The Medium is the Message

Last night, we watched Frost Nixon and this quote near the end of the film struck me forcibly. 

James Reston Jr says: 

You know the first and greatest sin of the deception of television is that it simplifies; it diminishes great, complex ideas, trenches of time; whole careers become reduced to a single snapshot. At first I couldn't understand why Bob Zelnick was quite as euphoric as he was after the interviews, or why John Birt felt moved to strip naked and rush into the ocean to celebrate. But that was before I really understood the reductive power of the close-up, because David had succeeded on that final day, in getting for a fleeting moment what no investigative journalist, no state prosecutor, no judiciary committee or political enemy had managed to get; Richard Nixon's face swollen and ravaged by loneliness, self-loathing and defeat. The rest of the project and its failings would not only be forgotten, they would totally cease to exist. 

And it reminded me of one of those 'defining' books I read a few years ago and which I want to dust off again. Neil Postman's 'Amusing Ourselves to Death'.

Postman's argument is that how we are obliged to conduct our conversations will have the strongest possible influence on what ideas we can conveniently express. And what ideas are convenient to express inevitably become the important content of culture. (p6)

'To take a simple example of what this means, consider the primitive technology of smoke signals. While I do not know exactly what content was once carried in the smoke signals of American Indians, I can safely guess that it did not include philosophical argument.... You cannot use smoke to do philosophy. Its form excludes the content.' (p7) 

or


'The shape of a man's body is largely irrelevant to the shape of his ideas when he is addressing a public in writing  or on the radio or, for that matter, in smoke signals. But it is quite relevant on television... For on television , discourse is conducted largely through visual imagery, which is to say that television gives us a  conversation in images, not words.... You cannot do political philosophy on television. Its form works against the content.' (p7)

Of course, there is some irony here. I watched a DVD and these thoughts were all triggered. Doesn't that undermine Postman's thesis? 
Of course, there is an interplay of word and image in the medium of TV/Film and my memory of his book is that it is nuanced on this point. And yet, the quote had force for me because it triggered my memory of an argument I had read in print. So that objection is not as strong as it might seem. 

More potently I have to admit that reflecting on the film, what do I know about Nixon? Not a lot. What do I know about David Frost? Not a lot. What do I know about Watergate and Vietnam? Not a lot. The film did not educate me as much as entertain me. There was much form and not much content.

And perhaps this is where TV is really dangerous. For it gave me the feeling that I know something, when really I do not. And that is both seductive and deadly for me personally.

What effect does it have on a culture that spends so much time consuming this medium?