Need for Speed / Amin Bhatia
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Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death (2005) is really an updating of Aldous Huxley’s prophetic Brave New World (1932). If you’ve read Brave New World you know it depicts a society controlled through pleasure, consumerism, and conditioning rather than physical force. It proposes a very different future than George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). Orwell’s book, coming at the end of WWII, centered more on the landscape of the world at the time it was written. That is, the consequences of totalitarianism, mass surveillance, repressive regimentation of people.
The consumerism, pleasure and conditioning in Huxley’s Brave New World serve as forms of control – a control by distraction rather than the Orwellian confrontation. In other words, letting a populace – as Postman argues – amuse itself to death. This type of control is one of the greatest (yet barely observed or studied) effects of the digital age. It offers a huge change from control by confrontation of earlier ages of technology based around the linear world of print created by Gutenberg’s printing press.
While the confrontation and threat Orwell predicted in Nineteen Eighty-Four are more visible as control means in the East than the West, the digital age of technology has pervaded and infiltrated the entire global populace. The modern world has little time of silence from distractions for reflection on the real world surrounding them.
Aldous Huxley’s Prophetic Book of 1932 / Brave New World
Given the importance of control by distraction, it is amazing that few in the populace have addressed this issue. It might be amazing but it’s not surprising. One of the key purposes and effects of distraction is to distract populaces from thinking about important things in the world … such as how they are controlled by governments. Media theorist Marshall McLuhan discussed this distraction as a type of numbness of the conscious mind. In Understanding Media he noted:
The American stake in literacy as a technology or uniformity applied to every level of education, government, industry and social life is totally threatened by the electric technology. The threat of Stalin or Hitler was external. The electric technology is within the gates, and we are numb, deaf, blind and mute about its encounter with the Gutenberg technology, on and through which the American way of life was formed … Our conventional responses to all media, namely that it is how they are used that counts, is the numb stance of the technological idiot. For the ‘content’ of the medium is like the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind.
For McLuhan, the “watchdog of the mind” has become numb in its distractions by the content of the “juicy piece of meat” of digital media, always on and always surrounding us. In the end, the idea of government control by distraction is a huge topic that hardly no one seems interested in exploring. But then, this is not surprising. In the era of distraction, the very act of exploration involves a repudiation of distraction.