9 -- We believe that we live in an "age of information," that there has been in information "explosion," an information "revolution." While in a certain narrow sense that is the case, in many important ways just the opposite is true. We also live at a moment of deep ignorance, when vital knowledge that humans have always possessed about who we are and where we live seems beyond our reach. An Unenlightenment. An age of missing information.
10 -- I'm not interested in deciding which of these ways of spending time is "better." Both are caricatures, and neither strikes me as a model for a full and happy life. But caricatures have their uses -- they draw attention to what is important about the familiar. Our society is moving steadily from natural sources of information toward electronic ones, from the mountain and the field toward the television; this great transition is very nearly complete. And so we need to understand the two extremes. One is the target of our drift. The other an anchor that might tug us gently back, a source of information that once spoke clearly to us and now hardly even whispers.
11-12 -- ["invisible ink" effect -- discourse spoken on the Tube is not easily recoverable.]
14 -- ...TV is cumulative, and over a lifetime ten minutes here and there of watching fishing or car racing or Divorce Court has added up to a lot of hours and had a certain effect on all of us.
15 -- [Admits that "people don't watch TV... the way I watched it... -- that is, ordinary viewers get a steady, cumulative dose, mixed into the fabric of everyday life.]
16 -- [Impact of TV most acute on the generations raised on the medium -- those without a "real world" to use as reference point.]
16 -- [McKibben's perspective -- returning to television after a prolonged moratorium: it is like returning home after college, he says.]
18 -- My question is, "What's on?"
21 -- What I'm talking about is what happens when you see an ad, over and over, for small Ritz crackers pre-smeared and stuck together with peanut butter and sold under the slogan, "No assembly required." What habits of mind and body does this, in concert with a hundred other similar messages, help produce? And how do those habits differ from the habits, the attitudes people got from the natural world?
22 -- [Mark Fowler, Reagan's FCC chief, celebrates the transition from a natural to an electronic "ecology."]
22-23 -- [TV] worries me because it alters perception. TV, and the culture it anchors, masks and drowns out the sublte and vital information contact with the real world once provided. There are lessons -- small lessons, enormous lessons, lessons that may be crucial to the planet's persistence as a green and diverse place and also to the happiness of its inhabitants -- that nature teaches and TV can't. Subversive ideas about how much you need, or what comfort is, or beauty, or time, that you can learn from the one great logoless channel and not the hundred noisy ones or even the pay-per-view.
24 -- [Hamburger wisdom: what would it take to produce a hamburger in the wilds of the Adirondacks?]
25-26 -- [Argues with McLuhan's claim that his children have access to more knowledge than any other generation, thanks to TV: McKibben insists that they lack "fundamental knowledge," which turns out to mean "a deep sense of limits."]
28 -- [Story of the Manhattanite who goes fishing in Chile in order to re-discover her "natural" ability to acquire food.]
29-30 -- [Quotation from Jeanne Robert Foster: "I must find a man who still loves the soil..."]
30 -- ...the television culture celebrates incompetence.
35 -- [McKibben admits that he is hunting for a "shortcut" to salvation -- a curse of the modern age:] But it's a useful shortcut, since though few of us will farm, most people can still manage regular excursions into the natural world. It's not elitist, it's subversively easy.
35 -- ...there's very little, perhaps nothing, left that's entirely "natural."
35 -- [Quotes John Muir on "the inexhaustible pages of nature... written over and over uncountable times, written in characters of every size and color, sentences composed of sentences, every part of a character a sentence."]
36 -- [Postulates "a true age of information"]
38 -- [De-emphasis of the local and regional in favor of the national and global.]
41 -- [McKibben argues that the "natural" world conveys information from the very situation of things, while there is no such effect in the artificial world; cites example of condominiums which are where they are simply because of proximity to water and a skiing hill.]
45 -- Now, McLuhan said a lot of things, and some of them were clearly nonsense -- he once described a thermonuclear explosion as "information," and he had complicated theories about how the flicker on a TV screen made it "low-definition" and therefore "participatory."
46 -- Sometimes McLuhan was wronger than wrong, as when he predicted that "the TV image has ended the consumer phase of American culture."
47 -- When people in villages traditionally got together to talk, they talked about what they had in common. What the weather was like and what it meant for the crops; what the people in the next village were up to and if they meant harm; who in town was causing trouble and who needed help. The talk had real content.... [What's the source for any of this?]
49 -- ["Coke adds life" in one African language means "Coke brings you ancestors back from the dead."]
52 -- ["Global village" is really "global convenience store."]
53 -- ...electronic media have become an environment of their own... to the list of neighborhood and region and continent and planet we must now add television as a place where we live.
65 -- By some estimates... human beings have used more natural resources since the end of World War II than in all the rest of human civilization. This needs to be seen for the binge it is, and it probably needs to end -- sooner rather than later, we need sustainable, steady-state societies that live off the planet's interest and not its capital. But if you marinate in the images of the last forty years for hour upon hour and day after day, this binge seems utterly standard, and it's exceedingly hard to imagine other models, societies, ideas.
70 -- [Having erotic feelings for a passing raptor.]
74 -- [TV's capacity for "misinformation" -- a documentary about an endangered bird shows minute after minute of footage of these animals, implicitly suggesting that they're not that endangered.]
85 -- ...too sophisticated to burn books, we burn the planet. Each day information leaks away -- some branch of life that evolved for millions of years is gone, and the next day two more, and six the day after that. The world grows stupider, less substantial. And those of us who would fight have little ground on which to stand, for the tug at our hearts from the sad picture on the screen is no substitute for the deep and lifelong understandings we've let slip away.
99 -- This information about the divine makes perfect sensee on the mountain; it accords with what I feel and what many humans in many places have felt. That rightness, down to the sound of breath in your own lungs, can't come through the human mediation of a television set. It comes through the mountain, the field, the ocean, the sky, the tree, the animal, through gravity and heat and motion -- it is information, pure and simple.
105 -- [TV's implicatedness in the cult of constant growth and expansion.]
110 -- [No real "progress" since 1960; little growth in median family income, no breakthroughs in technology (sez he)]
112 -- A phone that looks like a football helmet! A phone in the car! Do they change our lives?
116 -- ...there's very little left in daily life to streamline.
118 -- [1957 was the peak year in American's reporting themselves to be happy.]
119 -- There are no six-thousand-foot trees. Here's a red squirrel. When it was young it was tiny. It grew quickly. It stopped growing -- if it continued, its weight would soon overwhelm its anatomy and it would collapse. [Limits to growth.]
120 -- The increasing temperature, the thinning of the ozone -- these are signals about the correct size of our society. Reminded hourly of our glittering destiny, though, we can hardly recognize them. [And just how big -- or small -- is "correct?"]
124 -- [QVC hostesses speculate that shopping is an adaptation of the old hunting instinct. To shop is the "kill! kill! kill!"]
128 -- Even up on the mountain I was inordinately pleased with my fancy backpack, not because it carried my load better than other packs I've had but because it was sharp-looking and bespoke ruggedness and seriousness of purpose. There was no one else up there -- it just spoke those things to me.
132-33 -- [Dance and music once had "content" to spare, but now they're just about shaking your booty.]
134 -- [Critique of pop music, amounting to a lament that there aren't as many protest songs any more.]
136 -- [Cranes' mating dance, again celebrated as "information."]
142 -- [Triumph of the linear -- the time-line stamping out the old, traditional, cyclical sense of time.]
144-45 -- [Argues for the importance of cyclical time as against linear time.]
148 -- [Bismarck chose 65 as retirement age because most of his bureaucrats would be dead by then. The equivalent age today would be 117.]
149 -- [Television takes away the "dignity" of old age, because it is demographically skewed to the very young.]
153-54 -- [On the first via-Telstar satellite nightly news broadcast, David Brinkley announced "there is no important news" (ca. 1964)]
157 -- TV's vaunted immediacy is here a curse, and even newspapers can't help much -- you need a book, or at least a documentary, to see time unfold over decades. Something that happens constantly and all around lulls the camera. You can't dash off in a helicopter to track down global warming -- you need to sit calmly in a chair and think.
159 -- You need a novel to explain why Mr. R.'s son doesn't want to come to his funeral...
162 -- [The emphasis on speed in electronic communications is no help with complex problems, where what we need is not immediacy but depth.]
163 -- [Argues that it would be more advantageous to take in only a small amount of news periodically instead of vast amounts all the time. Compare Neil Postman's arguments about information control and "stamping out excess information."]
164 -- [Paean to All Things Considered -- strange, since it usually presents a huge overdose of news.]
165-66 -- [Inverse knowledge-effect: the more TV people watched, the more likely they were to think Kuwait was a democracy.]
176 -- The greatest story of the TV age is the transition from the fifties to the sixties -- the demolition of the last ordered American "way of life." And TV tells us this story incessantly.
183 -- ...an art that reminds us that our own lives shouldn't merely be free -- that they should be of value to others, connected to others, and that if our lives arfe like that they will become finer. That's what a culture is. It's true that we don't need all the old "traditional" values -- but as a society we desperately need values.
184-85 -- [An example of solid values: the American gay community and its reaction to the HIV epidemic.]
189 -- [TV robs us of information by biasing our senses toward the visual and auditory.]
191 -- [TV vision is extremely limited; and more important, it robs our ability to choose objects of perception by locking down a narrow visual field.]
192 -- No one's ever shot a scene for television with a cast of thousands. [Nor did a "scene" in a film ever involve so many.]
193 -- If you wanted even the slightest sense of what the war in Iraq was like, how it felt, you'd be far better off hiring someone to come at some random hour in the night and toss a brick through your window.
199 -- [TV doesn't make us happy; it tranquilizes us though we remain basically depressed.]
201 -- [McKibben's story about lying on the couch and watching Wide World of Sports instead of playing Pop Warner and Little League. I Was A Pre-Adolescent Couch Potato?]
210 -- [Discussing something that looks much like current computer networks:] But are such advances actually so profound? When you think about it, the new technology doesn't really seem very staggering. The revolution clearly came with the invention of television, when you could carry sight and sound from distant places into your home and do it abundantly and cheaply. The rest -- the bodysuits and the laser discs and so on -- are add-ons, refinements, and they do not fundamentally alter the limits of the technology.
211-12 -- But it's not just real reality that electronics supplants; it's the other arts that try to mediate reality.... Consider, just by contrast, the book, a form in disrepute with the up-to-date. [Long quotation from Edward Rothstein in the NYT] ...An author, in a sentence or even half a sentence, can conjure up any locale from Paris to Pluto, can flip backward and forward in time, can take you inside the minds of her characters. She's in no measure bound by what she can take a picture of. TV can show you a face, saving you the work of imagining what that face would look like, but it can't get behind the face, or it can do so only clumsily, by having a character talk.
213 -- [McKibben predictably nominates The Civil War as the best TV of 1990 -- though he admits that it's "more like a wonderfully illustrated book that talented people read aloud"]
216 -- If God delivered the Ten Commandments on the Today show, it's true he'd have an enormous audience. But the minute he was finished, or maybe after he'd gotten through six or seven, it would be time for a commercial and then a discussion with a pet psychiatriost about how to introduce your dog to your new baby.
229 -- [Another McKibben influence: Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire: "I want to be able to look at and into a juniper tree, a piece of quartz, a vulture, a spider, and see it as it is in itself, devoid of all humanly ascribed qualities."]
231 -- [Horseshoe crabs coming "onshore in great waves to mate" -- Duh!]
237 -- One of the functions of advertising, and more broadly of television as a whole, is to reinforce the way we're used to doing things, and one of its most potent tools is ridicule.
242 -- [The Mickey Mouse Club does Operation Margarine: "If you think Home Shopping Network's a tacky rip-off, you're a dweeb, because everyone already knows it's a tacky rip-off."]