The Age of Missing Information

This book is a meditation on the effects of television on society. After living in an area with no TV reception for a few years, McKibben embarked on massive project to try to understand what information television conveys and how this affects society. He had a very novel approach for this project: he identified Fairfax County, Virginia as having the greatest number of cable TV channels at the time (almost 100), so he recruited a Fairfax volunteer for each channel to record the entire day's broadcast on a video cassette recorder. The day chosen for the recording was May 3, 1990. On the day the tapes were being recorded, McKibben went hiking near his home in the Adirondacks, and kept a careful journal of all his observations up on the mountain. Then, for the next year, McKibben watched the TV tapes of May 3, for 8-10 hours a day, taking notes and analyzing what kinds of information they contained. In this book, he reports on the kinds of messages that were being spread through the broadcasts, and contrasts this to what he learned by observing the natural world on the mountain. The methodology may sound a little trite, but the project was very well executed, and McKibben leaves us with many disturbing points to ponder. Some critics of TV say that TV is bad because watching all the violence on TV makes people, especially children, violent. Others point out that the gratuitous violence is lamentable, but worse is the fact that watching TV contributes to hyper-consumption. McKibben takes the criticisms of the media to a much higher level. In this extended essay, he points out how much TV plays a role in how we see the world, how we expect it to work, and how the essential mismatch between the TV version and reality leads to unhealthy expectations or apathy. He argues that TV has become a guiding force of unparalleled strength, but where is it guiding us to? As he points out "Why do we do the things we do? Because of the events of our childhood, and because of class and race and gender, and because of our political and economic system and because of `human nature'-but also because of what we've been told about the world, because of the information we've received....What you do day after day is what forms your mind." If you spend your days watching TV, you are relinquishing control of the forces that will guide you to the broadcasters, whose interest is purely commercial, not helping you or society to be better. McKibben notes out how stories repeated during childhood contribute to one's system of ethics. In older societies, such tales were told by elders around the campfire, or read by parents to young children. But since the 1940's, the TV has taken over both the role of the campfire and the trusted elders. Instead of being brought up on moral or Biblical tales, today's children are raised on a fare of endless re-runs, from the Brady Bunch to Leave It to Beaver, to Gilligan's Island. Some of these shows contain moral lessons that

In this rather short book(250 pages)there is much to lament.Bill Mckibben volunteered to undergo the torture of watching every program that filled the 90+ channels in a 24 hour period in Fairfax,Virginia in May of 1990.This required 90 volunteers (to tape their specific channel for 24 hours)to make his project a reality.As he begins to go through the 90 odd tapes full of dreck it is not surprising that Mckibben finds a wasteland populated by infomercial hucksters,inane blather on talkshows,endless streams of commercials hawking an endless train of useless garbage.None of this is anywhere near as disturbing as the fact that there seems to be nowhere in the world of television where intelligent debate,contextual information or even a concern with thoughtful dialogue about anything ever makes an appearance.It is apparent that tv itself is inherently useless except for the business of selling product and images.Jerry Mander,in his book_Four arguments for the elimination of television_ goes into much greater depth than does Mckibbon on this subject.The best observation of the entire book may be that tv constantly recycles the images,stories and shows of the last 40-50 years.What is insidious about this is that a generation that has grown up on tv is likely to have a vastly more limited grasp of history.If the young are swamped by the history of a short 50 years as though the world hardly existed before 1950,hasn't then the education process become that much more difficult?The decline of education has become so precipitous in the last 4-5 decades that standards have had to be lowered time and time again so that a large chunk of students don't flunk.It is the same now with teachers,who have sicced the NEA on school districts across the country that try and administer proficiency tests to make sure students are being serviced by competent teachers.If public school students of today had to meet the criteria of 70-80 years ago it is very unlikely that most would be able to do it.What does it say that 3/4 of Harvard students now graduate with 'honors'or that you now automatically get points on the SAT test for merely signing your name?Mckibben hints that we've had to dumb down our educational standards precisely because tv has to some degree impaired the learning process of the young,specifically in the areas of attention span and grasping concepts that haven't been sufficiently Sesame Streetized(dumbed down).For Mckibben,and I have to agree wholeheartedly with him,the greatest danger our nation,civilization and Democracy faces is the coming generations that have been marginally educated and have no concept of how our nation and Democracy was brought about and maintained.If the populace of the future is made up mostly of ignorant,ahistorical,consumer drones with no concept of how a civilization is made possible and what it takes in order to maintain the precious gains of civilization then aren't we looking into the abyss?If the curiosity,wonder and meaning

Welcome to our teletronic nightmare! "The Age of Missing Information" is an intriguing book that covers an interesting and diverting subject; the human effects of sustained exposure to the seductive silver images flowing from our TV sets. As a people, we Americans are increasingly spending more time immersing ourselves in these unnatural, artificially generated, and carefully maintained environments, in what the author describes as the dangerously seductive throes of a quite strange (and unrepresentative) version of reality. This fascinating book cleverly illustrates how we are negatively affected by such massive (and more and more predominating) exposure to media-generated artifice. Although the immediate focus of the book revolves around comparing what he learns as a result of a random 24 hour period in front of his boob tube as opposed to another day spent out in the natural world, what he really seems to be questioning is the electronic media's subtle but significant effect on our consciousness, on the way we perceive, interpret, and interact with the world outside our doors. It is chilling to recognize the degree to which sustained congress with the electronic media negatively paints, influences, and organizes our conscious perspectives on all we see and do. One of the most dangerous results seems to be a receding appreciation for and familiarity with the natural world. This can lead to some dangerous confusion about what is and is not real. For people habitually electronically connected, the world of artifice & entertainment becomes the predominating influence on conscious awareness. What is the result of sustained exposure to the electronic equivalent of junk food? No one seems to know, but it can't be too great. The problem is that for a growing number of young people, this is the life style of preference, one that makes its devotees creatures drawn more to the flashy and entertaining artificial images flashing on their TV screens than to more natural features of the world outside the family den. Like Chauncy Gardener, the fictitious anti-hero of the movie "Being There", such individuals can believe anything and know nothing because all they appreciate and have any experience with is the sort of specious nonsense flooding out of their televisions. Next time you wonder why an impressionable 11-year-old kid can grab a pistol and shoot his teacher for little or no reason, ask yourself how much TV violence he has been exposed to. Although this book constitutes a chilling wake-up call, it is delivered in an humorous, entertaining, and quite readable narrative, and is a book I would recommend that any concerned adult read before letting Junior sit enraptured for hours by the TV set as a surrogate babysitter. Enjoy!

The author taped all the TV shows being broadcast for 24 hours, then watched all of the shows over the necessary time period, and then spend 24 hours alone with nature. There are some well-thought and well-articulated insights in this book. Information is not a substitute for nature. The information explosion is drowning our senses and cutting us off from more fundamental information about our limitations and the limitations of the world around us. Television really did kill history, in that it continually celebrates and rehashes the 40 years of time for which there is television film on background, and overlooks the 4000 years behind that. The worst disasters move slowly, and the TV cameras don't see them.

Bill McKibben is a great writer and deep thinker. This book is packed full of ideas that shows how television is not only ever-present and captivating but is teaching us, the viewing public, many lessons and a world view most of us would find abhorrent if we ever had an open debate about what ideas television should be promoting. This is one reason why our natural world is growing ever fainter while mass consumption of ludicrous products threatens to bury us. If you really care about your health and that of your children, not only would you think about their physical health, but you would be far better off being careful about the kind of garbage television is feeding their brain. This book makes clear the kind of information we do and more importantly, don't learn, by watching television.