There’s No Business but Show Business
Each new technology has a bias, or agenda, or downward gravity of its own. The golden touch of TV is to turn everything into entertainment. Grapple for a minute with the following:
‘But what I am claiming here is not that television is entertaining but that it has made entertainment itself the natural format for the representation of all experience. Our television sets keep us in constant communion with the world, but it does so with a face whose smiling countenance is unalterable. The problem is not that television presents us with entertaining subject matter but that all subject matter is presented as entertaining, which is another issue altogether’
The Pied Piper Is Working
In the famous story of the pied piper the children didn’t have to be chained and drilled in order to be driven to servitude; they happily danced. So it is with us. We are happily adjusted to incoherence and gleefully amused into indifference.
Ignorance Is Knowledge
Our news is so fragmented and decontextualized that ‘knowledge’ is in fact ignorance. We have lots of opinions, but little understanding on which to build them. Consider the following:
‘What is happening here is that television is altering the meaning of ‘being informed’ by creating a species of information that might properly be called disinformation…Disinformation does not mean false information. It means misleading information-misplaced, irrelevant, fragmented or superficial information-information that creates the illusion of knowing something but which in fact leads one away from knowing’
From TV to Instagram
Postman poses four questions for TV that can readily be applied to social media. Consider the following after substituting ‘Instagram’ for ‘television’:
‘What is television? What kinds of conversations does it permit? What are the intellectual tendencies it encourages? What sort of culture does it produce?’
The Dangers of Broadcasting a Sermon
We need to own up to the dangers of televising a sermon. Is it possible for someone to be saved watching a sermon on TV? Of course. God can use a jack-ass to get the attention of a sinner (see Num. 22). However, the bias of TV corrupts the form and content of preaching due to the following: (1) TV is directed to people’s wants, not needs (after all, they can always flip the channel or look at a second screen); (2) TV communicates personalities better than ideas (thus the herald becomes more important than the message); (3) TV cannot re-create the atmosphere or presence of a worship service.
Most would find it bad-mannered to check email during a Sunday service; no one objects, however, to scrolling ESPN while watching a sermon online. Just imagine what Ezra would have done if he had seen guys playing dice while he was reading the Law of God. The scene would not have been pretty.