Media O.D.

I thought it was interesting that you set out to identify the different types of people and their relationships to the media. In your book, there's the "The Paranoid," "The Exhibitionist," "The Ironist," etc. Is it a good thing that people have adopted a specific identity in their relationship to the media, or do you think it will limit their ability to see the bigger picture?

It's certainly better to cope than not to cope. So, yes, it's a sign of aliveness that we try to find some dry land. Strategizing is better than lying prone and wallowing or collapsing into it. It's a sign of vitality.

So are people aware of how media affects them?

Lots of people have some awareness that something odd is going on. One way that comes out is by people complaining about how busy they are. Some of the busyness has to do with real world connections -- children, work, family. But some of it also is an awareness that there are too many media things to do, and yet they don't quite satisfy.

Another way that people are aware of it is that many people sit down to watch television and end up watching more than they wanted. Just like someone regrets that they drank so much, it makes them feel uncomfortable. That's why very modest efforts like National Turn Off Your TV Week actually get people going. It's also why many teachers are restless with the restlessness of their students and wonder whether the fidgetiness that gets diagnosed as attention deficit disorder has something to do with the unacknowledged curriculum of all-around media.

Even the occasional campaigns to control one or another aspect of media, many of which are either too narrow or misguided, still reflect some awareness that people are bathed in a media environment that seems out of control. I'm thinking of the campaigns against violent video or nasty lyrics or the post-Columbine surge of censoriousness -- the fear that violence is triggered or bad values are being conveyed. Those campaigns are often misguided and not intellectually solid, but they still reflect some anxiety about something that's happening.

On the other hand, and this is especially true of shut-ins who tend to watch more television, there's still a large number of people who feel thrilled or blessed with the nonstop stimulus.

You write that people find this comfort, or maybe a distraction, in connecting all the time. What's actually good about it?

Much of it is very useful. I'm not an Internet utopian, but I'm not an Internet dystopian either. Because it's far less controlled, the Internet does offer the possibility of something seriously challenging and interesting. As a writer, I find it very useful to get letters about pieces that I've written. Internet sites that cultivate some serious attention to things are a very good service to people trying to find some serious niche. Not to be overly flattering, but take Salon -- the contentiousness and range and the very fact that there's an ongoing book discussion in a culture that's not terribly hospitable to that is a very good thing.

I'm involved with the Web site Open Democracy, based in London, which makes an effort to be cross-national and argumentative at the highest plane, inviting people to respond not to the weakness of people's arguments, but to their strengths. And that, without any publicity, has taken off in the globalization debate, the post-Sept. 11 debate. It's so early in the history of this thing to know how that's going to pan out. To try to assess how valuable the Internet is at this stage would be like trying to figure out the significance of radio around 1923.

But then you do say that the Internet and various forms of media distract us from civic life, public life.

That's largely true. It seems that the main use of it is for entertainment, for sports and celebrity stuff and even more for gambling and pornography. There's an interesting debate about whether there's a democratic function in Internet users being forced to confront people whose views are different from theirs. If part of what you want in a democracy is not simply that people express themselves but that they deliberate, then it's important for them to get out of their bubbles. So the question is: Does the Internet perfect the bubbles and enable environmentalists to chat with other environmentalists while neo-Nazi skinheads chat with neo-Nazi skinheads, or is there some cross-fertilization and encounter going on?

Robert Putnam's book "Bowling Alone" argued that television has a lot to do with why Americans are more antisocial and reluctant to join church groups, volunteer in the community or even participate in outdoor sports. You mentioned this in your own book. What are we missing and is this because of television and the Internet?

Putnam's book is very well reasoned on this question. I find it completely conclusive that there's this strong association, which is probably causal, between, on the one hand, dependency on television, especially for people who turn it on and leave it on all day, and civic withdrawal. What we don't entirely know is whether this same process is operating in other countries. I've heard that it might not be. I was in Toronto earlier this month and I was told that the Canadian data don't go that way. And I know about a presentation by a British scholar to the effect that this wasn't happening in Britain either. I'm open-minded about that. But for America, I do think that Putnam has the goods. Television has a lot to do with it.

Before, you mentioned that sex and violence in the media aren't making people more sex-crazed and violent.

I want to condemn vile video games and action movies on aesthetic and moral grounds. In general, though, people feel squeamish about saying that something is no good or debased. Instead, we want to say that it's murderous or issue a public health warning. I just don't find that persuasive. I have no trouble condemning racist or idiotic action movies or sentimental tripe of various kinds as bad work. But I certainly wouldn't want Congress to legislate against bad work.

But didn't you also say in your book that the constant presence of violence in media somehow makes it more acceptable to us?

Yes, I think that's true. I don't doubt that there's a desensitizing, an anesthesia. We collectively normalized this whole repertory of blowing up buildings and "taking people out." In some sense the years of anesthesia led many Americans to think that they "got" what happened on Sept. 11 because it was like a movie. No, it wasn't like a movie. In a movie, the people who are "taken out" are stick figures. It doesn't really matter that they're gone. They were never there in the first place. Anesthesia is a more sinister consequence than the very, very occasional one where a kid sees a movie and says, "I would like to hold up a bank, too, and now I know what gun to buy."

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