Big World, Small Town
Anyone who’s read my work on Watershed Voice knows that I’m a big fan of music, books and television. I’ve written pieces here on Bob Dylan, Tiger King and even one on the obscure comic book character The Question. Heck, Watershed Voice is even publishing a piece of fun serialized fiction that I wrote called The Ticket.
But recently, I’ve started to question our intense cultural focus on entertainment and how it affects us individually and collectively. The smartphone era has made entertainment something that we can enjoy anytime and anyplace. Whether it’s scrolling through Facebook, playing Words with Friends or listening to a podcast, we rarely experience even a single hour that is not interrupted by at least a short burst of entertainment.
Being in my 40s, I remember quite vividly a time when this was not the case. Back in those simpler times, when we walked to school uphill both ways, entertainment was much harder to come by. People read more books back then, mostly because books were one of the few easily portable entertainment sources.
Television entertainment in those days was also more limited and came from only a few sources. Friends, The Simpsons and ER were programs that, even if you didn’t watch them, you were familiar with. Today, with streaming services proliferating like frisky rabbits, there are many shows not only unfamiliar to a majority of Americans but also not easily accessible.
As our entertainment options have exploded, they have also become more fractionalized. Everyone can now have their own gated community of content, where you never have to be exposed to anything that you don’t like or that you disagree with.
“It’s as if entertainment has become our cultural sun, and everything else is forced to revolve around it.”
Consider how we get our news in 2020.
Back in the days of Walter Cronkite, it was enough that news organizations accurately reported what was happening in the world. But today, in order to get clicks and views, national news organizations are expected to inform as well entertain their viewers. The influence of the entertainment industry on the news industry is long and complicated, but a critical moment happened in 1988 when Rush Limbaugh’s radio show became syndicated across the nation. Limbaugh developed a novel “news” product that featured plentiful jokes and a very strong partisan viewpoint that relished mocking liberals.
It wasn’t long before Limbaugh’s approach to the news was transferred to television with the founding of cable news channel Fox News. And then in 1999, Jon Stewart took over The Daily Show and built on Limbaugh’s entertainment approach to the news but added a liberal point of view. Many young people began to get all of their news from the show, which aired not on a news network but on Comedy Central.
In 2020, the highly polarized nature of our politics exists in part because it’s just so entertaining to pretend that people who disagree with us are mustachioed Snidely Whiplashes out to destroy America. Humbly engaging viewpoints different from our own is much, much less entertaining.
The influence of entertainment culture has even impacted our churches. I grew up attending what would now be called a “traditional” church. It had wooden pews and an alter at the front which served as the focus of attention. A priest wearing vestments presided over a somber service that featured the singing of old songs with spare accompaniment.
Today, the most well-attended churches don’t even have an altar. Instead the presider is perched up on a stage, the natural workplace of actors and musicians. The pastor often dresses in jeans and a tee-shirt and is backed up by a drummer, keyboardist and lead guitarist as if he’s the front man of a band. The songs that are sung are written to satisfy the musical tastes of today and are often repetitive, like a chant you’d hear at a football game.
It’s as if entertainment has become our cultural sun, and everything else is forced to revolve around it.
Apprehension about the effects of entertainment on our culture is not a new concern. In 1985, Neil Postman published his influential book Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. In that book, Postman expressed trepidation about the negative effect television was having on our culture. Postman suggested that television was like a drug and that Americans had become so addicted to it that other, higher pursuits were being abandoned, much like some addicts abandon their family and their health in pursuit of their drug of choice.
Postman died in 2003, before the iPhone made television something that you could carry around in your pocket, but I wonder what he would make of our current culture. I wonder what Postman would think of Facebook or Tik Tok. What would he make of people walking about with AirPods in their ears listening to podcasts that continuously reassure listeners that all of their opinions are correct, and that anyone who says differently is a damned fool?
I don’t know the answer to those questions, but I do think it’s worth pondering what kind of world we want to live in. What is the highest good? What do we want our culture to look like and do we want our nation to be a place where being entertained is what matters most?
Charles D. Thomas is a writer and psychotherapist who made Three Rivers his home for over a decade. Feedback is welcome at [email protected].
Any views or opinions expressed in “Big World, Small Town” are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of the Watershed Voice staff or its board of directors.
