Media Matters with Bob McChesney

Susan Jacoby’s plucky, huh? This conversation was fun and enlightening. It was particularly funny that when Prof. McChesney asked about her credentials—a veteran journalist who laments America’s anti-intellectualism --- she said “I read and I write!” I always enjoy the Media Matters podcasts, but this one was a special treat. What an interesting person.

I’m listening to the podcast at work as I have been for the last several years (wow, has it been that long?), and I’m distinctly unsatisfied by Susan Jacoby’s thesis.  I mean, is it just me, or does her analysis betray shades of Luddite-ism, or perhaps its just nostalgia?  Or perhaps its a generational thing?  I’m 30, and perhaps I might be in the exception, but I think that technology has made me smarter than I would have been otherwise.  Technology has given me the ability to listen to this podcast and many others, for example.  I am able to explore a world of thoughts and opinions that would have been unavailable before the internet.  So my use of the technology propels my reading.  It challenges my assumptions and stretches my imagination.  But perhaps this is because I avoid the commercial culture like the plague.  I try to get off of the beaten path and search for (what I consider to be) excellence - for the best thinking about the issues that matter most to me (which is of course what brought me here). 

Technology is a tool that has no moral quality - it can be used to inspire or to pacify.  How technology is used - whether it’s books or computers, is a question of politics and culture, not a matter of whether technology (like videogames, for example) is inherently making people less intelligent.  So I enjoyed her analysis of why reading levels are relatively low in the South.  But that begs the question: what is it in our politics and culture today that causes us to devalue the pursuit of knowledge?  And how can we create a popular culture - and that includes videogames and everything else, more intelligent?  What political and cultural structures do we need to create in order to make popular culture that is more in line with our best values and highest aspirations?  And are such structures even possible within such a commercial society? 

I think that it is too easy in the analysis of popular culture to appeal to nostalgia, because it just means that you are trying to evoke an age that most likely never existed.  A much better approach is to assume that our best days are ahead of us, if we can just figure out what makes the present age tick.  I hope Bob that we can hear more guests who can speak to that question as well.

I liked Susan Jacoby’s story about the two yuppies talking about Pearl Harbor on September 11, but I wonder if there is going to be a story about you two talking about Kurt Vonnegut’s “Catch-22.” Joseph Heller wrote “Catch-22,” and the Vonnegut book with a number in the title that jumps to mind is “Slaughterhouse Five.”

I love the show, Bob, but I just had to bust your chops on this one!