by Jeroen Bouterse
In 2022, I worked harder than before to keep my students’ tables free of smartphones. That this is a matter for negotiation at all, is because on the surface, the devices do so many things, and students often make a reasonable, possibly-good-faith case for using it for a specific purpose. I forgot my calculator; can I use my phone? No, thank you for asking, but you won’t be needing a calculator; just start with this exercise here, and don’t forget to simplify your fractions. Can I listen to music while I work? Yeah, uhm, no, I happen to be a big believer in collaborative work, I guess. Can I check my solutions online please? Ah, very good; but instead, use this printout that I bring to every one of your classes these days. I’m done, can I quickly look up my French homework? That’s a tough one, but no; it’s seven minutes to the bell anyway and I prepared a small Kahoot quiz on today’s topic. (So everyone please get your phones out.)
As a matter of classroom management, some of these questions are more of a judgment call than eating and drinking in class (not allowed, with some exceptions immediately after a PE lesson) but less complicated than bathroom visits (allowed in principle, but in need of limits that I may never be able to express algorithmically). In spite, however, of the superficial similarities between these phenomena – all subject to teacher- and class-specific settlements, informed and assisted by school-wide institutions such as regulations and phone bags – it feels as if more is at stake when it comes to smartphones. I sense more urgency, as if I’m laboring to stop a tide from coming in; as if what I am inclined to view as ‘complex’ and ‘multi-faceted’ and ‘also an interesting challenge, actually’ is actually one big thing only: an external force threatening to infiltrate my classroom and undo what I am trying to achieve there (which is called ‘education’ and which is therefore plainly also one big thing). I don’t feel this way about chewing gum.
To help me make up my mind, I decided to consult a writer who passed away before smartphones were ‘a thing’: media and educational philosopher Neil Postman, famous for his criticism of the role of television in modern culture and education. Though this choice of authority seems to be loading the dice rather heavily in one direction, I did briefly consider the counterintuitive case that Postman might have seen 21st-century media technology as a step in the right direction. In the end, however, I think the more predictable reading – that, in Aubrey Nagle’s words, mobile media represent “Postman’s fear of TV on steroids” – is the more interesting one, allowing us to apply his broader cultural criticism to our time.
The counterfactual case would have been that social media invert at least some of the tendencies of television: the invisibility of other viewers, for instance,[1] or its bias towards general agreeability, which he saw as undermining political partisanship. Postman remembered that his father wisely refused to let the other side win even if his own party presented a manifestly incompetent and corrupt candidate.[2] What Postman thought TV had taken away in this respect, Facebook may well have given back.
It would have been a treat to see what Postman would have made of these shifts. Still, I think the evidence is overwhelming that he would have regarded the media technology of our current decade as continuous with that of the late twentieth century, further eroding our key institutions and our attention spans: an intensification of what he called the “peek-a-boo world”, where events present themselves out of nowhere, are visible for an instant, then disappear again.[3]
In his own time, the paradigm medium of this peek-a-boo world is the television. In Teaching as a conserving activity, Postman treats television as presenting a genuine curriculum: a system of training and cultivation that is in direct competition with the school curriculum, and that is in almost every respect its perfect mirror image. Importantly, where school uses external incentives and promises of future reward to command attention, attention to TV is its own, immediate reward. This also means there is no linearity, no analysis, no continuity or progress – no history – in the content of the ‘TV curriculum’: you can never really get behind when every item is simply a new present.[4]
That TV entertainment is incoherent and contextless is fine by Postman, insofar as it is just entertainment. The problem is that its ways of dealing with the world creep into other institutions. For instance, it is normal to allow yourself to be distracted while the TV is on, and teenagers bring this habit to school; thus, he writes in 1979, “it is not uncommon for teachers to report that students will openly read newspapers in class”.[5] (I can report that this has now become uncommon.) In a broader sense, TV, in being at the same time a vehicle so suited for entertainment and the dominant medium of the age, “has made entertainment itself the natural format for the representation of all experience.”[6] This is the key to all of Postman’s cultural criticism: everything that ought to be serious and substantial has been infected with the epistemology inherent in the present-, image- and affect-centered technology that is television.
In particular, TV has turned our world into a world of disconnected phenomena: a world in which we are always turning over cards in a large shuffled deck, basically clueless as to what will come next. In his recent lecture series on the history of Ukraine, Timothy Snyder asks: “why is it, in the 21st century, where we supposedly have access to all this data all the time, and we all know everything instantly – why are we always surprised by things? … Why is it that things that happen in the world always seem to catch us unprepared?” He suggests that studying some history might help in this respect. Postman would concur with the sentiment; he might merely add that we are in fact never surprised for long, because we have learned to forgo any kind of comprehensive picture of the world that a certain fact can seem to contradict.[7] We are always unprepared, and so we have stopped being surprised at being surprised.
Here, the information chaos created by TV converges with – and strengthens – the decline of institutions. Social institutions, such as law courts, schools, and families, function by weighing and controlling information, and in doing so they render people less vulnerable to information chaos. Religions and ideologies likewise fulfill an information-regulating function. However, when Postman writes in 1992, all of that is supposed to have reached an end-point, since with the decline of Marxism there are no alternatives left to liberal democracy. This term, ‘liberal democracy’, now threatens to become hollow, hiding from our sight a major fault line in our culture:
Francis Fukuyama was wrong. There is another ideological conflict to be fought – between ‘liberal democracy’ as conceived in the eighteenth century, with all its transcendent moral underpinnings, and Technopoly, a twentieth-century thought-world that functions not only without a transcendent narrative to provide moral underpinnings but also without strong social institutions to control the flood of information produced by technology.[8]
What is left when all substantive, value-driven control of information has indeed vanished? Only technical control – that is, bureaucracy, ‘expertise’, and statistical machinery such as IQ tests, SAT scores, and surveys. We have to believe that intelligence is a number, that grades describe our students’ achievements, and that politicians should be guided by opinion polls, because we now lack the foundations for the alternative – that we ourselves interpret the world and sift through its complexity. We don’t exercise judgment; we just produce and look up numbers. This pushes us to an empty, procedural ideal of efficiency. There is a lot in Postman’s diagnosis of his age that converges with current critiques of the neoliberal era, though Postman’s angle is always that of culture first, rather than economics.
The dominance of reductionist and quantifying solutions to the problem of information chaos leads Postman to revisit the thesis, made famous by C.P. Snow’s 1959 Rede Lecture, that there are ‘Two Cultures’ – Snow identified these as the literary and the scientific – that in the 20th century had grown to be increasingly at odds with each other. Snow had pictured the problem in terms of mutual disinterest, where there should be harmony and synergy. Postman thinks of the situation more in terms of fierce opposition, where there should be even fiercer opposition; opposition, not between “humanists and scientists” – Snow had gotten that all wrong – but between “technology and everybody else”.[9] The ‘culture’ of radical technocracy (‘technopoly’) has been rendered invisible by its sheer omnipresence, and is in dire need of being identified as the opposite of something.
One of the pillars of technopoly, Postman says, is ‘scientism’: the application of natural-scientific methods to the human world, and the use of science – in particular, social science – to organize society and give meaning to it.[10] This is an impossible ideal. In fact, according to Postman, the whole concept of social science is a non-starter: “the quest to understand human behavior and feeling can in no sense except the most trivial be called science.”[11] On multiple occasions, Postman stresses that when Galilei said that the book of nature was written in the language of mathematics, he did not mean this claim to extend to humans, too.[12] The idea that the human world can be measured and quantified just like the physical world is a later invention, and a largely misguided one at that: it reduces people to numbers, and it leads to out-of-control statistics, producing a lot of irrelevant, meaningless data[13] – and in this, it converges with the information chaos caused by TV and the erosion of traditional institutions.
What people call social science – Freud, Marx, Weber and the like – is not science but storytelling. “Unlike science, social research never discovers anything. It only rediscovers what people once were told and need to be told again”.[14] Natural science, on the other hand, seeks to discover universal laws that govern all processes.[15] The mix-up is due to “a profound misunderstanding of the aims of natural and social studies, and of the differences between the physical and the social worlds.”[16] It is also sustained by the hope that science can tell us what to do, in a world where nothing else can.
In Postman’s idea that only the study of nature can present us with genuine discovery, and that the study of the human world and mind always stays in a familiar orbit, there is an echo of Francis Bacon, whom Postman calls the first “technocrat”.[17] In Bacon’s work, the distinction serves to make room for an ambitiously innovative project of probing investigation into nature, and of technological progress, while making a plausible case that such progress would not threaten the social order – the technocratic society that Bacon presents in New Atlantis, for instance, is deeply conservative. To Postman, the drawing of a hard border between science and rhetoric serves a similar function, but now the emphasis is not on the merits of a potentially expansive technology but on the need to demarcate the defensive position of “everybody else”: on our behalf, Postman is working to keep the thought-world of technoscience at an arm’s length.
In Postman’s sweeping criticism, this world includes not just the whole category of the social sciences, but also every medium that prepares us for the disconnected, isolated peek-a-boo world, in which we become objects of technology. Yes, in the 1980s and 1990s, the central threat is television, but Postman is pessimistic enough about the next wave:
to what extent has computer technology been an advantage to the masses of people? To steelworkers, vegetable-store owners, teachers, garage mechanics, musicians, bricklayers, dentists, and most of the rest into whose lives the computer now intrudes? Their private matters have been made more accessible to powerful institutions. They are more easily tracked and controlled; are subjected to more examinations; are increasingly mystified by the decisions made about them; are often reduced to mere numerical objects.[18]
Postman is not prophesying here – his criticism concerns his own present – but to me, observations like these read as very much ahead of their time. It is hard to say the same, however, about Postman’s binary opposition between the human world and the world of natural science and technology. That this is an old distinction is no argument against it; but its long history makes it a tricky one, prone to essentialism and overuse. Postman’s arguments rest heavily on a cumulation of such binary oppositions, bolstered by fitting illustrations but coming with a risk of oversimplification.
Reading Postman, apart from being its own immediate reward, did cast light on my distrust of what my students’ smartphones are doing to their education: first, because of the legitimate force of his criticism of media that subordinate content to attention; but also, second, because he pushes this criticism so far that it starts to creak. Postman advocates for a deeply modern, logocentric form of humanism that makes it attractive for him to deal with science and technology through a ‘Two-Cultures’ framework – and one can make too much of that. That said, I think Postman gives me a way to have my cake and eat it too – the cake being my newly-rationalized distrust of smartphones, and the eating being a way to wear this distrust ironically, with a knowing “things are in fact a little more complicated” expression.
In Teaching as a conserving activity, Postman pictures the role of schools as ‘thermostatic’: they should be innovative when the environment is conservative, and conservative when the environment is innovative. “The school”, Postman writes, “stands as the only mass medium capable of putting forward the case for what is not happening in the culture.”[19] This ideal, that what students learn and do in school should form some kind of counterbalance to what they will ‘naturally’ learn and do outside of it, is ambitious and modest at the same time. Applied to the smartphone question, it doesn’t require us to picture the relationship between culture and technology in the gnostic terms in which Postman sometimes tends to put it; it just requires us to agree that teenagers are not underusing their devices at the moment. (I mean, just look up the numbers.)
[1] Neil Postman, Teaching as a conserving activity (Delacorte Press: New York 1979) 64.
[2] Neil Postman, Amusing ourselves to death: public discourse in the age of show business (orig. 1985: references here to a later edition: Penguin Books, 2006) 133.
[3] Amusing ourselves to death, 77.
[4] Teaching as a conserving activity, 47-86.
[5] Ibid., 73.
[6] Amusing ourselves to death, 87.
[7] Neil Postman, Technopoly: the surrender of culture to technology (Alfred A. Knopf: New York 1992) 58-60.
[8] Ibid., 82.
[9] Ibid., xi-xii.
[10] Ibid., 144-147.
[11] Ibid., 148.
[12] Amusing ourselves to death, 23-24; Technopoly, 13.
[13] Technopoly, 138.
[14] Ibid., 157.
[15] Ibid., 148.
[16] Ibid., 160.
[17] Ibid., 37-38.
[18] Ibid., 10.
[19] Teaching as a conserving activity, 22.