M/C Reviews: 'Sound Bite Society'

	'Sound Bite Society' Lisa Gunders
	The Sound Bite Society: Television and the American Mind, by Jeffrey Scheuer	31 Oct. 2000

Bit

Bit 1		The main argument of this book is that television is by nature a simplifying medium and that it has contributed to the rise of right-wing politics in America and elsewhere. Scheuer links two trends that he believes have shaped American politics over the past generation: the emergence of television as a framework for politics, and the nearly complete collapse of American liberalism in the face of a resurgent New Right.
Bit 2		Since the 1960s, political culture in the USA has drifted to the right, with the far right being a major force. In addition, since the 1970s television has increasingly become a vehicle for Christian fundamentalist organisations, scarcely an agent of tolerance or equality in Scheuer's words, who also preach conservative politics and nurture the same audience. For Scheuer, conservatism is characterised by simplicity and liberalism by complexity, and the electronic media are systematic simplifiers of politics and culture in general. Commercial television, by its nature, works against complex left-wing argument: in the individualistic focus of much of its content; in its dependence on large corporations for advertising income and the consequently massive costs for political advertising; and by weighting political discourse toward symbols, images, slogans and sound bites.
Bit 3		The language of television--the way its technical and commercial imperatives interact to produce content--is focused on immediacy, action, concreteness and simplicity. It is, he says, a symbolic rather than a discursive medium and commercial and political symbols tend to bypass critical faculties and appeal directly to emotion. Even liberal politicians are constrained to use television as a means to present a personal image, rather than to convey liberal ideas, and virtually all political activity and communication is designed with television sound bites and audiences in mind.
Bit 4		According to Scheuer, television creates a type of hyperreality, whereby we invest its subjects with more authority than we do lived experience. It has become so naturalised that we ignore the differences between mediated and lived experience, forgetting, at times, from which source our memories come. This is a trend he sees as increasing with the emergence of high-definition and interactive television, but the nature of television itself will remain essentially the same.
Bit 5		While wanting, on an intuitive level, to agree with Scheuer's claims, this reader found the book intellectually dissatisfying. Early in the introduction Scheuer says that the book aims to understand television, not to bash it, yet his choice of language to describe television and the type of society he credits it with producing is consistently negative. He distances himself from conspiracy theorists, saying that television simplification of issues is not conscious, insidious, or unfair, and points out that viewers are not passive and that television has both left-tending and right-tending effects, and he notes the work of television scholars which shows that the vast range of content and sheer size of televisions audience make affects difficult to attribute, but he still maintains his basic thesis that the shaping of information by television affects the organisation of political beliefs. He does not critically engage with any of these audience studies or consider the differing effects different content has on real audiences, preferring to treat television audiences as an homogenous, uncritical mass. Nor, to my mind, does he question seriously why television takes the form it does, but rather treats it as an inevitable and natural feature of the medium.
Bit 6		Despite the above criticism, I think that Scheuer has a point that needs to be given serious consideration, and I agree that widespread media literacy should be encouraged and actively taught, but I think that Scheuer's own argument, as presented here, is itself a little too black and white.

Bit 7		Details Scheuer, Jeffrey. The Sound Bite Society: Television and the American Mind. New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1999

Bit 8		Citation reference for this article MLA style: Lisa Gunders. "'Sound bite society'" M/C Reviews 31 Oct. 2000. [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/reviews/words/sound.html>. Chicago style: Lisa Gunders, "'Sound Bite Society'," M/C Reviews 31 Oct. 2000, <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/reviews/words/sound.html> ([your date of access]). APA style: Lisa Gunders. (2000) 'Sound Bite Society'. M/C Reviews 31 Oct. 2000. <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/reviews/words/sound.html> ([your date of access]).

[image]

Links:
Four Walls Eight Windows