Visual media rules! The lost war against forgetting

"Forgiving presupposes remembering." Paul Tillich, The Eternal Now 1963.

The word is dead! Long live TV and the Internet (TV-net). Hail videogames and online worlds. Blessed are the search engines Google, Altavista and Bing for in to their hands we commit our memory and history.

This is a story about memory and why TV-net are helping us lose ours.

There are two issues here that are mutually inclusive. One is the nature and quality of content we see on TV-net. For those of us in our 50s and 60s (and therefore doomed to be labelled NIMBY boomers, lost in nostalgia), we can remember live TV and current affairs programs that actually were expositions on the news of the day.

Yet the value we place on TV-net content is a matter of individual taste. One man’s Hogan’s Heroes is another man’s Charlie Chaplin. TV-net is tailor-made for hawking the trivial in to our lounge or bedrooms and that is what it does best.

Many of the modern thinkers of communications such as Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman recognised that because the “medium was the message”, the nature and ideology behind the technology which carried the message was alloyed to the content.

So in the case of TV and online news, flashy graphics, fast moving pictures, ten-second grabs, cut aways, old video footage edited on to new, are all tailor made for a visual medium.

And the ideology behind the content of TV, Google and the raft of spin offs created by converging and splitting mediums is entertainment.

Entertainment is the supra-ideology of all interactive discourse on TV-net. What we watch, and like to watch, are pictures - millions of them - of short duration and dynamic variety. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that, unless you’re focused on trying to make sense of the news of the day.

It is in the nature of TV-net to suppress the content of ideas in order to accommodate the values of visual interest - and when it comes to news, matters of policy or politics, these are the values of show business.

In the early 1980s Neil Postman wrote in Amusing Ourselves to Death that: “Modern visual communication is essentially fantasist because of the simulacrum of interactivity. It is rarely a mentally challenging activity. The sum requisite knowledge of how to play is provided for us.”

When Postman says “requisite knowledge” he means the organising principle of how pictures are created and gathered for us.

One of the best examples of an organising principle is the Google search engine. It organises searches on what is most popular and not necessarily on what is most applicable or even what is verifiable or accurate.

Google doesn’t search for the best information. It searches for websites with the most amount of links or hits on specified terms. Google produces an avalanche of information. Any sort of information and instantaneously.

The organising principle behind TV news is different but the result is the same. It gathers information from all over the world via syndicates, edits across time zones and then broadcasts it. If you ever wonder why you’re watching Taiwanese politicians fight in their parliament, it’s not because it contains core news values such as conflict, impact, proximity or timeliness. It’s simply because the networks have the pictures.

Watching a squirrel drive a small-motorised boat around a swimming pool is news. So is the fact that the 100th US soldier was killed in Afghanistan. Yet the squirrel will rank higher on Youtube. So the more serious the content, the closer we drift towards Dadaism.

“For technological change is neither additive nor subtractive, but ecological. One significant change generates total change. If you remove the caterpillars from a given environment, you are not left with the same environment minus caterpillars: you have a new environment, and you have reconstituted the conditions of survival,” Gideon Haigh said in The Monthly.

What does this say about exposition - how we have traditionally examined and critiqued information? For my generation (boomers) and those who came before, most of our modern ideas about the uses of the intellect were formed by the printed word, as were our ideas about education, knowledge, truth and information. This was the age of exposition as defined by the primacy of the written word.

Exposition is more than a type of analysis. It is a mode of thought. It’s a method of learning and a means of expression. Exposition leads us to think conceptually, deductively and sequentially. It places a high valuation on reason and order.

It has a large capacity for detachment and objectivity and a tolerance for delayed response. It forgoes the gratification of replying now for time spent considering a position.

The image has no respect for time and space. Its natural tendency is to compress everything in to now, this very instant.

It has everything to do with the speed at which information is delivered. TV and the Internet are masters of speed. It’s live or as my young niece used to say, it’s alive, because it produces a phantasmagoria of instant friends and melodious jingles.

Allow me to digress. Students have worked and played with computers for one full generation. We know a great deal about how they “interface” with text on the screen. They race across the surface, dicing language and ideas into bullets and graphics, seeking what they already want and shunning the rest.

This is a kind of literacy but it breaks down in the face of dense argument, a modernist poem, a long political tract and other texts that require steady focus and linear attention.

In an Introduction to Poetry class at RMIT some years ago I asked the students to memorise 20 lines of verse and recite them at the next seminar. A voice blurted out “Why?” She didn’t see any value in the exercise. If you can “Google” the verse anytime, why remember it?

Oxford University’s Professor Susan Greenfield has done considerable work on the rise of image technology and its neurological effects on thought processing and behaviour.

She was in Australia recently to deliver the annual Florey lecture at the University of Adelaide. Professor Greenfield argues the “yuck and wow” scenario of the Internet - “where you live in the short-term world where you have immediate reactions to things that flash up in your face and bombard your ears” - might drive brain connections and brain cell circuitry in a way that shortens the attention span.

"But for everything you win (with electronic games) you always lose something … Just because you can process information fast, that's very different to knowledge.

"For knowledge you really need to be able to reflect on something that's coming in - you have to slow your brain down. That's what reading does," Professor Greenfield said.

The images from TV-net float like motes in our mind and then settle outside conscious recall because electronic images have no sense of place. They are not symbols, they are not metaphors, they are images, the blind giants of the media world.

Yet this is not to damn all online communication. I regularly get news updates online from a range of sources. I certainly don’t criticise blogs or any of the other forms where people reach out from their computers with a point of view. I’m mindful that I’m writing in a digital medium now. I’m writing on a computer.

But understand this, TV-net is the command centre of the new epistemology. We have so thoroughly accepted its definitions of truth, knowledge and reality that irrelevance seems to be filled with import, and incoherence seems eminently sane. And if some of our institutions seem not to fit the template of the times, why it is they, and not the template, that seem to us disordered and strange.

It is not merely that TV-net is the metaphor for all discourse. It is that off screen the same metaphor prevails. Is it any wonder people feel confused?