Don't Watch This

How the Media Are Destroying Your Life

Michael Rosenblum

• Publisher: Skyhorse
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781510758766
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Media & Communications Industry
• Index: Business

An unfiltered look at the addictive properties of social media, TV, and movies on our culture, with strategies to help you reclaim control over your life. Today, the average person spends an astonishing eight hours a day watching TV or videos online. Watching social media stories, movies, and TV is now our number one activity, outpacing everything else that we do, including sleep. This habit has an incredibly powerful influence on our lives – from what we think to what we buy to whom we elect. Media are more than entertainment; they are a drug. This media addiction wreaks havoc on our mental health, causing increased stress, depression, and anxiety, and ruining personal relationships. It also drives us deeper and deeper into debt. In Don't Watch This, former TV producer and Ivy League professor Michael Rosenblum reveals the hidden psychology driving us to media addiction. He describes why solving the problem is not as simple as swearing off our devices, but about learning how to use media for good. Rosenblum reveals the key to getting the best out of technology, without letting it get the best of you. Inside, you'll learn:

• How to take control of the media
• How to use your phone's camera to spread stories worth telling
• How having a former reality TV star in the Oval Office has changed the scope of media
• Why posting selfies on Instagram isn't going to change the world, and what you can post instead

Enlightening and empowering, Don't Watch This provides actionable, revolutionary techniques and insight to control your media addiction—helping you live the life you really want.

PART I

THE DRUG

To the Moon, Alice

At 10:56 p.m. Eastern Daylight Saving Time, July 21, 1969, American astronaut Neil Armstrong opened the door of the Lunar Lander, turned around, and slowly began to descend the steps to the surface of the moon.

Some 240,000 miles away, nearly one billion people followed his progress—six hundred thousand of them watching on TV. It was the largest television audience in history, and with good reason. All over the world, people were watching the culmination not just of ten years of intense technological and scientific effort but also ten thousand years of dreaming and imagining a human being walking on the moon.

As it happened, at the very moment that Armstrong was taking his first steps on the lunar surface, something else was happening in space as well. Only a few weeks before the Apollo landing on the moon, the Starship Enterprise, part of the United Federation of Planets, had received a distress signal from the planet Camus II, the site of an important archaeological excavation. An interplanetary research vessel had crash-landed there, and the two survivors were Dr. Janice Lester, a woman with whom Captain James Kirk, commander of the Enterprise, had once had a relationship, and Dr. Arthur Coleman, a famous space archaeologist and scientist.

Almost as soon as Captain Kirk and his crew set foot on Camus II—almost at the same moment, ironically, that Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were setting foot on the moon—things began to go wrong, not on the moon, but on Camus II. By the use of an advanced piece of alien technology, one known only on Camus II, Dr. Lester was placed inside Captain Kirk’s body, and Kirk was placed in Lester’s. And so it was Dr. Janice Lester, in the guise of Captain Kirk, who was now in control of the Starship Enterprise. Would the crew of the Enterprise be able to figure it out before Captain Kirk, who was actually Dr. Lester, was able to carry out the death sentence that the hastily ordered court-martial had handed down to Commander Spock for mutiny?

Back on the moon, Armstrong was busy negotiating the ladder.

Meanwhile, a fleet of Klingon warships was fast approaching Camus II. Armed to the teeth with sophisticated weapons that could easily obliterate the Enterprise and her crew, time was of the essence.

Back on the moon, astronauts Armstrong and Aldrin were busy collecting rocks.

Both the adventures of Commander Neil Armstrong and of Captain James T. Kirk were delivered to Americans though the same exact medium: a screen in their living rooms. One adventure was real, the other fiction. Did it matter? Could anyone actually tell the difference?

Without realizing it, Americans in July of 1969 suddenly found themselves at the crossroads of their future. Would they continue to inhabit the real world of NASA and actual moon landings, boring though they might be, or would they opt to live in a far more exciting world of images, illusion, and fantasy? The lunar landing was the culmination of ten thousand years of grappling with the hard work necessary to accomplish real achievements. The trip to Camus II was the product of just the past few decades, a time of the unleashing of astonishing new technologies used to create and distribute visual content. A great deal of money had been spent to put astronauts in space, but, ironically, vastly more had been spent, in a sense, to put Captain Kirk on Camus II. Spaceflight technology was expensive, but focused—a one-time affair with an ending. Mass-media technology, on the other hand, was a never-ending global enterprise. Neil Armstrong’s first step would be a step into the future, but what kind of a future would it be? Would it be a future of real things, or would it be a future of invented realities?

Space exploration and television had, in fact, been born together. They had grown up almost hand in hand. At the height of the Cold War, on October 4, 1957, the Soviets had taken a mighty technological leap over the Americans in what would come to be dubbed the “Space Race.” They had launched Sputnik, the first man-made satellite to circle the earth. By this time, television had pretty well penetrated the American market. Almost every household in the country had a TV in their living room, and the news of Sputnik both captivated and terrified the nation.

Once the newspapers, then radio, delivered news like Sputnik, but by the late 1950s, television had begun to eclipse them to become our number-one medium of information. We began to experience the world through images on TV screens.

If anyone was a product of America’s embrace of television, it was John F. Kennedy. In 1960, the young junior senator from Massachusetts was making a run for the presidency. He had, at the start, been considered something of a long shot. He was only forty-three years old, had almost no prior experience (he had only been in the Senate for a single and rather unremarkable term), and was a practicing Catholic, considered to be a great handicap at that time.

Richard Nixon, the Republican candidate, by contrast, came to the election as perhaps the most qualified candidate in many years. He had had a stellar congressional history, having cast crucial votes on some of the most important legislation at the time, as well as having single-handedly unmasked Alger Hiss’s alleged dealings with the Communists—a very hot topic in the 1950s. Only one year earlier, Fidel Castro, a Communist revolutionary, had overthrown the government of Cuba and had set up a Communist regime only ninety miles from Miami in Florida. Communism seemed to be on the move, and the threat of a Soviet ally just off the coast of the United States was the singular focus of people’s attention in 1960, as the election drew close. More than anything else, Americans were searching for a president who could deal with the suddenly quite ominous Communist threat. That would seem to have been Dick Nixon. He had, after all, been named and elected to the vice presidency of the United States under the very popular Eisenhower and had served for eight years on his reputation as a Communism fighter—and that was before Castro.

In the newspapers, the then-dominant medium of the day, Nixon was the unquestioned front-runner for the presidency. The TV debate, however, would change all of that in an instant. It was neither the content of the debate, nor what was said. There was no gaffe by either candidate, there were no glaring errors, and there was no real singular attack. Television would change the election not because of policy, but rather because of perception. One candidate was great on TV; the other, terrible.

Kennedy arrived for the debate at the Chicago studios of CBS on September 26. He was well rested and well tanned. He looked good. Kennedy had spent the entire prior weekend holed up in a hotel room, practicing debate questions and answers with this team.

Nixon, on the other hand, arrived at the debate directly after a grueling week on the campaign trail. It had been a bad week for Nixon all around. He had been suffering from the flu. He had lost nearly twenty pounds, and his suit hung on him like a sack. On top of that, he banged his knee getting out of the limo when he arrived at CBS, exacerbating an earlier injury. He was in pain, gray, and sallow. In short, he was bad TV.

Despite Nixon’s lack of preparation and difficult week, he knew the material cold. He had lived it for years. He was, in fact, the very embodiment of US anti-Communist policy and action. For those who listened to the debate on the radio, Nixon was the narrow winner, but for those who watched the debate on TV, Kennedy had buried Nixon. It was not about substance any longer; it was about who looked better.

Following the debate, Richard J. Daley, the Democratic mayor of Chicago said, “My God, they’ve embalmed him [Nixon] before he even died.” The next day, the Chicago Daily News, a Republican-leaning tabloid, ran the headline, “Was Nixon Sabotaged By TV Makeup Artists?”

As it turned out, neither Nixon nor JFK had taken the option for makeup artists, which CBS had offered. But Kennedy was well tanned and looking good. Nixon, who had always suffered from a five-o’clock shadow, simply came across as shifty and sinister.

Nixon had once confided to CBS anchor Walter Cronkite, “I can shave within thirty seconds before I go on television and still have a beard.” Concerned about this, he had, at the last minute before the cameras started to roll, conceded to his support staff who suggested that he at least apply a thin coating of a product called Lazy Shave, a kind-of drugstore over-the-counter pancake. Nixon had used this many times before while working a crowd, and it had been fine. But under the hot studio lights, Nixon, who had a tendency to sweat anyway, began to perspire and the Lazy Shave began to melt off on screen. It was a visual disaster. As time went by, he began to look like a zombie in a B-movie.

But even before the debate, Kennedy had understood the power of visual media. He had invited documentary filmmakers Albert Maysles and Richard Leacock to follow him as he worked the state of Wisconsin prior to his primary run against Hubert Humphrey. Using small, hand-held cameras, a cutting-edge technology in 1960, Maysles and Leacock produced a groundbreaking film called Primary. It presented the candidate in an entirely new and, until then, unseen light. Maysles and Leacock created an intimate and highly personalized story of what it was like to run for the presidency. JFK was cast, and there is no other word for it, as a character in a movie with a great story arc. He went from being a political figure to a personality.

Today, we accept this as the norm, but in 1960, no one had ever done this before. Political stump speeches, the bread and butter of electoral politics up to that point, are, frankly, boring. Stories about underdogs who work tirelessly to try to win make great movies. JFK was the “Rocky” of Wisconsin. He went on to win, but more important, he had begun the great transformation of politics and its relationship to the visual media.

If Primary was the harbinger of the coming power of television and what visual storytelling would mean in politics, the great television debate between Kennedy and Nixon could seal the change. Kennedy had gone into the TV debate virtually tied with Nixon. By the time the four debates were over, he was the narrow front-runner. Kennedy, the better TV personality, went on to win the White House. In 1962, Nixon would publish his memoir, Six Crises, in which he would acknowledge what had happened. “I should have remembered that a picture is worth a thousand words,” he would write. As it turned out, a picture was worth a good deal more than a thousand words. It was worth the White House, the presidency, and the nation.

On April 12, 1961, a mere 90 days after Kennedy had been sworn in as President of the United States, a Vostok-K rocket blasted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Southern Kazakhstan, USSR. Atop the rocket was the Vostok-1 space vehicle, and inside the small vehicle was Soviet Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin.

Seven minutes after blast-off, Gagarin became the first human being to orbit the earth in space. One orbit and 108 minutes later, Gagarin and the Vostok landed back on earth, bouncing off the ground, eighteen miles south of the city of Engles in the Sarotov region of the Soviet Union, 170 miles west of the intended landing site at Baikonur. Seven kilometers above the earth, as Vostok-1 descended, Gagarin opened the hatch and was ejected from the spacecraft. He glided to earth, as planned, landing separately in a field.

A farmer and his daughter came upon Gagarin, gathering up his parachute.

“When they saw me in my space suit,” Gagarin would report later, “and the parachute dragging alongside as I walked, they started to back away in fear. I told them, ‘Don’t be afraid, I am a Soviet citizen like you, who has descended from space, and I must find a telephone to call Moscow!’”

The news, of course, was filled with this astonishing Soviet achievement. Americans felt that they were being left far behind. The Space Race had begun.

One month after the Russians put Gagarin into the first manned orbit, Kennedy delivered America’s answer to the Soviet Union. In a speech before Congress, Kennedy declared that the country “should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth.” This was, at that moment, an absolutely astonishing thing to suggest. When Kennedy laid down the challenge of a flight to the moon, the US space program, such as it was, had only put one astronaut, Alan B. Shepard, into a suborbital flight—essentially up and down, just three weeks earlier. The whole thing had lasted a total of five minutes and twenty-two seconds. Now, to say that we would go to the moon, land, and come back in essentially nine years must have seemed the height of insanity. Many people told him it was both ridiculous and impossible.

In a later speech at Rice University, Kennedy neatly outlined the obstacles that lay before them, should they accept the challenge:

But if I were to say, my fellow citizens, that we shall send to the moon, 240,000 miles away from the control station in Houston, a giant rocket more than 300 feet tall, the length of this football field, made of new metal alloys, some of which have not yet been invented, capable of standing heat and stresses several times more than have ever been experienced, fitted together with a precision better than the finest watch, carrying all the equipment needed for propulsion, guidance, control, communications, food and survival, on an untried mission, to an unknown celestial body, and then return it safely to Earth, re-entering the atmosphere at speeds of over 25,000 miles per hour, causing heat about half that of the temperature of the sun—almost as hot as it is here today—and do all this, and do it right, and do it first before this decade is out—then we must be bold.

The challenge JFK outlined had all the hallmarks of a Joseph Campbell impossible mission that had to be accomplished. It was the purest essence of great storytelling, and, as such, it captured the nation’s attention. Married to the astronauts, who were cast as “the right stuff” and heroes for our time, it created an almost perfect Campbellian construct of an epic tale. Also in the speech at Rice University, he said:

“We choose to go to the moon! We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win, and the others, too.”

This is how you inspire a nation to do the impossible—with a story. The power of storytelling, married to television and visuals, is almost beyond belief. When you look at the Apollo program, the application of character and story to real financial backing, it frankly is beyond belief—but it happened.

Kennedy, the nation’s first television president, had committed the nation to achieving the inconceivable and almost impossible task. Yet a mere seven years after the Rice University speech, America had accomplished the impossible. Neil Armstrong walked on the surface of the moon.

Placing a man on the moon was by any measure an enormous achievement. It was more than the culmination of a promise made only seven years prior. It was, in many ways, the fulfillment of a dream that had captured people’s imaginations since they first learned to walk erect and look up at the sky. The moon had always been a tantalizing object. It was close that you could almost hold it in your hands, yet it was so very untouchable—until Neil Armstrong put his foot down on the lunar soil.

The completed dream of leaving the bonds ...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part I The Drug
• Part II The Addiction
• Part III Carpe Medium
• Acknowledgments