Postman, Gitlin and Baudrillard

The Silk Market is one of Beijing’s most popular tourist sites. A gleaming, six-story structure in the city’s “Old Embassy” district, the Silk Market annually hosts more than 15 million visitors -- or, as the market's web site puts it, 15 million pairs of eyeballs (http://www.silkstreet.cc/). Browsers, mostly foreigners, must run a virtual gauntlet of young women in red sleeveless smocks pushing a vast variety of merchandise—clothes, jewelry, electronics, toys, souvenirs. Many of the items bear the labels of well-known designer brands. Almost all of them are pirated. The Silk Market, you see, is 300,000 square feet of fakery.

Or maybe I should say 300,000 square feet of spoof.

Neil Postman and Todd Gitlin seem to see the technology of the Information Age in the same way that I see the Silk Market: a cornucopia of counterfeit. Although they might recognize its vitality and its reach, even its entertainment value, in the end they don’t trust what it has to offer.

Both Postman and Gitlin take care to deny that they are opposed to information per se. Gitlin (p. 5) anticipates that very criticism and tries to launch a pre-emptive attack by acknowledging the positive connotations of the word “information” and then claiming that his denunciation of the “torrent” of data is based not on the mere fact of dissemination—after all, “Who in his right mind could be against information or want to be without it?”—but, rather, what he sees as a nefarious attempt (p. 6) to establish an orthodoxy of feeling.

At the same time, both Gitlin and Postman acknowledge the impact of the sheer volume of information that is available now. Postman (p. 69) observes that society is “awash in information.” Gitlin (p. 17) claims that the “media flow into the home . . . has swelled into a torrent of immense force and constancy.” Postman (p. 54) rues that “the success of twentieth-century technology . . . was so obvious and promising that there seemed no reason to look for any other sources of fulfillment or creativity or purpose.” Still, the paramount issue for these two critics seems not to be the exponential growth in the flow of information, but the character of the information itself. Postman (p. 69) refers to it as “garbage.” Gitlin (p. 17) complains abouty a "glut" that once was “an accompaniment to life that has become a central experience of life.”

Just as I believe the Silk Market undermines respect for intellectual property and the rule of law by promoting piracy, even though it can also provide some measure of entertainment for tourists who might enjoy the haggling and negotiating, so do Postman and Gitlin see communications technology as undermining respect for time-honored values, despite its potentially entertaining features. (Gitlin (p. 65) refers to the modern “arcade of amusements” and Postman (p. 202) cites the potential for “amusing ourselves to death”).

They find little amusement in what they see as potentially disastrous consequences. Gitlin (p. 39) says “the modern preference for ‘stimulation’ as such in impressions, relation and information” follows from “the increasingly blasé attitude through which natural excitement increasingly disappears.” Postman (p. xii) puts the argument even more dramatically, saying “the accusation can be made that the uncontrolled growth of technology destroys the vital sources of our humanity.”

In their denunciations of the negative impact of technology on modern human society, both Postman and Gitlin echo the French avant-garde intellectual, Jean Baudrillard, of whom Kellner (2006) says: "Likewise, in a digital era, Baudrillard claims that history has come to an end and reality has been killed by virtualization, as the human species prepares itself for a virtual existence." To my mind, both Postman and Gitlin are less Luddite than Baudrillardian. Both of them, although Postman to a greater degree, find the amount of information being conveyed of secondary importance to its lack of authenticity and its concomitant threat to society.

Baudrillard (1929-2007) gained international acclaim as a controversial, avant-garde French intellectual; his work is widely thought to be the inspiration for the movie, The Matrix. Kellner (2006) notes that Baudrillard not only theorized that the current era is defined by “simulation in which social reproduction (information processing, communication, and knowledge industries, and so on) replaces production as the organizing form of society,” but extended his argument to claim that globalization and technology were “erasing individuality, social struggle, critique and reality itself as more and more people became absorbed in the hyper and virtual realities of media and cyberspace.”

Despite the similarities in their analysis of technology's impact, Postman omits any reference to Baudrillard in Technopoly and Gitlin (p. 23) makes only a passing reference to him in Media Unlimited, citing the concept of a simulacrum, “a copy of something whose original does not exist.” Gitlin attributes the term “hyper-real” to Umberto Eco (p. 23), even though other sources, without identifying a single originator of the term, give at least partial credit to Baudrillard. Oberly (2003) specifically refers to Baudrillard’s singular contribution to the meaning of the word: “The concept most fundamental to hyperreality is the simulation and the simulacrum . . . The simulation is characterized by a blending of ‘reality’ and representation, where there is no clear indication of where the former stops and the latter begins.” (Baudrillard authored Simulacra and Simulation in 1981.)

Gitlin (p. 23) specifically prefers Eco’s identification of the “frantic desire for the almost real” as a description of the cultural zeitgeist in the United States. However, Baudrillard’s hyper-reality, which is described by Kellner (2006) as a realm “in which entertainment, information, and communication technologies provide experiences more intense and involving than the scenes of banal everyday life,” would seem to be more accurate with each passing day.

Possibly a dose of American optimism, or at least the American “distrust of constraints” that Postman (p. 53) identified as one of the three factors creating a favorable climate for the emergence of a technopoly, serves to constrain the two American critics and distinguish their analysis from Baudrillard's. Perhaps not so constrained was their French counterpart, who scandalously suggested that the Perfect Crime had been committed: in Kellner’s words “the murder of reality,” which Baudrillard regarded as “the most important event in human history.” Baudrillard held that the object had defeated the subject and that the simulacrum had replaced reality. “There is no need to enter the virtual double of reality—we’re already there,” said Baudrillard (2005).

With their jeremiads, Postman and Gitlin apparently hope to raise awareness of the threat posed by technology to the human experience. Baudrillard believed it was no use, that the whole world was already fake.

References

Baudrillard, J. (2005). The conspiracy of art. New York: Semiotext(e).

Gitlin, T. (2002). Media unlimited: How the torrent of images and sounds overwhelms our lives. New York: Henry Holt and Company.

Kellner, D. (2006). Jean Baudrillard after modernity: provocations on a provocateur and challenger. International Journal of Baudrillard Studies. Retrieved Feb. 18, 2009, from http://www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol3_1/kellnerpf.htm

Oberly, N. (2003). Reality, hyperreality (1). Theories of media: keywords glossary. Retrieved Feb. 19, 2009, from http://csmt.uchicago.edu/glossary2004/realityhyperreality.htm

Postman, N. (1993). Technopoly: The surrender of culture to technology. New York: Vintage.

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Even the Silk Market’s own web site acknowledges that the emporium was “once famous for selling fake goods.” http://www.silkstreet.cc/templet/en/ShowArticle.jsp?id=6418

For a video on the high-pressure sales tactics in the Silk Market: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=54C24hGCZL8&feature=related

For a photograph of a sign in the main entrance to the Silk Market listing "Recommended Words" and "Forbidden Words"--truly helpful information for all aspiring salespeople:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/bdeitte/153043981/