False Images Lead Us Back to Dark Ages : Media: Bombarded by information, we turn on the tube and tune out the reality of our contemporary world.

Given that I believe that television demeans and trivializes everything and everyone connected with it, that in short it is responsible for the downfall of civilization, I have mixed feelings (to put it mildly) about appearing on it to promote a new book that is critical of nearly all its aspects.

My case is as follows:

We’re in the midst of a new Dark Age. This one, however, has been brought about, paradoxically enough, not by the suppression of knowledge and information but by their dazzling assault on our senses. The result has been nothing short of catastrophic.

For all practical purposes, everything in our society has become a branch of entertainment: business, news, politics, religion, you name it. Why? When people can no longer make sense of their world because of (a) its sheer complexity and (b) the overwhelming volume of supposed “information” with which we are bombarded daily (from the arcane and esoteric to the titillating and trivial that are mixed in proportions that would tax even the most sophisticated alchemist), then they will seek coherence elsewhere. They find it in the endless pursuit of nonstop, disconnected sights, sounds, images and pleasing personalities that pretend to offer them the pretense of coherence. As a result, we no longer prefer to confront reality directly, for long ago we learned and accepted the fact that reality has for all practical purposes become unmanageable. Instead, we have turned our energies to the proliferation and production of endless amounts of unreality to soothe our tired and fractured egos.

Television is, of course, the prime culprit, for it has become the model for everything in our society. Everything now either imitates and/or caricatures TV as TV itself caricatures and imitates everything else. We have newspapers, magazines and even “books” in the form of TV screens or TV reality. Thus, USA Today, the newspaper, is a simulation of “TV news” that is itself a simulation of “real news.” And “USA Today on TV,” is a simulation of USA Today, the newspaper. At each step in the chain, we recede further from reality. Conversely, each step heightens a felt sense of unreality.

TV is particularly insidious, for it is the very background, the very oxygen, of our new world. It is wrong, dangerously so, to think that TV is merely a harmless, trivial simulation of reality. TV has become both a simulation of reality and reality itself. There is in fact no reality any more. It’s all artifact. We have so thoroughly merged symbols, information and entertainment that few of us can distinguish between them.

TV has not only distorted our ability to deal with complexity; it also may have altered irreversibly our desire to confront reality. Donahue, Geraldo and Oprah are no longer merely caricatures of “truth” or “journalism.” They are no longer merely filters or portrayers of reality. They have become the “new reality.”

A law of 20th-Century communication has become evident: The length of a sound bite is inversely proportional to the complexity of the world and the overload of information to which we are exposed. Columnist George Will summarized it best when he noted that “If Lincoln were alive today, he would be forced to say, ‘Read my lips: no more slavery.’ ”

This is the level to which our national discourse has descended. This is the promise of the mass media. As Paddy Chayefsky once said, “Television is democracy at its ugliest.” And, as Fred Friendly remarked, “There is no incentive for television to do its best when it can make so much money by doing its worst.”

Given the contempt with which I hold TV, why then would I want to appear on it to promote a new book that deals with its perverse effects? I have no easy answer. I struggle daily to find one. The best that I have been able to come up with its that I believe strongly, as the recent PBS interviews with Joseph Campbell demonstrate, that there is a deep, unsatisfied hunger on the part of the American people for something better, for something that speaks directly to our constant search for meaning on the basic issues of life itself.

This hunger can never fully be extinguished by the media powers-that-be. I believe in speaking as directly to that hunger as I can, although I have no illusions whatsoever with regard to changing the odious system that governs the airwaves.

There are pockets of the public that hunger for something far better than the media moguls give us. In fact, I think that there is another quasi-law that describes our current situation: The hunger for something better is directly proportional to the constant banality that we are fed.