After watching more than 1,700 hours of television–the one-day output of the Fairfax, Virginia, cable system–and spending a weekend in the woods, the author argues that television separates us from more significant sources of knowledge. Reprint. NYT. K. … More >>
The Age of Missing Information
All the TV shows he mentioned were from around 1990, so I didn’t have a clue what’s he’s talking about. If you wanna read a good nature book, then read Walden by Thoreau.
Rating: 1 / 5
What kind of an experiment was this cable watching thing supposed to be? The guy goes on a hike and imagines he comes back full of some eternal “wisdom” and then sits down and watches TV for 1700 hours straight, and comes to the conclusion that the 1700 hours of TV watching were not particularly rewarding…! give me a break! well duh-of course watching tv for a month straight isnt rewarding!
Its amazing that people sit down and write big books making these sorts of obvious points. In the end mcKibben succeeds in shining a damning light on our culture – not through his “experiment” but by publishing the book. A culture, where people can pretend to be clever intellectuals by making the kind of social experiments and delvering the kind of half baked “insights” as McKibben does, is in serious, serious trouble.
Rating: 1 / 5
The fact that the previous reviewer had no clue what the author was talking about supports McKibben’s ideas: about how short-lived television programming is, and how it is part of and contributes to a culture that is (superficially) changing at breakneck speed.
Besides, the specific TV content McKibben references is not central to the book; one can easily substitute more recent equivalents of the infomercials, commercials, and music videos to make the same points. It’s McKibben’s ideas that are central here, not the cute or quirky moments gleaned from his TV-watching marathon. And while these ideas are largely not very revelatory, they are very important and demand consideration by the reader.
Rating: 5 / 5
What’s truly amazing and impressive is that this book was written in 1992 and the insight that the author lends to the incredible tension between television and nature..which in the advent of cable this and cable that, it has only become more obvious and pervasive..if you’ve ever wondered why you can spend hours watching the tube and then wonder about the real world you inhabit and live in, then this book is most emphatically worth your time..have you ever thought about at the end of the day, it isn’t just what televison tells us, it’s also what it doesn’t tell us!
Rating: 5 / 5
The classic question “what ought I do” entails not only an ethical imperative but a future orientation, a certain awareness (if not certain knowledge) of what’s to come. Some books suggest we should prepare to survive modernity’s collapse.
Bill McKibben’s The Age of Missing Information (New York: Random House, c. 1992) details the results of a fascinating experiment. Having videotaped all the TV programs aired, on May 3, 1990, on a cable system, he watched 1,000 hours (in itself no mean feat!) and thought about it, trying to understand how this medium affects us. Then, to taste a different world, he spent a day in solitude on a mountain in the Adirondacks (near his home), listening to the wind rather than commercials, watching squirrels rather than sitcoms, reflecting on the vastly different kinds of “information” provided by nature and TV.
The very experiment, of course, is refreshing. He concluded: “We believe that we live in the ‘age of information,’ that there has been an information ‘explosion,’ and information ‘revolution.’ While in a certain narrow sense this is the case, in many important ways just the opposite is true. We also live at a moment of deep ignorance, when vital knowledge that humans have always possessed about who we are and where we live seems beyond our reach. An Unenlightenment. An age of missing information” (p. 9).
The world has changed in the past 40 years, in part through TV. Increasing numbers of in people simply grow up in TV-land. Their world-view comes from the world viewed on the tube! “And as every great teacher . . . has told us, what we do and see each day is what shapes us, not how we behave or pretend to behave on special oc¬casions” (p. 220). Without significant exposure to the real world, the natural world, they lack the perspective needed to separate fact from fantasy. Consequently, our notions of family come from “The Brady Bunch” or “Three’s a Family,” our views of wilderness from “Wild Kingdom” or “National Geographic” specials, our impressions of politicians from campaign sound-bites, our beliefs about God from televangelists, our understanding of the world from carefully-orchestrated newscasts. McKibben’s not worried that TV’s “decadent or shortens your attention span or leads to murder. It worries me because it alters perception” (p. 22).
What we lose, by immersion in TV, is the healthy baptism in reality nature affords. There’s lots of truth we need to know, things our species has always known, embedded in the natural world. Over the millennia wise men and women have pondered and learned important truths while walking, farming, sensing the seasons, wondering at the stars. In gardens and parks, as well as wilderness areas, one may “read what John Muir called ‘the inexhaustible pages of nature . . . written over and over uncountable times, written in characters of every size and color, sentences composed of sentences, every part of a character a sentence’” (p. 35).
Following Muir’s advice, one learns to know a world quite unlike TV-land. In the natural world, such as the mountain where McKibben watched the patient movements of hawks and ducks, you learn that other creatures “are not there for you–they are there because the world belongs to them too” (p. 84). Yet this world, creation, as McKibben documented in an earlier book, The End of Nature, is everywhere endangered by our ruthless greed.
What’s true for our knowledge of nature is also true for our knowledge of God. McKibben carefully watched a plethora of TV “ministries.” What he found was that “above all else, they depict a strangely puny God. He can be easily persuaded to grant human wishes–a short of genie-in-the-bottle God” (p. 88). Lots of testimonies are given con¬cerning what God has done and will do for us. Yet there’s “something missing here too–a sense of the experience of God, of the presence of the sacred that led people and societies to religion in the first place” (p. 93). On the mountain McKibben sensed a God of a different order! He found, with Job of old, God in the thunder and the whirlwind, God the Creator, doing more than dash about answering our prayers for health and wealth. Ancient insights, inscribed in sacred scriptures, are confirmed on the mountain, where “the divine makes perfect sense.” And, McKibben believes, “if we felt it down to the soles of our feet we might be more moved to protect the rightness, the integrity, of the planet” (p. 99).
One of McKibben’s discoveries deeply impressed him: despite our boasts of “progress,” daily life for most of us has hardly changed in 40 years: “in material terms life on a 1960’s sitcom closely mirrors life on a 1990’s sitcom” (p. 113). The freezers and stoves, the cars and clothes, have hardly improved, despite some superficial changes. Coincidentally, studies “show that a ‘higher proportion of Americans reported being very happy in 1957 than anytime since” (p. 118). Perhaps that’s because when we’re glued to the tube we’re in bondage to a medium which manipulates us through insatiable desires and shame, and which punctures anything smacking of nobility and lofty purpose. TV entertains, but (like the indescribably sad faces of rock musicians) it mainly numbs depression rather than inspires affections.
McKibben’s as fine writer. He knows how to illustrate his points, how to elicit reader re¬sponse. He offers few simple solutions to our TV-sired predicament, though he certainly would urge us to take control of it and understand its philosophy. And to give us balance, to provide a real antidote to TV’s poison, he insists we must reach out and touch reality, the living around us.
Rating: 4 / 5