What’s Next?
POSTMAN WAS ONE OF THE FEW educational theorists who realized how profoundly undemocratic runaway technology combined with unrestricted capitalism can be. Who was it, exactly, who voted to make all our LP vinyl record collections obsolete—not to mention the expensive turntables and “sound systems” we’d invested in to play those records? When was the democratic referendum held in which the majority of us voted to begin our lifelong music acquisition efforts from scratch again, first for CDs, then for burnable singles from iTunes (or someplace where we pay nothing because the artist’s work is stolen), now to stream to and through and from all our Glass Teats? Postman understood the need for the “creative destruction” element of capitalism, augmented as it is through dizzying technological change, but he wasn’t ashamed to call himself a Luddite. That group—followers of a mythical, Robin Hood-like Ned Ludd, who sabotaged early-industrial-age looms— fought to preserve their culture and the value of their (non-industrialized) work. Postman’s identification with them is his acknowledgment that each new technology, however ill-conceived or temporary, may bring a greater reality of damage to a culture than the technology might be worth. Neil Postman realized that the headlong rush to more and faster and shinier and more omnipresent Glass Teats in our lives would have dark consequences. “GIVE US THE NAME,” thousands of American parents might shout, “of the man
or woman who put texting capabilities on a cell phone and then sold these machines to our sons and daughters who’ve just received their drivers’ licenses!” If you invent and sell a non-osmotic semipermeable crunch-enhancer for cereal (a la Chevy Chase in Christmas Vacation) and it kills thousands or tens of thousands of people, largely those under 21, someone or some corporation is going to be held responsible. There’s going to be hell to pay and that payment will begin in the tens of billions of dollars to the parents of the dead kids. But cellphones alone used by drivers of cars—much less cellphones with texting capabilities—have already killed thousands of young people (and those of all ages whom they plow into on the highways) and will, despite draconian laws and punishments being proposed in all states, kill hundreds of thousands more. Couldn’t someone designing cellphones (especially with text capabilities) have foreseen this highway carnage as young people, already suffering from the human race’s worst Age of Constant Attention Deficits, lose what little driving attention they were able to muster in the first place? Oh, give us a name— we’ll take the whole design committee if you give us their names—and give us a gibbet. Postman understood that Glass Teats—all Glass Teats—not only are the drug of choice for shallow people, but they are deadly treacherous as well. Like the 1,207 “friends” I’ve accepted after being on Facebook for less than two months —about 7 of whom I’d recognize in person—context-free information flowing like botulized milk from all these Glass Teats creates a “comprehension field” that’s 25,000 miles wide and 1 millimeter deep. Mostly, the gorilla-glass myriad of Glass Teats in 2012 will do what the Mother of All Glass Teats did in 1955: Mostly, it will distract us from more important and more human thoughts and interactions.
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What’s Next with Childhood?
NOTHING.
Childhood—as a separate time and place in one’s life—is gone. Dead. Finished. Childhood was “born” in the late 1840s, largely due to the work of its midwife Charles Dickens, and it died in the mid-1990s, largely due to the 32
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indifference to it from all of us. Look at paintings of children pre-1840s. The ratio of head size to body size is all wrong. They’re the proportions of shrunken adults. They’re bizarre. A Charlie Brown cartoon is closer to the head-body ratio of children than the portraits of some of the finest artists of the 15th through 19th centuries. That’s because no one really paid attention to “children”; they were thought of and even visualized as miniature adults. Through his books, Dickens helped create childhood as a protected and sentimentalized new period in a human’s life. But it’s dead now. As Postman pointed out decades ago, what separates the adult from the child is a restriction of information (and responsibilities and behaviors) for children. But when children and adults get all their information from the same source—today TV and the Internet—childhood, as a viable concept, is dead. By doing this, parents have helped remove the door to their bedroom—everything from sexual details to worries about money and mortgages now flows over the “child.” When the culture deliberately sexualizes the child, childhood is dead. When children are targeted for hundreds of billions of dollars as little consumers, CHILD childhood is dead. HOOD In 2012, the culture will notice that 1845—1994 we’ve killed childhood forever. The headR.I.P. stone might read:
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What’s Next with The Book?
idea of sacred Scripture, but the very bookness of a physical book, whole and entire unto its own self. In my Colorado Front Range community of some 90,000 souls, the only bookstore that carried new books was Borders. As a writer, I’m supposed to praise only independent bookstores, but the truth is that our Borders was a clean, well-lighted, coffee-smelling place, filled with thousands of books in spite of their wish for more “diversified” inventory. It was one of the few places open after 9 p.m. on any given night, and it folded up, literally, over night. The same was true in 2011 in mid-size towns all across America—good towns and cities that could never support a large, independent bookstore like Portland’s Powell’s or Seattle’s Elliot Bay or Denver’s The Tattered Cover, but that offered an oasis for readers in the night with their Borders and Barnes & Nobles. The latter is now our last national chain of physical bookstores and its success or extinction, one reads in the Wall Street Journal, will depend on how well B&N sells their proprietary e-reader, the NOOK®, to their patrons. Why do I imagine a cartoon of dinosaurs designing an asteroid to drop on themselves? “THE BOOK” BEING NOT SOME GROUP’S