One can imagine benefits, costs, and complications. But the task for conservatives remains clear.
Ian Tuttle, who I am glad to see again in our pages, argued earlier this week that “the 2024 campaign is one more sign that our politics is moving inexorably out of the televisual era — one way or another, and for better or for worse.” His judgment is sound. As is a related assessment: that television “maintains certain presuppositions about authority, expertise, and credibility.” One is that centralized, top-down authorities are inherently trustworthy, whether it’s the anchors behind the news desks or the figures, such as Anthony Fauci, who have regularly pronounced on TV.
So what might be the better, and what might be the worse, about the end of the televisual era? It will certainly weaken, and perhaps eventually destroy, the consolidationist tendency that has played a large role in opinion-formation in this country from roughly the Great Depression through (or perhaps merely to?) the present. Throughout this period, a few large institutions played a dominant role in the distribution of information and opinion. They typically did so with pretensions to be objective and possessed of quasi-scientific expertise –though it masked a leftism of various gradations –and with the ultimate goal of cultural conformity. Thus did William F. Buckley complain (following his own advice), in National Review’s 1955 mission statement, that “there never was an age of conformity quite like this one.”
The erosion of that landscape could have some benefits. It would likely make the imposition of consensus from above more difficult. And it would make its survivors more honest, in one sense: The fracturing of mass culture would weaken incentives to feign objectivity and would allow public figures to present their views for what they are. This would be a return to the more free-wheeling, straightforwardly opinionated era that preceded the consolidationist one, an era with traces evident in the outright partisan names of some modern newspapers. The consolidationist era may end up the exception, not the norm, in American history. If so, the continued dominance at the commanding heights of our culture by the Baby Boomers, who grew up under the exception and took it for the norm, will have forestalled but not negated its end.
What about the bad? Ian’s description of the television age as at least being capable of an intelligibility and refinement that its digital successor may lack reminds me of criticisms once made of television itself. In 1985’s Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman lamented that American discourse, “under the governance of television, has become shriveled and absurd.” Twenty years later, Postman’s son Andrew noted that his father’s complaints seemed quaint in a time of “the Internet, cellphones, PDAs, cable channels by the hundreds, DVDs, call-waiting, caller ID, blogs, flat-screens, HDTV, and iPods.” In a time of smartphones, Twitter, TikTok, VR, AI, ChatGPT, and other digital distractions, Andrew’s own observations now seem quaint.
These altered circumstances will present immense challenges. A fractured culture may resist top-down imposition, but it may also lack a shared frame of reference entirely. Curation could allow us to cultivate our own digital worlds, into which all of us might separately disappear. Distraction, always a human problem, might become a worse one, as attention spans plummet, dragged down by forms of information-dissemination that reward brevity and superficiality and punish length and depth. The basic responsibilities of life, and the duties of republican citizenship, might become more difficult to a “flattened” America — though this is hardly inevitable, despite what some have lazily argued.
In human affairs, little is inevitable. And much is surprising. The end of the televisual age will bring benefits and costs, some anticipated, others unexpected. Andrew Postman’s observations, from both the perspective of his looking backward to what his father wrote, and from our perspective of looking backward to what he wrote, ought to humble our collective faith in the power of prognostication. And Neil Postman’s own diagnosis ought to complicate an assessment of any particular time. The pre-television era, which he labels the “Typographic Age” and claims had a discourse more intelligent and serious than our own (he cites the Lincoln–Douglas debates), existed alongside the intense partisanship and fractured polity of the time. We may return to something like it. Technological circumstances may change, but human nature remains constant. And complex. The latter will remain true of the societies we create.
“Each age finds its own language for an eternal meaning,” Whittaker Chambers once wrote. If conservatives believe not only that human nature is constant but also that the truth is transcendent, then our task in the future, whatever it is like, will be what it is now, and what it has been: to help each age find that meaning. Ian’s latest proves that he is doing his part.