You are on to something. The entire phenomenon of television deserves more discussion. In many ways it's the template for the shallowing of the American mind, and also the replacement of community values with what Harlan Ellison referred to as The Glass Teat. Ellison wrote two excellent books of social commentary under that title; it's a window into 1960s-early 1970s television--and also the way that show producers dumbed down scripts for mass consumption by the American public. Harlan was of course a highly regarded science fiction author and scriptwriter; some of his most scathing observations have to do with the way that television industry mentalities eviscerated his work. His bitterness is palpable (and also often quite funny, once he gets to wielding the rapier of his wit.) It's been a while since I read the book Robert Putnam's book Bowling Alone, and I don't recall exactly what he said about television. But it's something that struck me recently, when I was recalling the abysmal PTA participation in my suburban junior high school (which eventually dwindled to two sets of parents, one of them mine; both military families, neither of them local.) And I was thinking on what it was that all the other parents were almost certainly doing instead: they were watching prime time television series. United in their living rooms and dens, linked nationwide as the viewing audience for the top-rated prime time shows of one of the 3-4 commercial broadcast networks-ABC/NBC/CBS, with Metromedia--which later became Fox, iirc--a distant fourth. (There was also PBS, but i didn't know anyone who watched it, including my parents. "Educational TV", you know. And therefore suspect, as too highbrow. Bo-ring. A reputation that would remain, until Sesame Street blew up in the early 1970s.)
Flash forward to the 1980s--and I noticed something: almost everyone I knew, in my generation, my parents generation, and the upcoming cohort that was eventually tagged as "Generation X" had stopped reading. Those who did read, read novels. And I recalled learning about the Muckraking Journalists of the late 1890s and early 1900s in my high school history and civics class, and how works like The Octopus and The Jungle had been widely read by Americans to the point where they sparked an outcry for reform of corporate trusts and food and drug regulations. Those investigations had real political impacts. I learned about that history in the early 1970s--which also happened to be a time of considerable nonfiction history and investigative journalism. The 1960s and 1970s youth culture was the last time I noticed nonfiction books having any serious impact in popular culture and politics--and, strangely enough, most of that impact was within the generation then in high school and college--the"hippie counterculture", not the parental generation. I remember regional libraries staying open until 10pm. But by the late 1970s, very few people were reading serious nonfiction.
By the 1980s, television had made quantum leaps in appeal to young audiences. The 1960s and 1970s had primarily been a Music Radio generation--and, probably not coincidentally, an amazingly rich, multicultural, multigenre era of excellence.And then Radio was corporatized and commercialized practically beyond recognition. The prevailing sentiment of the 1980s was "radio sucks", for anyone who had lived through the era when George Benson and Fleetwood Mac could bracket Stevie Wonder. But television--formerly that thing we used to leave on in the corner with the sound off. as incidental ambience--was just beginning to gain unprecedented momentum. The ads were less corny, and more attuned to Young Consumers. MTV replaced the Radio. The Reagan era: Miami Vice, with narcs in Armani suits. Dallas, Dynasty, Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. And that's the template that's been built on, ever since. What happened to books, to investigative journalism, social criticism, natural history? There was plenty of it. The 1980s and 1990s was a peak era for it: James Mills. Peter Dale Scott. Charles Bowden. Roger Morris. Stanley Crouch. Barry Lopez. Neil Postman. Clarence Lusane. Lewis Lapham. Chrstopher Lasch. Mike Davis. The problem is that hardly anyone in the general American public was reading it. Americans are still not reading, at least not nonfiction and history. It's worth noting that this is the era when Critical Theory began shifting from the English Lit and Philosophy departments to the social disciplines in academia--so students in history and civics classes were assigned novels, memoirs, mythology, polemic, didactic poetry, and above all abstracted postmodern social criticism. Not the old-fashioned thick description and factually detailed insights of Neil Postman or Christopher Lasch. Even less the outright disturbing historical and economic observations of researchers like Kevin Phillips, Roger Morris, and Charles Bowden.
I admit, part of this screed is a whine--because I did read books by the authors I mentioned; I read all of those authors. And after all these years--ever since Americans stopped reading--I still got nobody to talk to about them. But my deeper point is that seriously researched nonfiction history books used to lead to policy changes in Washington, back in the era of Upton Sinclair and Ida Tarbell and Lincoln Steffens. And the last book I can think of that had a reform impact was Rachel Carson's Silent Spring--since unjustly maligned by industry lobbyists with smears that she never wrote (like claims that her work led to the banning of DDT spraying for mosquitoes; Carson didn't even oppose using DDT for that purpose. What she opposed was ag chemical salespeople and lobbyists shilling for pesticides the way Purdue sold Oxycontin, for ridiculous campaigns like spraying forests for gypsy moths and trying to eradicate fire ants, which despite being invasive and annoying are not crop pests.) Instead of serious investigations, the bulk of nonfiction books that tackle issues with political implications are written--or more accurately ghostwritten--by Television Personalities. And even those books owe their placement on NY Times nonfiction bestseller lists to mass purchases by the axe-grinding partisan outfits that got the Celebrity Journos their publishing contracts. One of my most eye-opening disillusionments was back in the1990s, learning that Top 10 nonfiction bestsellers often sold fewer than 40,000 copies. Naive me, I had thought it would be more like a million copies sold.
One final observation before I'm out: also back in the late 1990s, I remember listening to a forum on the dawn of the digital era and microminaturized camera technology: someone was pointing out that "the cameras are coming", and auguring an era of ubiquitous surveillance and spying. And someone else observed that "the authorities don't need to spy on everyone. They already know where most everyone is, and what they're doing--they're watching TV." Pick up on those implications. Historic and otherwise.
Like Neil Postman said decades ago: Amusing Ourselves To Death. Postman's book by that tile, online for free: https://ia600101.us.archive.org/27/items/Various_PDFs/NeilPostman-AmusingOurselvesToDeath.pdf
You are on to something. The entire phenomenon of television deserves more discussion. In many ways it's the template for the shallowing of the American mind, and also the replacement of community values with what Harlan Ellison referred to as The Glass Teat. Ellison wrote two excellent books of social commentary under that title; it's a window into 1960s-early 1970s television--and also the way that show producers dumbed down scripts for mass consumption by the American public. Harlan was of course a highly regarded science fiction author and scriptwriter; some of his most scathing observations have to do with the way that television industry mentalities eviscerated his work. His bitterness is palpable (and also often quite funny, once he gets to wielding the rapier of his wit.) It's been a while since I read the book Robert Putnam's book Bowling Alone, and I don't recall exactly what he said about television. But it's something that struck me recently, when I was recalling the abysmal PTA participation in my suburban junior high school (which eventually dwindled to two sets of parents, one of them mine; both military families, neither of them local.) And I was thinking on what it was that all the other parents were almost certainly doing instead: they were watching prime time television series. United in their living rooms and dens, linked nationwide as the viewing audience for the top-rated prime time shows of one of the 3-4 commercial broadcast networks-ABC/NBC/CBS, with Metromedia--which later became Fox, iirc--a distant fourth. (There was also PBS, but i didn't know anyone who watched it, including my parents. "Educational TV", you know. And therefore suspect, as too highbrow. Bo-ring. A reputation that would remain, until Sesame Street blew up in the early 1970s.)
Flash forward to the 1980s--and I noticed something: almost everyone I knew, in my generation, my parents generation, and the upcoming cohort that was eventually tagged as "Generation X" had stopped reading. Those who did read, read novels. And I recalled learning about the Muckraking Journalists of the late 1890s and early 1900s in my high school history and civics class, and how works like The Octopus and The Jungle had been widely read by Americans to the point where they sparked an outcry for reform of corporate trusts and food and drug regulations. Those investigations had real political impacts. I learned about that history in the early 1970s--which also happened to be a time of considerable nonfiction history and investigative journalism. The 1960s and 1970s youth culture was the last time I noticed nonfiction books having any serious impact in popular culture and politics--and, strangely enough, most of that impact was within the generation then in high school and college--the"hippie counterculture", not the parental generation. I remember regional libraries staying open until 10pm. But by the late 1970s, very few people were reading serious nonfiction.
By the 1980s, television had made quantum leaps in appeal to young audiences. The 1960s and 1970s had primarily been a Music Radio generation--and, probably not coincidentally, an amazingly rich, multicultural, multigenre era of excellence.And then Radio was corporatized and commercialized practically beyond recognition. The prevailing sentiment of the 1980s was "radio sucks", for anyone who had lived through the era when George Benson and Fleetwood Mac could bracket Stevie Wonder. But television--formerly that thing we used to leave on in the corner with the sound off. as incidental ambience--was just beginning to gain unprecedented momentum. The ads were less corny, and more attuned to Young Consumers. MTV replaced the Radio. The Reagan era: Miami Vice, with narcs in Armani suits. Dallas, Dynasty, Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. And that's the template that's been built on, ever since. What happened to books, to investigative journalism, social criticism, natural history? There was plenty of it. The 1980s and 1990s was a peak era for it: James Mills. Peter Dale Scott. Charles Bowden. Roger Morris. Stanley Crouch. Barry Lopez. Neil Postman. Clarence Lusane. Lewis Lapham. Chrstopher Lasch. Mike Davis. The problem is that hardly anyone in the general American public was reading it. Americans are still not reading, at least not nonfiction and history. It's worth noting that this is the era when Critical Theory began shifting from the English Lit and Philosophy departments to the social disciplines in academia--so students in history and civics classes were assigned novels, memoirs, mythology, polemic, didactic poetry, and above all abstracted postmodern social criticism. Not the old-fashioned thick description and factually detailed insights of Neil Postman or Christopher Lasch. Even less the outright disturbing historical and economic observations of researchers like Kevin Phillips, Roger Morris, and Charles Bowden.
I admit, part of this screed is a whine--because I did read books by the authors I mentioned; I read all of those authors. And after all these years--ever since Americans stopped reading--I still got nobody to talk to about them. But my deeper point is that seriously researched nonfiction history books used to lead to policy changes in Washington, back in the era of Upton Sinclair and Ida Tarbell and Lincoln Steffens. And the last book I can think of that had a reform impact was Rachel Carson's Silent Spring--since unjustly maligned by industry lobbyists with smears that she never wrote (like claims that her work led to the banning of DDT spraying for mosquitoes; Carson didn't even oppose using DDT for that purpose. What she opposed was ag chemical salespeople and lobbyists shilling for pesticides the way Purdue sold Oxycontin, for ridiculous campaigns like spraying forests for gypsy moths and trying to eradicate fire ants, which despite being invasive and annoying are not crop pests.) Instead of serious investigations, the bulk of nonfiction books that tackle issues with political implications are written--or more accurately ghostwritten--by Television Personalities. And even those books owe their placement on NY Times nonfiction bestseller lists to mass purchases by the axe-grinding partisan outfits that got the Celebrity Journos their publishing contracts. One of my most eye-opening disillusionments was back in the1990s, learning that Top 10 nonfiction bestsellers often sold fewer than 40,000 copies. Naive me, I had thought it would be more like a million copies sold.
One final observation before I'm out: also back in the late 1990s, I remember listening to a forum on the dawn of the digital era and microminaturized camera technology: someone was pointing out that "the cameras are coming", and auguring an era of ubiquitous surveillance and spying. And someone else observed that "the authorities don't need to spy on everyone. They already know where most everyone is, and what they're doing--they're watching TV." Pick up on those implications. Historic and otherwise.