The Spectacle of Entertainment
Part Two: Info-tainment
William Brown
The spectacular integration that produces "info-tainment" presupposes that both entertainment and information are capable of and are now being created with the needs of the marketplace "in mind." Information -- without regard for its subject matter -- must be as easily conceived and comprehended as a bar of soap or any other commodity, and it must contain or lead to nothing harmful to the logic or regime of the commodity. Data must be narrowly re-cast as "information" and strictly defined as a source of value and a form of merchandise before it can be integrated into "info-tainment." But, unlike culture, which is "the locus of the search for lost unity" (Debord), data is concrete knowledge about particular facts or circumstances. Won in the course of the struggles of everyday life, data is local and subjective by definition. As such, it poses a problem for the marketplace, which can only circulate "objectively" valuable goods that have "universal" appeal. Data can only circulate productively after it has been "raised up" (or abstracted) to the level of the objective and the universal. When the process of abstraction works according to the "logic" of the commodity -- that is, when the process isolates what it produces from its context, its past, its original intentions, and its consequences -- the end result can only be irrational. And yet there is a certain "logic" to the systematic irrationality of all information: if theory can define information as "a measure of the probability of a message being selected from the set of all possible messages," then the probability of information containing a "commercial message" (an advertisement for a commodity) is, in a capitalist society, very high indeed. But because "raised up" data remains knowledge about particulars, it is also essentially totalitarian: information as commodity is the imposition of a fragmentary vision on the totality of social practice. Therefore, there is nothing "objective" or "universal" about information at all, except for its relationship to power, which is absolute. (Despite its apparent diversity, information in all its forms says the same thing: Just do it why ask why!)
The interest of a neologism like "info-tainment" (which is applied to a lot more these days than just half-hour-long commercials) is that, like a spectacle-commodity, it is as easily conceived and comprehended as a bar of soap: its meaning -- such as it is -- is immediately clear to a broad range of people. Though essentially it is an empty phrase, "info-tainment" grows more valuable as an object of exchange the more the term can be filled with references to other easily-comprehended spectacles. An example: the rhyme of the neologism "edu-tainment" (presumably a shortening of the phrase educational entertainment) with "info-tainment" suggests that integrated edu-tainment is "education for the Information Age" and that "info-tainment" can't be so bad because it can mutate into something called "edu-tainment." Literally speaking, edu-tainment is unthinkable without info-tainment, which is its role model. Industry has long regarded the school systems (the main repositories and sources of popular knowledge) as an important potential entrance point into the minds of children and, thus, into the minds and pocketbooks of parents. But advertising has wisely been forbidden in textbooks and on school grounds, thus depriving the marketing specialists of the beach-head needed for their invasion, so to speak. And so they have had to produce "informative" videotapes specially designed for use in the classroom, produced by the likes of the Cartoon Channel, the Discovery Channel, CNN in the Classroom, and Turner Broadcasting Systems. The degree of the commodity's colonialization of edu-tainment generally can be gauged by the title of TBS's very popular edu-tainment tape, Just Yabba-Dabba-Doo It!, which plays on both Fred Flintstone's cry of falsified happiness and the command-slogan of the Nike Corporation (itself a recuperation of the Yippies' slogan "Do it!"). Such integrated works may indeed be the "effective teaching tools" that their sellers proclaim them to be, but it seems clear that what they teach is to how to be a good "citizen-consumer" of the reigning spectacle.
There are always plenty of fresh examples to hammer home the point that there is no other choice but to be a good "citizen-consumer." In the context of the global imposition of edu-tainment as the (only) pedagogic method, no more compelling a lesson could be imagined than the current campaign in New York State to shrink drastically tax-derived funding for the State University of New York system and then to commercialize and profit from decentralized access to all of the individual components and everything that they each contain -- the "in-house" libraries, museums, and archives -- in the names of "learning productivity," an obvious rhyme with "worker productivity," and "distance-learning." (In a certain sense, the Governor of the State of New York -- presumably on behalf of the People of the State of New York -- is claiming that SUNY just isn't entertaining enough to be subsidized, or rather that SUNY can only be entertaining in its current fashion if its component universities charged enough in tuition to allow them to pay for their own spectacles. In other words, let the word go out: the People will only entertain the shows that they personally like to watch.) These are an ominous developments -- "commercialization" and "privatization" are taking place in an increasing number of important municipal entities and functions, such as sanitation, security, correctional institutions and park maintainence -- but especially because of the conditions in which all of the other libraries, archives and museums are now forced to operate.
Faced with severe budgetary restrictions and declining in-person usage (both in their respective ways symptoms of widespread illiteracy and stupefaction), public and private knowledge centers have had, some more willingly than others, to begin the long process of digitizing and commercializing access to their entire holdings (and to promote the corporations that so graciously allowed them to do so at such a good price). Such a process is nothing less than self-annihilation, for it was capitalism that had originally and widely disseminated the rigorous mentality of the museum, the original and unreproducable object, the authentic document and precise historical criticism. According to the director of the Whitney Museum, David Ross, his museum is now so much a "part of a process in which capital is transformed into aesthetic experience" that it is "logical" for the Whitney to be better integrated into the general process in which aesthetic experience is transformed into capital. In the name of "public access," libraries, archives and museums are going on-line (integrating themselves with one of any number of computer networks) with whatever they've converted into information, and, again, dutifully promoting the corporations that graciously allowed them to do so. The key here, as elsewhere, is the reductive translation of knowledge and experience into spectacular information. Some programs allow the person entering the information to attempt to copy perfectly the appearance of the original manuscript or document. But the Standard Generalized Mark-up Language (SGML), which is coming to be "the industry standard" (and thus the standard for everything and everybody else), only produces the appearance of an exact copy of the original when it has been given the command to print. If the information is, say, accessed through an on-line provider (that is, without any print command being given), it will be indistinguishable from any other block of digitized text, be it the Declaration of Independence or the latest news on Monica Seles. Though it will have "circulated productively," the information will have completely lost both its context and its aura, that is to say, both its logic and its humanity.
It is true that computers allow their users to run rapid and extensive database searches for keywords, titles and authors, and thus to "learn everything" there is to learn about a given subject. But users only learn from what has been entered, which must be accurate and complete (otherwise it wouldn't have been entered in the first place). If the data hasn't been entered, it can't be "information," and therefore (and literally speaking) doesn't mean anything. Worse still, users will never learn who entered the data, when and where it was entered, and on whose behalf -- that is to say, the things that matter most. Consequently, soon absolutely no basis will remain for the relatively independent judgment of those who make up the world of learning, those last few who base their self-respect and sense of purpose on their abilities to verify assertions, produce relatively impartial histories of the facts. In their place will come -- in addition to such new personal bonds of dependency and protection as secret societies, militias, gangs and organized-crime "families" -- vast, unchallenged networks of info-tainment, propaganda and falsification, and large-scale clandestine operations such as those hinted at by the so-called Iran/Contra scandal. If threatened, the networks' agents will be all too happy to blow up the Uffizi Gallery, for example, with the intent of showing just how fast and completely the spectacle can reconstruct what is genuine; technical abilities are such that reality itself can now be put into a museum, if need be. With the general destruction of the possibilities for independent verification, it is now only necessary to control the relatively few so-called experts and specialists who are active in their fields. Such control is easy, especially if it is simply a matter of convincing some citizen-consumer that the article on his or her TV screen is an authentic reproduction of something he or she has never seen before. Look how easy it has been to do the hard stuff, for example, keeping the members of the AMA and other "professional" organizations from clearly and exactly indicating just how sick our poisoned environment is making us (look at the silence concerning the very high incidence of breast cancer on Long Island and the obvious correlation with chemical pollution of the water supply).
Part Three: The Computer
Return to William Brown at The Birdhouse
[Writers] [Birdhouse]