How To Watch TV News

How to Watch TV New
© 1992 Neil Postman, Steve Powers
192 pages (2008 edition)

Don't.


Well, that was easy.  From television insider Steve Powers and technological critic Neil Postman comes this slim book, How To Watch Television News, which explains how televised news is produced and scrutinizes the platform's ability to deliver seriously useful information.  Although  this is not a takedown of television news -- at the end they merely encouraged readers to reduce their TV news consumption by a third --   it doesn't foster trust in the medium.   Powers' insight reveals an industry which scrambles to stay ahead of the latest developments, seizing on whatever is most likely to keep eyes on the screen and keep the ratings high.    Most readers are aware, of course, that television news programs play to the ratings:  no serious journalist would focus their attention on the goings-on of celebrities otherwise.  What we might fail to appreciate, however, is how carefully orchestrated television shows are, from the music chosen to the arrangement of news sequences,  designed to draw viewers in and keep them fixated.  Because of the pace, the need to keep as many viewers' attention as possible,  and the amount of production work required to put each show together, serious journalistic pieces are impossible for something as small as the nightly news, whether it's a half-hour local news spot or an hour-long nationwide show.  To truly evaluate what's happening in the world, Postman and Powers maintain, we need print media -- stories that allow us to consider ideas at length, not merely be distracted by them as objects on the screen.  If readers were to reflect on the news and the commericals which it actually serves, they might see through the illusion -- and see that just as a mouthwash commericial is more about social acceptnance than mouthwash, a news show is more of a show than the actual news.

Despite its multitude of references to the eighties, How to Watch TV News is far from outdated. Powers' 2008 revision updated some references and tech, but Postman's contributions are timeless. Some of them will be familiar to anyone who has read Postman before, from his view that different technologies foster different beliefs, to the belief that television has trivialized and eroded culture in general.  How To Watch Television News is less about television, however, and more about news, the barrage of facts we're told are important. Postman and Powers help us to look for the stage behind the story: why are these facts being presented,   what judgments are we expected to accept in viewing them? In giving recommendations to the reader, however, Postman urges readers to realize they don't have to have an opinion about everything.  This has never been more relevant than today, when  the social media cloud that we're all forced to live in - -because it rains on those of us who don't use it, when people insist on talking about what they're tweeting or reading -- constantly pushes us to react to everything as if it were important. We are still a nation -- and now a globe -- amused to death, frazzled by distraction.

Also from Neil Postman:
Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology
Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business 
The Disappearance of Childhood
Building a Bridge to the 18th Century

Affluenza

Affluenza: the All-Consuming Epidemic
© 2001, 2004, 2014  John de Graaf, David Wann, Thomas Naylor
288 pages

In getting and spending, we lay waste to all our powers -- so sayeth the poet. Originally published in 2001, Affluenza is a critique of consumerism, which it depicts as a disease affecting not just the body politic, but the environment. The authors use visual language drawn from medicine -- "feverish expectation", "hardening of the traffic arteries", "community chills" to argue that rampant consumerism is not only making us unhappy,  it has unraveled communities and is presently sacking the Earth.  This book has been on my radar for many years now, but I've always resisted it given that I'm in the choir this is preaching to.  I found it more varied than expected, and it does an admirable job of attempting to be nonpartisan. This third edition is genuinely valuable in keeping the material up to date,  using the sharing economy as a way of demonstrating of how we can do more with less,  Most of the suggestions for cutting back are appropriate only for an affluent audience, however, so I suspect the target audience is the comfortable-yet-feeling-guilty.

Affluenza has a pronounced emphasis on environmentalism, but it opens with a more diverse array of topics.  There's a disappointingly small section on the psychology of desire, how we pursue happiness through the acquisition or consumption of things but are then left feeling unsatisfied.  Their history of consumerism draws from works like Susan Strasser's Satisfaction Guaranteed indicate that the family-based consumer dream of the 1950s quickly became an individual-based consumer dream, with society being re-made to match.   Stores, for instance, became locations to go to and consume, rather than being part of the community; compare walking down the street and mingling with fellow citizens, then buying goods in a small bookstore owned  by someone in the community, whose business interacted and supported other businesses (local accountants and sign-makers, for instance), to a solitary individual driving by himself to a large box owned and sustained by a corporation outside the community.   The  mass focus on maximizing individual consumption -- the cheapest price, at any cost -- has reactions that not only unravel the very fabric of communities, but create lonelier people in the bargain.  Technology is something of an enabler in this regard: people whip out cell phones to stay "connected" the moment there is a lull in their activity, but in so doing lose focus of the very people they are with.  I think Erich Fromm -- who wrote in To Have or to Be? that we have become a people obsessed with having, with possessing and attempting to mount our happiness on that -- would have much to say about people who attend a play or go to the zoo and spend the entire time staring at their phones.....so concerned with capturing the experience they actually remove themselves from the experience.

The chapters on the despair of consumer therapy have the authors at their nonpartisan best. They report with delight that the Mormons are even more concerned about consumerism -- or rather, materialism -- than the students of Berkley.  They quote William Ropke's A Humane Economy: the Social Framework of the Free Market, in which the conservative offers a measured defense of free markets -- measured in that the free market is a necessary element of a free society, but  that it cannot be  the definer of its values.  Elsewhere,  they continually use the conservative label to refer to  anyone in league with advertisers and plutocrats, so I don't think they're very used to seeing anti-consumerism as a nonpartisan issue.  They marvel at Ropke,  asking readers if they could imagine any conservative writing such a thing today. Well...yes?  Rob Dreher, Wendell Berry,  and Anthony Esolen are a few who come to mind immediately, and just about anyone writing for The American Conservative.    Another hiccough is that the authors don't seem to be paying attention to what they write:  shortly after proposing a series of laws with the object of improving quality of life by reducing hours and mandating vacation/sick/universal paternity-maternity care,  they discuss a factory that reduced its operations to four days a week to save money, despite the union's protests.  After fighting to resume the five-hour day, the union's members immediately realized they actually preferred the extra day off, and so petitioned to reverse their previous petition. The authors comment that it was unfortunate that the  initial choice was forced on people,  apparently not realizing that its previous list of mandatory this--and-thats are also forced.  Ditto for the authors hailing regulatory agencies and in the same breath lamenting that said regulatory agencies are in cahoots with the people they're supposed to be policing.   Regulatory capture, dear authors --  problems can't be dispatched with a bill from Congress.

I found Affluenza an interesting book, quoting from a good range of authors --  diverse in fields as well as core beliefs. Its overall emphasis is a little weak, I think -- "Someday we're going to run out of resources and that will suck". Environmental stewardship is always an easier sell from the  immediate quality of life angle (clean air and water) than the more abstract (bad things...eventually..in the future).   The same is true for anti-consumerism and advocacy for simple living; they would be better served with an emphasis on the misery of getting-and-spending than on matters that can only be handled by the national government at large, i.e public policy.


Related books which were cited:
Satisfaction Guaranteed, Susan Strasser
Bowling Alone: the Collapse and Revival of American Community, Robert Putnam
The Geography of Nowhere, Jim Kunstler
American Mania: Why More is Never Enough, Peter Whybrow

Cited and on my to-read list:
Alone Together, Sherry Turkel
A Humane Economy: The Social Framework of the Free Market

Related:
The Plain Reader, various authors

The Call of the Mall

Call of the Mall: the Geography of Shopping
© 2005 Paco Underbill
240 pages

Paco Underhill wants to take a little walk with you through the local mall, to see it with his eyes- the eyes of  a "retail anthropologist" and marketing strategist who scrutinizes malls as the environments they were built to be: shopping arenas.  Born amid the automobile-guided infrastructure buildout of the 1950s, shopping malls have been the crown jewel of American consumerism, dedicated spaces of recreational consumption of goods.  The walk, which begins in the parking lot and travels through the cavernous mall's innards, going even down the twisty hallways into the hidden bathrooms, takes reader on a guided tour of the territory, where even toilets don't escape scrutiny. The Call of the Mall is a little business history, a little social musing, and a little advertising/marketing examination.  Written more for consumers than business students, it's an entertaining account that offers most another perspective on shopping malls.

Although Underbill spends most of his working life walking around malls, his feelings regarding them are mixed. He seems to enjoy them -- the long stretches of flat marble or tile, air-conditioned walks down channels filled with eye-catching displays and even more eye-catching people --  but his job requires being both appreciative and critical. Throughout the mall tour, Underhill's perspective reveals that for all their flashiness, malls do a lot things badly.  Music stores, for instance, have gone downhill since records gave way to CDs, because record sleeves could be used as eye-catching displays. CD covers are as useful for displays seen at a distance as postage stamps.  Underhill is also surprised that no store has ever considered using the mall restrooms as a display area for its own equipment (but considering how much volume mall toilets get, would any retailer want to chance his toilet being associated with badly-maintained restrooms?).  There are greater problems, too, unavoidable consequences of the malls' status as artifacts of suburbia.  Malls are in fact very artificial environments, little island awash in a sea of pavements. A lot of their foot traffic is from teenagers who are there because they have nothing else to do;  suburban teens have no place outside of home and school to go to.  Underhill makes the point repeatedly that malls are limited by their environment.

In revealing what malls don't do well, Underhill also points out their strengths, and explains to readers, uniitated shoppers, why they might work the way they do.  He points out, for instance, that the spaces near entrances and exits are consigned as low rent.  One would think otherwise considering they receive greater traffic than the interior of the mall, but Underhill comments that as people are entering a store, they need space to adjust, to adapt to their new environment. As they are making the transition, their mind ignores the first few stores they pass. He also elaborates on some of the strategies that the real estate giants who own the malls employ when deciding who rents what space;  different stores have different markets, and there are dynamics to be taken into consideration. A low-end and a high-end jewelry store side by side can enhance one another's business.  Underhill goes into several stores to scrutinize their specific practices; he comments on the high-end jewelry store's physical additions, for instance, how they use a black brick facade to minimize window space, sending a clear message of exclusivity to hoi-polloi outside who can't afford $80,000 necklaces.

Shopping malls are a mixed bag, an experiment  in retailing that may change as time passes, or may fail entirely. Demographics are changing, writes Underbill, as is technology; online stores are giving brick-and-mortar (or in suburban cases, plywood and concrete)  an increasingly hard time,  and this work was penned ten years ago, before Amazon Prime and similar services.  The Call of the Mall will probably frustrate marketing students looking for a catalog of tricks of the trade, because while Underbill offers general suggestions and reveals a few practices,  he's not going to give away the farm considering he makes a living as a consultant helping businesses  organize their physical space. For the ordinary person on the street -- or in the aisles -- The Call of the Mall is an entertaining look into the workings of places we might spend a lot of our time in.

A Consumers' Republic

A Consumers' Republic
© 2002 Lizbeth Cohen
576 pages

What is the meaning of citizenship? To the Romans, and to the early Americans, citizenship was an exclusive state of being that depended on owning land, and so a stake in society. In the early twentieth century, however, as suffrage waxed more universal and markets were flooded with goods made for the masses, citizenship took on a different meaning. To be a citizen of a modern, capitalist  democracy was to be a Consumer;  voices rang out most strongly at the marketplace, not the ballot box.  In A Consumer's Republic, author Lizbeth Cohen examines the way the burgeoning consumer market effected political activism.  Beginning with consumer activist groups who protested high prices amid the Depression, her history examines the Civil Rights and feminist movements through the lens of consumption.  Consumer equality, not income distribution, would create a classless society. Women fought for the right to have their own bank accounts and lines of credit in addition to equal wages;  blacks labored for just prices in stores as well as unhindered access to the vote.  This is an account of social, political, marketing history, intertwined together.  Consumption didn't just serve individual desires; as Keynsianism became the dominant economic philosophy, intellectuals and citizen-consumers alike saw their compulsive buying as not only fun, but patriotic: their every new gadget grew the economy.  The consumers' republic began to die in the 1970s  and 1980s amid economic turbulence; even though people continued to buy more and more,  the political aspect of their purchasing, the meaning they had given it, fell away, both because the economy no longer responded as Keynes promised and their motives became more purely self-focused and only tangently connected to the thought of improving the nation's fortunes.

  Although occasionally touching on the negative aspects of the rapidly expanding consumer culture -- the growth of suburbia, for instance --  A Consumers' Republic is not a polemic raging against consumerism, and effects open to interpretation,  like the consequences of consumerism on citizens' peace of mind, are not touched on. It has a scholarly feel, though a 'popular' look;  the art is well-done, including plenty of large black and white photographs that demonstrate the point at hand, and stylized headings that bring to mind advertisements from the 1950s. One particularly effective illustration shows the evolution of advertising in Ebony magazine from the 1950s to the 1970s, as white-owned haircare manufactures realized that (1) blacks were a market and (2) that black people were a different market. They gradually transition from a white model demonstrating hair treatment lotion to a black model advertising products related to 'natural' hair.   Republic is a fascinating look at another side of the rise of consumption,  impressively thorough in that respect, and free of scathing criticism if not critical substance.

Free to Choose, Born to Buy (and Left to Die)

In the past two weeks I've been reading a series of books which connected together despite being on disparate subjects. Milton Friedman's Free to Choose, published in the 1970s, argues for a completely free market -- that is, one with no regulations, tariffs, government licenses, public financing, etc. Friedman follows initial chapter on the power of markets with sections that compare the effects of government attempts to improve safety,  protect consumers against defective products, raise wages, etc.  Time and again he made good points about market efficiency,  but the general attitude advocated is extreme. Friedman is not nearly as extreme as other free marketeers: he respects the potential power of monopolies and advocates for free trade so that potential monopolies are always disrupted from outside, and  (staggeringly, for the 1970s) acknowledges environmental hazards.  Although I'm often tempted to agree with him on principle, in practice caution is warranted. While Friedman is correct in pointing out that people who buy defective products will not be likely to purchase them again,  consumer-driven corrective measures aren't always the best. What would he make of malware, for instance, which invades people's computers and then pretends to be an anti-virus program, which will rid the obvious infection for a fee?   On the whole, this work makes the same arguments as Thomas Sowell's Basic Economics, but Sowell was far more thorough.

A much different view was taken by Juliet Shor, whose Born to Buy examined the commercialization of childhood. After providing a history, an overview of the tactics, and an examination the consequences, Shor argues -- pleads, as a parent -- for regulation and taxation to reign in the corporate invasion of schools, the ubiquity of product placement in television, the insidious attitude in advertising that encourages kids to not only seek approval by buying things, but to assert their coolness by badgering their parents into buying them the latest and greatest -- advertising that blames the parents for being  mean and the cause of their child's misery if they don't. Released in the same year as Susan Linn's Consuming Kids,  Shor's work contains more concrete data, but is not quite as helpful:  Linn focused on especially destructive themes and counseled parents on how they could make decisions in their household and in conversations with their children to counter consumerism and premature sexualization.  Shor largely passes by  media sexualization and only looks at government regulation to reign in the abuse. Considering that the Supreme Court regards corporation as people who can dump however money they'd like into elections,  I would not count the US government as an ally in this fight.   Born to Buy is still very much worth reading, though, just for the numerous interviews with marketing execs, many of whom (parents themselves) left the business when they could no longer reconcile their work with their consciences. (With good reason:  their usurpation of child psychology and carefully planned invasions of home and school borders on villainy.)  A quotation from one:

"Banks [,a marketing agent], believes buzz practitioners are just getting started.
'We'll have ten or fifteen more ways of encircling the consumer in ten years [...] surrounding almost every move you make, that would be the ideal.' Asked about consumers who didn't like being marketed to, Banks didn't hesitate. 'Covert messaging. Use their friends.'"

Born to Buy was published in 2004. Nine years later, 'Banks' must surely be pleased with the ubiquity of facebook, which converts our friends' passions into ads for us, projected across the internet via plugins.

And lastly there was The Working Poor: Invisible in America, which profiled the millions in America who do their damndest to fulfill the promise of the American dream, but cannot seem to escape poverty.  David Shipler attempts to find out why, and realizes the answer is...complicated! Yes, shockingly, a societal problem has nuance. Poverty cannot be reduced to bad character nor oppression inherent in the system. Instead, it's a little of both. More extensive comments on this piece will follow this week.

Satisfaction Guaranteed

Satisfaction Guaranteed: the Making of the American Mass Market
© 2004 Susan Strasser
348 pages

America was born of the frontier, its citizens people who by necessity often manufactured their own household requirements.  This was the case throughout most of the 19th century: even in cities where people could purchase articles like candles and clothing.  But by that century’s end, a revolution was in the process – a consumer revolution in which virtually every household good, from food to cleaning solutions, came from factories. Even more remarkably, however, those goods weren’t even coming from the factories through familiar faces at local groceries: they were entering the lives of people through new mail-order schemes and colossal supermarkets. Satisfaction Guaranteed examines how a few entrepreneurs transformed Americans’ lifestyles and marketplace.

Like Never Done and Waste and Want,   Satisfaction is chiefly focused on social history, and together the three examine various facets of Americans’ transformation from producers to consumers, of how a nation of nominally self-reliant farmers and merchants became one of employee-consumers and big business. Unlike her previous workers, however, here Strasser presents a critical business history, rather like Straight Out of the Oven or Cheap.  To explain the success of the new businesses, she demonstrates to readers how they created completely new business and marketing practices, like ‘market segmentation’ – targeting particular products within a brand to specific demographics.  Another novelty was that of the brand name or trademark, which could be used to build a reputation for quality. They also depended on new technologies and systems, either material (in the form of railroads that allowed for mail-order companies to flower and deliver cheaper goods through volume sales) or legal, like court decisions that made corporations easier to form and much more effective at managing interstate businesses. Strasser places the most emphasis on marketing, however, for it was marketing that introduced Americans to completely new goods (‘Oleomargarine? What kinda cow makes that?), marketing that coaxed them into trying it even when their local grocers didn’t want to stock it, and marketing that gradually lured them into not only using products, but becoming dependent on them. Marketing is why invention is the mother of necessity.

Although Strasser regards consumerism as wasteful, she doesn’t rail against the giants that promote it – indeed, depend on it. There are no villains in this piece, though she’s plainly sympathetic to the small businessmen, like the neighborhood grocers and general store managers, who were at first forced to keep goods on their shelves they had no experience with , and then driven out of business when large chains like A&P Groceries invaded. (Ads of the day directed potentials customers that if their local firms didn’t carry Crisco or the brand in question, they should forward the names and addresses of those firms to the corporation, who would see to it that the goods were offered for retail.)   The new branded products didn’t offer storekeepers much of a profit margin, and eventually corporations began seeing local retailers as obstacles to reaching as broad a customer base as they possibly could – and that was the goal: not meeting needs, but devising any way to create and capture new markets. Whereas once Americans produced things in-house to satisfy their needs, now they were consumers who bought whatever ensnared their interests – and following the ‘credit revolution’, they didn’t even need to be limited by what they could afford.

Strasser’s previous work has been lively yet comprehensive, and Satisfaction Guaranteed largely meets those standards.  Covering the intersection of business practices and lifestyle,  she focuses more on new approaches business management than on lifestyle, the usual center of attention,  which may broaden her audience to those interested in business in general.  This by no means detracts from its appeal as an introduction to the origins of mass consumerism in America, however.