History? Education?

By Pico Iyer

In his new novel, Vineland, Thomas Pynchon, that disembodied know-it-all hiding out somewhere inside our nervous system, performs an eerie kind of magic realism on the McLuhanite world around us. His is an America, in 1984, in which reflexes, values, even feelings have been programmed by that All- Seeing Deity known as the Tube. Remaking us in its own image (every seven days), TV consumes us much more than we do it. Lovers woo one another on screens, interface with friends, cite TV sets as corespondents in divorce trials. And the children who have grown up goggle-eyed around the electric altar cannot believe that anything is real unless it comes with a laugh track: they organize their emotions around commercial breaks and hope to heal their sorrows with a PAUSE button. Watching their parents fight, they sit back and wait in silence for the credits. History for them means syndication; ancient history, the original version of The Brady Bunch.

All this would sound crazy to anyone who didn't know that it was largely true. As the world has accelerated to the fax and satellite speed of light, attention spans have shortened, and dimension has given way to speed. A whole new aesthetic -- the catchy, rapid-fire flash of images -- is being born. Advertising, the language of the quick cut and the zap, has quite literally set the pace, but Presidents, preachers, even teachers have not been slow to get the message. Thus ideas become slogans, and issues sound bites. Op-ed turns into photo op. Politics becomes telegenics. And all of us find that we are creatures of the screen. The average American, by age 40, has seen more than a million television commercials; small wonder that the very rhythm and texture of his mind are radically different from his grandfather's.

Increasingly, in fact, televisionaries are telling us to read the writing on the screen and accept that ours is a postliterate world. A new generation of children is growing up, they say, with a new, highly visual kind of imagination, and it is our obligation to speak to them in terms they understand. MTV, USA Today, the PC and the VCR -- why, the acronym itself! -- are making the slow motion of words as obsolete as pictographs. The PLAY button's the thing. Writing in the New York Times not long ago, Robert W. Pittman, the developer of MTV, pointed out just how much the media have already adjusted to the music-video aesthetic he helped create. In newspapers, "graphs, charts and larger-than-ever pictures tell the big story at a glance. Today's movie scripts are some 25% shorter than those of the 1940s for the same length movies." Even TV is cutting back, providing more news stories on every broadcast and less material in each one.

There is, of course, some value to this. New ages need new forms, and addressing today's young in sentences of Jamesian complexity would be about as helpful as talking to them in Middle English. Rhetoric, in any case, is no less manipulative than technology, and no less formulaic. Though TV is a drug, it can be stimulant as well as sedative. And the culture that seems to be taking over the future is a culture so advanced in imagemaking that it advertises its new sports cars with two-page photographs of rocks (though the Japanese, perhaps, enjoy an advantage over us insofar as their partly ideogrammatic language encourages them to think in terms of images: haiku are the music videos of the printed word). Nor would this be the first time that technology has changed the very way we speak: the invention of typography alone, as Neil Postman writes, "created prose but made poetry into an exotic and elitist form of expression." No less a media figure than Karl Marx once pointed out that the Iliad would not have been composed the way it was after the invention of the printing press.

Yet none of this is enough to suggest that we should simply burn our books and flood the classroom with TV monitors. Just because an infant cannot speak, we do not talk to him entirely in "goos" and "aahs"; rather, we coax him, gradually, into speech, and then into higher and more complex speech. That, in fact, is the definition of education: to draw out, to teach children not what they know but what they do not know; to rescue them, as Cicero had it, from the tyranny of the present. The problem with visuals is not just that they bombard us with images and information only of a user-friendly kind but also that they give us no help in telling image from illusion, information from real wisdom. Reducing everything to one dimension, they prepare us for everything except our daily lives. Nintendo, unlike stickball, leaves one unschooled in surprise; TV, unlike books, tells us when to stop and think. "The flow of messages from the instant everywhere," as Daniel Boorstin points out, "fills every niche in our consciousness, crowding out knowledge and understanding. For while knowledge is steady and cumulative, information is random and miscellaneous." A consciousness born primarily of visuals can come terrifyingly close to that of the tape-recorder novels of the vid kids' most successful voice, Bret Easton Ellis, in which everyone's a speed freak and relationships last about as long as videos. Life, you might say, by remote control.

If today's computer-literate young truly do have the capacity to process images faster than their parents, they enjoy an unparalleled opportunity -- so long as they learn to process words as well. They could become the first generation in history to be bilingual, in this sense, fluent onscreen as well as off. We need not, when we learn to talk, forget to communicate in other ways. But only words can teach the use of words, and ideas beget ideas. So just as certain tribes must be taught how to read a TV set, we must be taught how to read the world outside the TV set. Much better, then, to speak up than down, especially when speech itself is threatened. Nobody ever said that thinking need be binary. Nobody, that is, except, perhaps, a computer.