From Sermons to Sonys: HOW WE KEEP IN TOUCH

NEIL HARRIS

The following Bicentennial Essay is the sixth in a series that will appear periodically and will discuss how we have changed in our 200 years.

Writing from Williamsburg in 1777, Thomas Jefferson voiced a complaint that echoes across the years. The post office, he grumbled, was inefficient. Riders were supposed to travel night and day, and pick up their mail three times a week; yet they were not meeting their schedules. "The speedy and frequent communication of intelligence is really of great consequence," Jefferson reminded his correspondent, John Adams. "Our people, merely for want of intelligence which they may rely on, are becoming lethargic and insensible of the state they are in."

John Adams agreed but had an explanation. "It is not easy to get faithful riders, to go oftener," he argued. The expense was too high to permit any profit.

The letters between the two revolutionaries indicated a close connection between our political Revolution and the exchange of information. The crisis of the 1770s had built upon, and now fed, the prompt dispersal of news and opinion. The pace of communication had irrevocably quickened, and the habits of an earlier generation were no longer sufficient.

Of course, there were limits to the change. Although the printing press had been operating in America since 1639, a chronic shortage of paper and type limited the easy spread of printed material. Correspondence and sermons supplied the necessary information. During the first century of settlement, ministers acted as the chief transmitters of news. By the 18th century, several among them had become sensitive students of crowd psychology and perceptual theory. Wars, pestilence, famine, murder, theft, gossip--these supplemented religious texts. Ministers often had a virtual monopoly on the interpretation of information.

"News" was slow in arriving. It took more than two months for Bostonians to learn of the death of William III in 1702.

The revolutionary crisis changed the sense of need. News of the battles of Lexington and Concord reached Boston immediately, but it took almost ten days for accounts to be printed in New York and Baltimore, and three weeks before a Charleston newspaper included a report.

An aroused public opinion was demanding fresh news. The colonies were serviced by 30 to 40 newspapers. Although their circulation was small (averaging around 600 each), these newspapers were passed from reader to reader and read aloud in taverns and coffeehouses.

Many papers were conservative. They depended on government for lucrative printing contracts--legal forms, public notices, the legislative record. Printers could be put in jail--and were--for libeling government officers. But the newspaper form nonetheless challenged authority. For one thing, it invited participation.

From the start, newspapers included letters to the editor (sometimes written by the editor to stir up interest). For another, these were truly living newspapers, with one item often superseding or contradicting another in the same issue. In one Boston Gazette of 1736, readers had datelines of Sept. 6 from London, Aug. 21 from Copenhagen, Aug. 25 from Vienna, July 31 from Paris, Oct. 14 from Philadelphia and Sept. 12 from Paris. On the first page of a 1737 Gazette, readers learned that Corsican rebels had overthrown their royal pretender; two pages later came a dispatch reporting that Corsica's King Theodore was still firmly in power after all--the attempted takeover had been a ruse to fool the Genoese. When reports were contradicted, denied or outdistanced in the space of several pages, it was natural for readers to become skeptical about authority.

Finally, the written contact was necessarily more equalizing than the oral. Deportment, stature, platform manner--all vanished behind the neutrality of type. What remained was the information or the argument, either of which could be taken to pieces slowly, unaffected by oratorical skill or audience fatigue, traditional props for the sermonizer.

The revolutionaries had another great avenue of expression besides the newspaper. Between 1750 and the mid-1780s, some 1,500 pamphlets appeared that touched on the great crisis. In these unbound tracts, which varied from a few pages to book length, every American opinion was represented, from Thomas Bradbury Chandler's The American Querist, a loyalist brief, to Nathaniel Whitaker's revolutionary An Antidote Against Toryism. A passion for discussion and argument animated this generation. Thomas Paine's Common Sense, the clarion call for independence, sold more than 100,000 copies within six months (based on population, an equivalent sale today would be more than 5 million).

In their search for information, revolutionaries did not necessarily value most highly what was most recent. Their readings in history, philosophy, travel and natural science supplemented their immersion in the events of the day. In the long letters they wrote one another, they indicated both the obsession to know more and a concern with traditional learning. Letter writing was a form of recreation as well as communication. Despite active political careers, men like John Adams often spent hours each day on their correspondence. Facts were analyzed again and again; a new joy in argument and in the testing of novel hypotheses became one of the intellectual characteristics of the era.

The Jeffersonian circle included David Rittenhouse, a legislator and astronomer; Dr. Benjamin Rush, reformer and theorist of psychological medicine; and Charles Willson Peale, inventor, portraitist and member of the Committee of Public Safety.

In many ways the 18th century was especially distinguished for organizing information. The great tradition of dictionaries and encyclopedias, through which men gained easier access to the accumulated knowledge of both their ancestors and their contemporaries, was one of the achievements of the era.

Samuel Johnson's two-volume dictionary was published in 1755, just four years after the first volume of Denis Diderot's Encyclopedic, that great compendium of information and Enlightenment opinion, had appeared in Paris. The first edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica began appearing in Edinburgh in 1768. The colonists knew and valued these works; indeed, I'Encyclopedie was among the most popular of all the books imported for colonial libraries. Information was instrumental to human happiness; education was meant to serve progress and political stability; and news, after all, was only one category of information, subject to the same laws of controversy and debate. The major issues of the day had to share their time with the contemplation of older discoveries.

In the 1970s information has become more than an adjunct to experience in America; in more and more instances, it threatens to replace it. The transformation has involved many factors: the dizzying speed with which news now travels, the way it is organized (or not organized), the emerging belief in the "objectivity" of news presentation and, above all, the quantity of information that is thrust at us. Where once there were several dozen news papers, plus books, correspondence and a pamphlet literature, Americans now have access to some 1,500 daily newspapers, more than 10,000 magazines, nearly 1,000 television channels and almost 8,000 radio stations. Of course, the bigger numbers reflect a bigger population--but only partly. For the fact is that in most respects the increase in information has been disproportionate; we absorb a quantity of information each day that would have sat ed our ancestors for a year or more.

Developments have not been linear; there are fewer newspapers today than there were 50 years ago, and new forms threaten older ones. The staggering audiences for mass communications have access to paperback books, Xerox copies, photography, films and a variety of other forms. Millions of Americans watch or hear the news at least three times a day--before work, at dinnertime and before sleep. Commercials, discussion shows, documentaries all provide further information.

Since 1927, when the automobile was married to the radio, Americans have demonstrated a commitment to continuous communication for entertainment or for news. And the distinction be tween news and entertainment grows steadily less clear.

Actually the presentation of material without commentary--what we fancifully refer to as "objective" news--has old Amer ican roots. We have long had a mania for raw statistics and facts of every kind. Even when our press has been particularly partisan or else heavily committed to background and interpretation, the demand for unadorned facts has rarely slackened. This taste was reinforced by our pioneering social science surveys of the early 20th century and it was further elaborated in the 1930s by a series of innovative photographers and cinematographers. William Stott of the University of Texas at Austin has recently argued that documentary journalism, broadcasting and film--along with soap operas, newsreel houses, "inside" books, photo and news magazines--appeal to an imagination that "seeks the texture of reality" by fixing upon particulars.

The quest for vicarious experience, which created the "human interest story" in 19th century journalism, has led to changes in al most every kind of public activity. It is still hard to believe that until the 20th century incumbent Presidents (and usually their challengers as well) did not barnstorm for election, and not until 1932 did a presidential nominee personally address his own nominating convention. The sports celebrity, the movie star, the crime reporter, the professional fund raiser are all products of this new sensibility. Eighteenth century communication was differently ordered.

In their letters, broadsides, sermons and pamphlets, the revolutionary generation received facts in the service of opinion, facts brought together to support a persuasion. Except for the newspapers, information was segregated according to subject and function. Encyclopedias and dictionaries contained variety, to be sure, but they were well organized; indeed, that was the point. Their readers searched them out with particular questions, and used them with some expectation of what they might find.

Information today has broken down older categories. On television in particular, dramatized commercials, world calamities and local anecdotes are presented in astonishing juxtaposition without apparent effort at assigning priorities. Of course, the colonial press was prone to some startling juxtapositions and inconsistencies itself, but these seem far more striking when they appear in the electronic media. Because information can be so easily repeated, neither concentration nor memory is critical to its ab sorption; at times they even interfere with the pleasure of reception. The instant replay is based on this principle of the second chance, a world without necessities that can transcend any barrier. The new stadium in New Orleans houses giant television screens, assuring spectators of the same opportunity to re-examine exciting moments that they would have had in their living rooms.

If electronic information systems have challenged temporal and spatial boundaries, the character of authority has also been impugned. Newspapers were once published "by authority," proudly boasting that their relationship to government represented some index of reliability. Whether their readers accepted the claim is not known. But today, the closer a publication stands to government, the more suspicious its readers are likely to be of its accuracy. Reporters and commentators have become more persuasive makers of news than the people they interview.

Such developments suggest a disproportionate influence by news gatherers on public opinion. Critics have been examining this issue for more than a century. Typically it has not been the affirmative character of the media that has attracted most attention, but their critical functions, the standing challenge they present to constituted authority. Visiting the U.S. in the 1840s, Charles Dickens blamed the press for practically every kind of moral degeneration, noting that "with ribald slander for its only stock in trade, it is the standard literature of an enormous class who must find their reading in a newspaper" or nowhere at all. The style of newspapers, as well as their content, added to their influence. Other visitors found that even educated Americans preferred their information summarized and predigested, even if it was abbreviated, inconsistent and strangely organized; it took too much time to read anything else. To service a broad public, American newspapers became magazines, creating various feature sections that appealed to housewives, businessmen, sports fans, merchants and job seekers.

By the turn of the century, sociologists and political philosophers, students of urbanization and the power of the press were brooding about the implications of mediated experience. The anonymous metropolis and the explosion of information threatened to swamp primary social contacts. Between man and his environment, Walter Lippmann noted in 1922, there had appeared a "pseudo environment," and human behavior had become nothing more than responses to the images and ideas filtered through the information machines.

Since the 1920s, the electronic media have become a fashionable source of anxiety, their power apparently boundless but their influence still strangely unclear. If information dispersal has become an entertainment form, this is, as we have seen, no total break with the past. When news came infrequently, as it did in the 18th century, its reception often provided occasions for gathering and celebration. It is the frequency of its reception that makes the real difference. When the entertainment appears daily, even hourly, the focus becomes the transmitter, not the information. This may be the only way of coping with the fact boom: personalizing information by identifying the story with the teller. Being talked about gives the politician, the athlete, the artist a legitimacy. The celebrant was once a person who performed a religious rite; now the celebrant is the creator of the celebrity. It is not strange that television broadcasters should be thought of, by some, as presidential possibilities.

With its meritocratic bias, our industrial civilization has emphasized the acquisition of information; thus our exploitation of machines that increase either transmission or reception has always been remarkable. Americans hailed the early typewriter as the bringer of universal literacy and world peace; our predictions about telephones, radio, film and television have been similarly cosmic. American Utopias, as in Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward, gloried in a world linked by instantaneous communications; current proponents of cable television see this form as the solution to a remarkable medley of social ills.

But because information has been so valued as a commodity, its centralization has always aroused hostility. No single newspaper has ever acquired the semiofficial status of the Times of London, despite the national ambitions of the New York Times. And our underfinanced educational broadcasting system has nowhere near the influence of the BBC. This is partly because Americans believe that information should be accessible through many different outlets. They have hesitated before the prospect of heavy, official subsidization and the specter of a single establishment blanketing minds with a unitary version of reality.

The task of "informing the public" continues to be laden with dignity, even as it is viewed with some suspicion. Yet it is not always clear what services this information performs, or how the orgy of statistical description, which in the economic field seems sometimes more misleading than no figures at all, aids our national perceptions. At one time, the role of information was clear. The founding fathers were proud of their new theory of representation, and effective representation required continual exchanges of information. By delegating power, the people reduce their chance for direct action; real intervention comes only through elections. In the intervals between voting, vast amounts of political information can produce a communal voyeurism, a diversion of the electorate which keeps it interested but not closely involved. Direct government is a casualty of size and complexity, for only representation permits large democratic societies to function. But a flood of facts that presents the illusion of control without changing actual power relationships is no necessary help to the democratic process.

What measures, then, can better order this growth of information? A historian can perhaps be forgiven for suggesting that one protection is to recall our ancestors' absorption with history, their conviction that reflection upon "old news" was as valuable as obtaining "fresh news." Creating values that help us organize our unceasing stream of facts is the job of both press and public, of political, intellectual and spiritual leaders. The first step may simply be to exercise greater self-scrutiny about our appetite for information.

There are signs that the first step is already being taken. Our lack of ease with simple generalizations about the power of information becomes more apparent every year. With less knowledge about the effects of knowledge, 18th century men thought they had more control. We are more aware of the gap. A symbol of this maturity is the debate among American journalists and commentators about opinion advocacy and the hidden biases of "impartiality." This debate points to an awareness that information presented without commentary and in great quantity can corrupt as well as inform.

There is, moreover, a new absorption with social communication and its varying levels of reality, a sense that knowledge includes more than verbal or statistical descriptions. However much current interest in matters like body language and social strategies can degenerate either into grammatical pedantry or a new mysticism, it reflects also a dissatisfaction with traditional forms of communication.

Finally, one can detect, in public debates and legislative enactments, a renewed concern with the issue of privacy, the citizen's right to retain for himself control over personal information and choices. Opinion pollsters have lately been meeting more resistance from prospective samples; governmental investigators, with a tarnished record of misusing certain data, are under investigation themselves. Not all the effects of this new suspicion are healthy or helpful. But it does signify an uncertainty about the value of uncritically adding to the mass of information.

Democratic societies cannot permit arbitrary abridgment of facts and opinion. Previous efforts indicate the clear and present danger. All we can do is approach our information more critically, aware that our desire for knowledge about one another can indicate nothing more noble than vulgar curiosity. But even self-criticism must have its limits, and we should not forget that keeping in touch remains a sign of an ancient faith, inherited from our Revolution: that enlightenment will eventually bring its own reward and that a form of truth can somehow emerge, battered but intact, from the mass of information that both obscures and protects it.

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