Infotaining Ourselves To Death

by Brett McCracken

A few weeks ago I came home to find the Lady Gaga issue of Rolling Stone in my mailbox. On the cover was a mostly unclothed Gaga sporting machine guns where her bra should be, and looking like some sort of militaristic sexpot Madonna wannabe. Meanwhile, buried deep inside the magazine—in the midst of Rolling Stone’s trademark rock band profiles, concert photos and over-the-top Peter Travers movie reviews—there was a lengthy article entitled “The Runaway General,” profiling Gen. Stanley McChrystal. The piece, written by Michael Hastings, was in a lot of ways a typical Rolling Stone political feature (snarky, vulgar, brash). It wasn’t exactly the epitome of sound, respectable journalism either (Hastings admittedly go several of his interviewees to offer quotes while they were drunk). But it was a story that literally changed the world.

On account of that issue of Rolling Stone, featuring machine gun Gaga on the cover, America’s Afghanistan war policy was altered. McChrystal was ousted, and Gen. David Petraeus took his place. Lots of people in Afghanistan will live or die because of the ramifications of that magazine article. The one with absurd Lady Gaga on the cover.

But who are we kidding? The world-shaping impact of Lady Gaga is probably as formidable and worthy of consideration as the Hastings article. In our world of increasingly collapsed boundaries between “news” and “entertainment,” where celebrities and politicians and politicians are celebrities, our old ideas about “legitimate journalism” and “serious news” are beginning to seem grievously foreign. Ours is a world of infotainment—a world where the name “Palin” simultaneously brings to mind the U.S. Presidency, Tina Fey, “hockey moms,” the Tea Party movement, and tabloid covers featuring “Levi and Bristol Engaged!” It’s a world where Anderson Cooper 360 and Access Hollywood are on at the same time and equally entertaining, and cable news regularly sponsors arguments that rival the theatrics of UFC.

It’s a world where you can open the Los Angeles Times and think you’re reading about some late-breaking news about Universal Studios being partially destroyed, only to discover that it’s simply a 4 page wrap advertisement for the new King Kong ride, masquerading as legitimate news.

It’s a world where a Facebook feed includes your cousin’s pictures from a wedding, a comment about someone’s ill-timed flat tire, a diatribe about immigration and a link to a New Yorker article about Mexican drug cartels. It’s a world where an endless flow of 140-character bits and pieces flow into our conscious with no rhyme or reason: News about Lindsay Lohan’s jail sentence, a comment about a World Cup goal, or news of an execution tweeted by the Utah attorney general.

The latter instance of Twitter news prompted John Mark Reynolds to recently write a piece for the Washington Post entitled "Twitter of Doom," in which he decried the use of a trifling medium as Twitter to bear such grave news as an execution:

Let's leave twitter for that which is tweetable, such as American Idol. When it comes to life and death, we demand our public figures reflect, process, and use language with care, in a manner suitable to the event. Tweeting our great events? Washington couldn't, Obama wouldn't, and American officials shouldn't. A culture that debases its language and its sacred things, whether flag or rhetoric, risks becoming a culture for which no sane man would die. It is difficult to ask a man to die for Twitter nation.

Is technology, and pop culture, and the leveling of information and entertainment creating a world of trivial hyperreality wherein the “important” and “superfluous” are increasingly difficult to tell apart? If so, is it something we need to be worried about?

As Christians, I think we do need to be mindful of this infotainment scenario, for a number of reasons: 1) We have to admit our own temptation as the church to package Christianity in terms of crowd-pleasing entertainment, and question the implications of this. 2) We have to recognize that infotainment erodes our sense of wonder and our grasp of the world’s gravitas, all but eliminating our trust in any sort of metanarrative or eschatological hope. What does this mean for the preaching the gospel? 3) If the culture at large is increasingly unable to determine what’s important vs. what’s not, or what’s trustworthy/believable and what’s purely fiction/diversion, how will we expect them to view religion or spirituality as anything more legitimate than the latest Twilight book?

Comments

Larry Hollon

In identifying the blurring of lines between what we once considered serious journalism and entertainment, you raise critical questions. What/who can we consider reliable sources of information? Who can we trust? How do we verify information that we believe it is important to act upon? And how does all of this affect faith and our response to the historic teachings of the faith community? And upon what authority do we base these faith claims?

In traditional religious teaching these questions were answered through some common assumptions, consistent teachings and reliable authorities who were (mostly) accepted by the whole religious community. Thus, the Bible, worship, creeds and priests, monks, and clergy were the basis for our teaching.

That's changed and we swim in a sea of competing claims mad by an equal unmber who also claim authority.

This is a huge challenge to Christian truth in an age of technology that levels the playing field unlike any age since the invention of moveable type..

Aaron Brown

I think one of the biggest reasons for the blurring of lines through "news reporting," "tweeting," etc., is the fact that we live in a society that wants to escape. I think we enjoy Facebook feeds and Tweeting because it allows us to glimpse into someone else's life and escape the mundane cycles we think we ourselves are trapped in. The grass is always greener on the other side, and thus we are simply exchanging the perception of a mundane life for someone else's perceived mundane life. By making this "exchange" for another life, we believe we have somehow escaped to a better life.

The same is true for our news and entertainment. Kurt Cobain sang, "Here we are now, entertain us." Perhaps the news does not entertain us. It is quite depressing to be constantly reminded of the recession, the state of health care, AIDS in Africa, and all of this with no solution or end in sight. Most people are not happy in their lives anyway, so they choose to escape from even more glaring bad news.

Compounding the issue, American advertising has learned how to truly cater and catch our attention, so yes, most people will be attracted to the Lady Gaga cover, read the story, and then glance through a more significant article and formulate an opinion on a "snarky, vulgar, brash" news piece. As a society, we do not care what we are being fed, as long as it is holding our attention and entertaining us.

In response to Mr. McCraken's blog posting and the 3 assertions at the end, 1) You are absolutely correct, especially since we live in a seeker friendly society of entertainment and thrills. 2) Yes, society has become numb due to the over indulgence of media, but I think we need to use media as a tool to continue spreading the Gospel. One truth is that media has never taken the place of authentic, loving, sincere people in a person's life. We have to couple our media with people who love and care and share the Gospel with the culture. 3) There have always been challenges to spreading and sharing the Gospel. There have always been competing gods/idols and philosophies. Media is one of our contemporary idols. The Gospel spread through authentic, loving Believer's who engaged in the lives of everyday people. Though my ideas may seem simplistic, media can never take the place of the human touch.

Randy Heffner

Brett: Good highlighting of our state of affairs, thanks. Your play on the title of Neil Postman's classic book is apropos. I'm also concerned about these things -- but not worried.

Taking up the other side for a moment, in a sense it doesn't matter what the demerits of a twittering nation are, it is simply the moment in which we find ourselves. While our vision is best formed by the "should be," the "is" is a much stronger basis for thought and action. Paul's admonition to "become all things to all men" would argue that, in some way, we should be people that twitter to a twittering nation. Our manner of doing so can be, like Paul's manner, "as without law, though not being without the law of God." In other words, concrete individual points of analysis, like John Mark Reynolds' piece, help us to understand, in the use of Twitter or other channels, what does and does not embody God's Beauty. We gain by letting such insights guide and form our manner of engagement yet, engaging "as without law," we needn't denounce and deride those that see things differently -- or that don't think enough to see at all.

While it is good to see clearly the state of the world, there's something insidious and dangerous in general denunciation of a twittering nation: It centers our mindset (and our heartset) in judgment rather than love, in pride rather than humility. We can easily miss that there are goodness and beauty to find even in the Twitters of the world. Twitter, Facebook, infotainment, et al are only tools (as Aaron says) -- albeit tools that are easily ill-used to raise the ephemeral over the eternal -- and they have a place in building connection and community in a fractured world. The world is too complex for everyone to be fully engaged in every issue and, besides, there's Beauty in playfulness about the ephemeral (and the eternal, for that matter). To "seek the welfare of the city where [He has] sent [us] into exile," we must show up where the people are. With winsome ways and an intriguing draw into something deeper (a la Jesus' frequent manner of engagement), perhaps we "may by all means save some."

So, to your closing points, I reply: 1) I believe there's a way to connect with people using a bit of "crowd-pleasing entertainment" -- perhaps as an ironic, self-deprecating reframing of society's jaded views of Christianity -- but not as a sugar-coated enticement to Christianity. 2) The starting point is to get past lament over the loss of metanarrative and engage with people where they are. Perhaps infotainment (with irony again, which is largely the dialogical currency of the day) can toy with extant metanarratives (e.g., scientism, materialism, postmodernism) to winsomely expose the truth that their ultimate metaphysical foundations are actually the same as the theistic "flying spaghetti monster" metanarratives some oppose. 3) We shouldn't expect them to be able to tell the difference -- our manner of engagement must begin with the assumption that they won't. By setting to the side the goal of converting them and instead aiming simply to love them without judgment, we can start by getting to know and love individual people (as per Aaron's comment). Knowing, sharing life, enjoying infotainment together, building connection, we might find common ground and learn from each other. They might begin to catch some of our vision and we may improve our vision for having seen it from their point of view. Twitter (et al) might be the impersonal starting point that leads to contact with the individual, and it may then be a common ground that sustains and reinforces the connection.

Mark Goode

Brett,

Brett,

I am old enough to remember the rants about how television ("the boob tube") was going to dumb down the news by forcing valuable information to be repackaged into short 90-120 second segments. Forty years later some look wistfully at the broadcast networks' evening news programs as an indulgence that fewer Americans can afford (in terms of time). My how things change . . .

The power and attraction of Twitter lies partly in the fact that it's an "every person" form of broadcasting that has no "entry cost" (free to use) and can reach anyone with a computer or smartphone. But Twitter isn't really free because each person who reads a Tweet has to invest some time -- should I read this person's tweet, is what they had to say interesting, meaingful, etc? The cognitive processing time is expensive in a time bound world and that is the first filter most people assemble: I only have so much time to consume this stuff; therefore, I'll focus on what's most important to me.

In a world of "free communications," the challenge for both the producer of information and the consumer is matching needs and expectations within the time available. And the constraint of the medium itself (bursty Tweets or RIA - Rich Internet Applications) will shape what content is broadcast and how it is packaged.

But don't fool yourself; evangelicals have been Tweeting for years: how many times has someone written "John 3:16" on a fence post, book cover, or public sign? What is that verse's metanarrative? It's embedded in the Tweet and it's context . . . Or how about Campus Crusade's famous "Four Spiritual Laws" booklet? Complex metanarrative? Eschatalogical vision? Nope. Bite size Christianity; Froot Loops for your soul.

You write, "infotainment erodes our sense of wonder and our grasp of the world’s gravitas, all but eliminating our trust in any sort of metanarrative or eschatological hope." I'd love to see some data to support that statement. I think many Americans struggle daily with their own personal gavitas . . . with unemployment near 15% (including the long term unemployed), housing foreclosures at a record level, bankruptcies breaking new records, and quarter over quarter consumer spending dropping like a rock . . . no, I think people are all to aware of how tough life is. Many are trying not to drown in their own personal gravitas.

You write: "If the culture at large is increasingly unable to determine what’s important vs. what’s not, or what’s trustworthy/believable and what’s purely fiction/diversion, how will we expect them to view religion or spirituality as anything more legitimate than the latest Twilight book?" Again, I'd love to see some data to support this supposition. I think you'd be hard pressed to demonstrate that "the culture" is caught in some sort of "reality fog" and unable to discriminate between what's important and what's not. What I sense underneath this statement is your personal frustration with the fact that evangelicals are getting less "air time," that the evangelical gospel isn't resonating, and that the newest generation is simply not interested in your vision of an eternal message. I suspect that the problem isn't that the audience isn't listening; it's that the message has been found wanting and not worth much attention.

I believe that if people are twitting about the banal, if they are laughing about utter nonsense, it's probably why they are eating carb laden food, drinking sugar drinks, and zoning out in front of the TV at night: they are stressed out, ovewhelmed, and trying to hang on during these trying times. I suspect that what some of these people have learned is that the evangelical Gospel of Quick Fixes and Magic Solutions just doesn't help.

Wayne A. Nestor

Wow, what an article! Great thought provoking content! I loved your "challenge and ponder" summary questions.

How do we train the newest generation to expect as much from their politicians and pulpits as we do from our surgeons, pilots, and automobile brake mechanics? Why do we let our politicians off the hook like we do our weather forecasters?

On the other hand, if we do hold our politicians accountable, why are we so quick to berate these political activists who challenge the sloppy politicians?

Again, great article, I'd like permissions to quote segments in an upcoming teaching I am doing.