A young woman approached the reference desk at which I work, told the librarians she was a Mass Communications major, and asked if we would mind filling out a brief survey on our television-watching habits. Choking back the temptation to make some wry comment on the weight of her major, I told her I wouldn’t mind filling out her survey, but wondered if it would be of any use to her since I didn’t watch television. She had a very expressive face, which registered surprise, and then a bit of disbelief. Was this guy pulling her leg?
It was resolved I could fill it out anyway. She was doing a survey, and data, after all, is data. An idea occurred to her: How old was I? I was, I told her, fifty-two. One could watch the calculation: not ancient, but still, pretty old. It was not uncommon, she told me, for older people to have “issues” with technology. There I was, sitting in front of the whizz-bang reference desk terminal at which I now do ninety percent of my work. But I didn’t bother to point it out, since I was busy—just smiled politely, quickly filled out her survey, wished her well, and bid her good day.
Last week the poor child was back with another question, a bit shyly put, but she wanted to know something about my educational level. (My guess is that she had spoken to her professor about me, and the question of my intellectual sophistication came up. Once again I was tempted, this time to show her that I had all my teeth, could write my name, and could count to ten without making a mistake, but once again, nobly resisted. Someone involved should have known that librarians have master’s degrees, and while the course of study has no rigor to speak of, at least in modern context their education has to be considered slightly above average.) “I have a Ph. D.” I told her. Sheer unbelief. “Do you read newspapers or listen to the radio?” she asked. I assured her that while I didn’t like them, I did now and then, but sensed it was time for a short lecture, the essence of which I will now relate:
“I was born at the dawn of the television age and grew up watching it. When my wife and I were married—we were about your age then, not old codgers like we are now—we decided not to have a television in the house, not because we thought it was sinful, but because we thought it was a needless distraction that wasted time better spent on other things. And we didn’t want our children to grow up with any television dependency. We would let them decide about that for themselves when they were out of the house.”
“If you are thinking that very, very few people do not watch television, you are right—that also has been our experience. But almost every household we have known that does not have a television is presided over by at least one Ph. D.—and invariably the doctorate is in a field that requires hard, skilled mental work in mastering languages other than one’s own, like the languages of math, physics, or ancient Mesopotamia. Not all doctor’s degrees are like this, you know.”
“I have found that many people who have to maintain their minds at top form have an intuitive dislike of having them manipulated by the organs of the mass media, which they find not only stupid, but having a drug-like quality that does something they don’t like to the efficiency and quality of their own thinking. It’s hard to explain, but it’s an opinion I have found that people like us share.”
“You see I am using a computer—a necessity for my job, and I’m known to be very good at it. I’m not a Luddite, and must make concessions to the age in which we live. But they will be limited, for I wish to retain as much control over my own mind as possible. That means television, even the good stuff on it, is, as a rule, out.”
Thus ended the reading, and the poor girl left me in something that looked like mild shock, the foundations of her poor little Mass Communications world, one would hope, somewhat shaken. Of course she had never thought of any of this. She was too young, and too heavily drugged. I wonder if there is anything that could place her at an objective distance from the world she occupies short of a Muggeridgian conversion, even if it were only a conversion to thinking, which, I believe, at the end of the day, is the greatest enemy of the mass media—a conversion to the place where the media might be used instrumentally, but allowed no controlling interest in life.
One must have, however, a reason to think, a reason that in our world surpasses all the reasons to cooperate with the world as we find it, a reason good enough to make it reasonable to pay the penalties for failure to cooperate with the mass-mind and its media. As the stakes in the game rise, as the world of the media begins to look less like that of Winston cigarettes and more like that of Winston Smith, the conversion necessary for deliverance from the mass-mind will be more like a religious act than simply a practical measure for the liberation of thought.
Recent Comments