which are instantly accessible. Entertainment before the 1970’s and 80’s would likely have consisted of social events, games, and plays. Entertainment was usually considered a luxury and not a necessity. Instead, literature permeated the lives of the people through books and speech. As Paul Anderson wrote, “Boys followed the plow with book in hand” (quoted in Postman pg. 11) Along with this came the concept of “people whose intellectual lives and public business were fully integrated into their social world” (Postman 2). Today, intellectual integration seems rare; instead we see a greater concern for entertainment value. Text books need pictures and “fun facts” on each page, cars need stereos and DVD players, signs need a clever slogan, commercials need a punch line, cereal boxes need a maze on the back, restaurants need a television screen, youth groups need a game system, movies need an action sequence, pastors need a joke, happy meals need a toy, the list goes on. It can be argued that if we don’t entertain then we don’t have an audience in the first place but, as seen in 19th century America, this is not the case. It seems that today we have turned entertainment into an inalienable right of the people, which has never been true. We have simply trained ourselves, overtime, to function this way.
Today it is difficult enough to find students who do their homework let alone learn outside of class for the sake of expanding their own knowledge. It is no revelation, then, that what replaces traditional reading and writing during discretionary time is entertainment outlets, the largest of these being video games and television. Students are essentially replacing their valuable time with things that are designed to waste time. These means of entertainment are meant to bring happiness and relaxation into people’s lives. But when used too much, entertainment takes us away from life all together causing an unhealthy apathy and discontent towards, as Dr. Paul Patton would sarcastically say, “our boring three dimensional existence.” Watching Lost every night in my dorm room does little more than provide escape from the stress of the day. This escape might be necessary, but when I continue to watch episode after episode I lose precious opportunities to grow. In essence, entertainment has become a dangerous procrastination device holding us back from our true potential. This potential is multiplied because we have knowledge at our fingertips more than any other decade in human history. All we must do is dive into that knowledge with a passion for wisdom, that we may reap the fruit it produces in our lives.
Having knowledge at our fingertips is a recent thing made possible through technology, specifically the Internet. It is argued that with our unlimited access to information through the Internet, learning/memorization is rendered obsolete. Well-known 20th century writer, Dorothy Sayers, strongly disagrees with this statement in her essay The Lost Tools of Learning. She says, “they learn everything, except the art of learning” (3). Sayers then goes on to explain this through the example of a child being taught “mechanically and by rule of thumb” how to play a song on the piano without having “taught him the scale or how to read music.” Because of this he still did not have the faintest idea as to how to play any other song (3). This clearly portrays the issue with simply “Googling” the answers and picking out the facts we need without bothering to understand the information we are presented with. After all, what will happen to the student particularly adept at fact searching when they must make critical decisions in the real world? You cannot Google search the correct techniques in brain surgery while operating just as you cannot hope to learn your favorite ACDC song on the guitar from a tutorial video and immediately become a touring rock star. Having all this knowledge at our fingertips allows us to ace a test or homework assignment only to forget what we had learned in a matter of days. Once again, this is a fault in our response to the wonderful technology we have. Students have the information to learn everything they could ever desire before them, but they need the motivation to earnestly seek after knowledge. Without this motivation, we can easily misuse and abuse the little information we do take in.
With this surplus of instant access information and lack of true, deep, understanding, students and scholars are misusing facts more and more. Words, when taken out of context, can be misconstrued into saying literally anything. This is a serious tragedy. Take, for instance, this well-known verse from the book of Matthew where Jesus says, “If your right eye causes you to sin, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into hell.” One could conclude that Jesus advocates violence and self-mutilation. However, if read further to Matthew 6:14 it says “forgive men when they sin against you, and your heavenly Father will also forgive you.” When read in this context, it is clear that the Jewish people of the day were not meant to gouge out their eyes, but instead understand the seriousness of forgiveness in their eternal salvation. Postman states that misusing information “is serious because meaning demands to be understood” (4). In this case an entire faith could be misunderstood. Meaning must be protected. Allowing meaning to be misconstrued dangerously distorts our entire understanding of reality.
Reality, as defined by the 2003 edition of Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary is, “something that is neither derivative nor dependent but exists necessarily.” For example, the East African Maasai people live in a reality where cattle and number of children are a man’s wealth, whereas here in the USA, the dollar bill, price of car, or size of house is a man’s wealth. Something has affected the realities of both cultures. Much of our current reality is built from advertising. Indeed, the concept of advertising seems to “exist necessarily” in our society where for thousands of years it did not. After all, much of our economy is run off the funds from advertising offering “free” services to people in anticipation that they can convince these same people to buy their product. The system is quite remarkable but its message is more powerful than we think.
Advertising has greatly contributed to the materialistic consumerism we live in. In the 19th century advertising was “intended to appeal to understanding, not to passions” (Postman 9). Early 19th century ads such as the examples found in Postman’s essay listed the facts including the product’s purpose, and where you could buy it. Today we see something much different. Take for instance the Axe commercial. Axe commercials usually portray a man who has just used axe with women literally chasing him like animals. While not only extremely degrading to women, like many other present day advertisements, this ad appeals to a man’s passion for sex. The ad contains no logical argument only an appeal to passion. In this way advertising has extended to not only making something known, but to convincing as many people as possible it is necessary to existence. As a result, advertising directly changes reality in two ways: it convinces us we are not satisfied now, and we need what they are selling to mend that dissatisfaction. By utilizing our emotion, advertising can convince us we need the new iPhone or Proactive acne cream to be accepted. This is, of course, ridiculous but we believe it nonetheless.
Many students claim they are above the influence of such advertising, but the numbers say otherwise. In October 2006, the consulting firm Yankelovich noted that “the average 1970s city dweller was exposed to 500 to 2,000 ad messages a day” whereas today the average is “3,000 to 5,000” ads. If it were true that students were immune, then advertising would become useless instead of rapidly growing. In this way, advertisement has created a society that values the material it can buy much more than the long-term accumulation of knowledge found in literature. This demand for visual appeal has slowly eradicated the desire for intellectual growth. At the very least, the visual wins over our attention before the intellectual does. Consequently as the visual becomes more accessible, the sacrifice of the intellectual and literate becomes easier to justify.
Today’s generation is not any less capable intellectually than those before. To the contrary, there are more possibilities, a near infinite amount of knowledge, and extremely efficient ways of accessing that knowledge. With the help of technology, students have the opportunity to reach even greater levels of intellect. However, technology has also given us thousands of ways to substitute that intellect with the visually appealing. Students must reclaim responsibility of their future, understanding the importance of literature in their quests for knowledge. Society’s dependence on entertainment, instant access information, and advertising have inflicted on our ability to comprehend and produce literary content. This unhealthy dependence must be stopped by students who are willing to prioritize literary and intellectual pursuits above what their culture says they need. If this prioritizing and responsibility is accomplished, then the future will lead to magnificent things.
Works Cited
“entertainment.” Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary. 2003 ed. Print.
Lincoln, Abraham. “Gettysburg Address.” 19 Nov. 1863. ourdocuments.gov. Web. 3 Nov. 2011. <http://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash=true&doc=36>.
Petrecca, Laura. “Product placement — you can’t escape it.” USA Today. N.p., n.d. Web. 3 Nov. 2011. <http://www.usatoday.com/money/advertising/2006-10-10-ad-nauseum-usat_x.htm>.
Postman, Neil. “Nature of Language.” Amusing Ourselves to Death. N.p.: n.p., n.d. 11. Rpt. in Amusing Ourselves to Death. N.p.: n.p., n.d. N. pag. PDF file.
“reality.” Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary. 2003 ed. Print.
Sayers, Dorothy Leigh. The Lost Tools of Learning. 1948. N. pag. PDF file.
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