The Devil is in the Details

Television is often blamed for the lack of culture, reason and discourse in our culture today. I have just read Neil Postman's "Amusing ourselves to Death" where vilifies television and nostalgically recalls an American age of reason that existed before mass media.The issue I have with this theory is causality. He claims that our shift in culture is caused by television because it is our new resource for knowledge. My issue with this is that Television is only how we entertain ourselves it is not how we provide for our way of life. Most people cannot watch T.V. at work and the most important knowledge and the knowledge that we generally seek is at the workplace. This is the knowledge that we need to survive providing food, cloths and shelter. The shift that Postman is describing has much more to do with the change of industrialization replacing the craftsman in the workplace. Industrialization has replaced craftsman attitude of quality and has replaced it with repetition and drudgery. If you think that your college education is going to save you from industrialization you only need to look at our new modern factory, it is a cubical office. A college education may keep your from getting your hand dirty but they are still factories mass producing products of thought.

When Henry Ford was first building car's he found the best craftsman in related fields to build car's with the same approach of quality that they had developed making things with the cognitive demands of a craftsman. When he began to develop the assembly line most of these craftsman simply walked off the job. in Ford's biography he wrote "So great was labor's distaste for the new machine system that toward the close of 1913 every time the company wanted to add 100 men to its factory personnel, it was necessary to hire 963" The new people that they were now hiring we far less skilled and had to be paid twice what the old craftsman were being paid. The difference is quality, the attitude that one takes when he is doing a job.(Keith Sward, The Legend of Henry Ford, New York:Rinehart, 1948, p. 49.)
So what happens to a person when has to do the same receptive task over and over again. He shuts down, its a survival tactic that eventually happens to everyone, quality is replaced with obedience and a personality that fits within the system of a corporate culture. Television is what people do to fill this void. Television may be the soma described in "A Brave New World" but it is only a symptom of a much larger cultural shift that requires human's to abandon quality. Television is only a coping mechanism because without we would all have to deal with how empty and unrewarding our jobs are. The evil is we can no longer care for the details of our lives.