Handmaking America by Bill Ivey

Author:Bill Ivey
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781619021242
Publisher: Catapult
Published: 2018-05-16T00:00:00+00:00

I know some of this probably feels like reheated conventional wisdom. The trends that have taken America to our current dismal state have been with us in one way or another for the past one hundred years. And dozens of experts writing across many decades have decried the power of television, the impact of technology, and the manipulative sophistication of marketing. It is not their mere existence but the exaggerated power that media, technology, and advertising have acquired over the last three decades that have dismantled core values of America’s social democracy.

The ideology of consumerism did not overwhelm Americans through marketing alone. After all, TV does more than rent screen time to advertisers. Most of the time, television drama, game shows, and gossip-laden entertainment and celebrity news programs bombard audiences with endless representations of lives filled with wealth and glamour. At the same time that television advertising sells us commoditized products, services, and lifestyle opportunities, the programming stuffed between commercials offers a worldview that, though skewed, is close enough to reality to influence attitude and action.

Television exaggerates and dramatizes everyday life. It tilts toward the sensational and the immediate, and it has difficulty taking on complex, slow-to-evolve, gray-area issues of life, politics, and society. And because television is a commercial medium, the relative cost of different kinds of programming shapes what we see. Prime-time drama and global news coverage are expensive, but games, home improvement strategies, kitchen adventures, dangerous occupations, people in jail, and the lifestyles of wives, teens, and drinking buddies are cheap. Cost has encouraged cable television’s striking race to the bottom.

Television has played an extraordinary role in reshaping how Americans think, what Americans want, and how Americans perceive happiness, power, and quality of life. Again, this is not entirely new. Television has been viewed with caution—sometimes with alarm—since FCC chairman Newton Minow famously labeled it a “vast wasteland.” Historical criticism has focused on three interconnected observations: television is vapid; violent and sexually explicit content is a bad influence on behavior (especially of young people); and viewing embeds slothful passivity.

Each of these observations is true in its own way, but the modern era of television narrowcasting through cable and satellite transmission has greatly empowered the medium—traditional critiques of TV highlight the least of it. Further, telephones and Internet-enabled computing and reading devices—early on advanced as gateways to privacy, choice, and creative freedom—have taken up and expanded on the basic character of old-time TV. They are engaged in selling us goods and services, but they also tell us stories. Much if not most of what we think about the world comes to us through moving images on screens. And it goes without saying that present-day screen media is qualitatively unlike that of the 1950s and 1960s; old-timey TV ads for aspirin or new cars have today been superseded by a ramped-up, sophisticated, multiplatform juggernaut of anxiety and envy that can be assuaged only by buying something. And, as Peter Whybrow points out, today’s media is especially obtrusive, because “technology is now mobile and targets the person rather than a place.

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