In my final year of high-school English, we studied Nineteen Eighty-Four. One of the many quotations that stuck with me is about deprivation: “War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking into the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent.” Such destitution, coupled with the chilling concept of thoughtcrime—“Thoughtcrime does not entail death: thoughtcrime IS death.”—illustrate Orwell’s predominant fear: that oppression would lead to our collective downfall. This notion likely reflected the devastation of World War II, after which the book was written.
No discussion on the cultural impact of Nineteen Eighty-Four would be complete without mention of Apple’s famous 1984 Super Bowl ad, ending with the tagline: “On January 24th, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh. And you’ll see why 1984 won’t be like “1984.” ” (this still gives me goosebumps). Postwar optimism and opulence fueled a departure from Orwell’s dystopian vision. Instead of being hoarded for the war effort, materials and resources could now be used for comfort, and North America entered into an unprecedented period of prosperity and technological advancement. Personal technology such as television, and eventually computers and the internet, promised life-improving benefits with less manual work and more leisure than ever before.
A realignment of our collective psyche away from suffering and oppression toward relief and pleasure was certainly welcome—but what was to be the ultimate destination of this new direction?
In the forward to his 2006 book, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, Neil Postman argues that we should caution ourselves against such a Huxleyan reality:
What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.” In 1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.
This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right.
It can be a pretty dark time of year as we progress into winter. On these cold, dark nights, it is too easy to turn on the TV and find endless distraction. After a day at work, the call of the couch can be a mighty tempting way of spending the evening. Cheap TV-subscription services abound, promising engaging storytelling and character development over many episodes and seasons, all so effortlessly available. Once you sit down and plug in, it can be next to impossible to leave the couch. This piece is a retrospection on my entertainment habits during winter: how I minimize TV viewing and maximize reading, my favorite form of distraction.
While a grad student, I subscribed to Apple Music. Included in this discounted membership ($5/month) was access to Apple TV+, which would otherwise have been a combined $15/month subscription (music and TV+). Ever one to take advantage of freebies, I watched a number of Apple TV+ shows through to completion: Ted Lasso, Servant, See, Mythic Quest: Raven’s Banquet, Defending Jacob, The Morning Show, and even Dickinson (still a bit surprised this one got a second season). For the most part, they were decent, entertaining shows. (Some are starting to argue that the limited selection but high quality of shows make Apple TV+ more of an HBO than a Netflix, which seems like a good strategy, but I digress).
Eventually, my student membership expired, and my monthly music subscription returned to $10/month, excluding Apple TV+. I figured I’d give Apple TV+ a break for a few months before re-subscribing—likely as part of an Apple One bundle—in order to wait for the release of subsequent seasons for many of the aforementioned shows. (My iCloud storage, which would be increased tenfold in an Apple One bundle, backs up my iPhone XR and Apple Watch. It has been hovering right around 4.3 out of the measly 5 GB of storage in the free tier for years now. Whenever it fills up, I delete old photos. Just try and make me pay for more space. [Also, see how this same notoriously parsimonious logic applies to my cell-phone bill.])
Only that as a month turned into two, then two into three, and so on until I lost count, I never renewed my Apple TV+ subscription. It has been over a year now that I have had no active TV subscriptions.
Perhaps initially there was some kind of withdrawal—This new release looks promising—however, as time goes on, I don’t feel that I am missing out. This isn’t a complaint against Apple TV+ in particular (again, well-produced shows) but more so a caution against the addictively distracting nature of entertainment.
I am certainly guilty of vegetating. In previous years, I watched all seasons of Breaking Bad, The Office (US), and most seasons of House, The Big Bang Theory, Travelers, and Homeland, among others I have forgotten. Perhaps this is below average—I have never seen any episodes of most of the series listed on Rolling Stone’s 100 Greatest TV Shows of All Time, let alone all seasons of more than a few shows. While I may fall below the average three-to-four hours daily of television viewing, I log more than enough screen time across my phone and computer each day.
Though most of the shows I watched were well done, involving terrific storytelling, others were not. I remember clipping a comic from my local newspaper in high school (around the same time I read Nineteen Eighty-Four) in which a man comically dressed as a crook opens the top of a box TV-set being watched by a couple. As the litterer surreptitiously empties his garbage—fish bones and all—into the TV, the husband quips to his wife, “Looks like Hollywood has just rolled out its fall programs.”
Recently, I purged some of my YouTube subscriptions, where the creators’ content no longer resonated with me. There can be a cynical, crass nature to a lot of pop culture these days, either directly, as in the case of certain very popular TV cartoons, or more insidiously. For an example of the latter, see the excellent video essay, The Adorkable Misogyny of The Big Bang Theory. We in software call this “garbage in, garbage out.” If you routinely expose yourself to bunk TV shows, how long before they rub off in your own ideas and vernacular?
If you must watch television, keep it as a treat. Rather than watching everything, trying to discover the next hit show, let someone else do that for you. After reading an article describing The Sopranos as the best TV show of all time, I subscribed to Crave in Canada one fall for a single month ($20) to gain access to it. I made it through just under two seasons in that month, and quit when the subscription expired. The following year, I repeated the process, making it into season three or four. At this rate, it will take years to get through all six seasons—not a binge but a nice distraction done in moderation.
In the Sopranos episode “D-Girl”, Anthony Junior (A.J.), Tony’s son, starts questioning his faith after having read some Nietzsche. He mispronounces it—“nitch” instead of “nee-chee”—until A.J.’s godfather’s college-attending son Matt corrects him. Matt criticizes A.J.’s pseudo-existential attitude and recommends reading Kierkegaard. The son of a nominally Catholic mobster (see the sixth commandmant) rebelling against his parent’s faith—such superb writing! How many other TV shows have come any where near this level of depth?
I have a running theory that the quality of a given TV show is inversely proportional to the number of episodes before the cast starts sleeping with each other. If there isn’t enough going on that the writers need to resort to the usual Hollywood tropes within a few episodes, perhaps the show’s premise wasn’t all that strong to begin with.
Another show I would recommend is Freaks and Geeks, which unfortunately—or perhaps fortunately, given this piece’s thesis of watching less TV—lasted only a single season. It follows siblings Lindsay and Sam Weir as they navigate high school in suburban Detroit in the 80’s. Without getting into any more detail, understand that this was a show that I would pay money to watch again (a few bucks, anyway). It’s also one of very few shows in recent memory to give a reasonable treatment of Christianity in pop culture (perhaps I am biased here).
Postman describes his book Amusing Ourselves to Death as “an inquiry into and a lamentation about the most significant American cultural fact of the second half of the twentieth century: the decline of the Age of Typography and the ascendency of the Age of Television” (8). He warns us that:
What Huxley teaches is that in the age of advanced technology, spiritual devastation is more likely to come from an enemy with a smiling face than from one whose countenance exudes suspicion and hate. In the Huxleyan prophecy, Big Brother does not watch us, by his choice. We watch him, by ours. (155)
The rise of the Age of Television, Postman asserts, has in many ways caused our culture to become a “burlesque” (155) with some pretty far-reaching cultural implications. I won’t repeat all of his arguments here but will offer one last quotation:
When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience, and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture-death is a clear possibility. (155–56)
With the explosion of the internet, distraction by electronic devices is more pervasive than ever before. Apps, games, and websites are designed to maximize user engagement at all costs (I now work in tech—I would know). Many apps such as Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube transitioned away from serving content in a chronological order to instead serving it with black-box algorithms. In the cases of Facebook and Instagram, algorithmically served posts were still not receiving enough attention that “Stories” were added, shorter, ephemeral photo or video posts designed to be viewed in rapid succession (apologies to everyone whose stories I have ignored all this time). Surely I am not the first to wonder if this has all gotten out of hand. When will user engagement ever be adequately and finally maximized? And what is the human cost associated with creating such addictive electronic distractions? Curiously, Instagram has been rumored to be bringing back the chronological post feed. This, after previously hiding like counts, another negative result of algorithmically sorted content.
Ironically, most of the traffic to my essays comes from social media. Occasionally, I get some algorithm love—as in the case of A New Chapter, my reflection on the first few months of mountain life, where many of you messaged me in the weeks and months following its publication—whereas other times I get crickets. I’m curious what the response to this piece will be: lengthy thought pieces are certainly harder to get engagement with than cat photos (with apologies to all cat owners reading this), precisely the point I am bemoaning in this essay.
Perhaps it is time for the pendulum that is our collective attention span, instead of relentlessly careening toward absolute zero, requiring constant stimulation changing in sub-second intervals, to instead swing in the other direction.
As most of you probably know, I am a huge reader. One of the most recent updates to my website is my reading list, my now-public book-tracking list. As an aspiring writer, I try to read almost every day. While falling short of the “four to six hours a day, every day,” recommended by Stephen King in his memoir, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, I try to dedicate at least an hour to reading on free nights.
I have found my attention span for reading to imitate a muscle: the more you use it, the stronger it gets, and vice versa with neglecting it. In my last long-winded reflection, 30 Going on 13, I recommended finding some trashy reading as a means to reinvigorate your desire to read if it has been a while since you last picked up a book. Eventually, you’ll be able to work your way up to much longer works.
In one such work, Soul Survivor by Philip Yancey, Yancey interviews Dr. Robert Coles, a physician and instructor of literature in medical, business, and law schools. When asked about his devotion to literature, Coles explains:
A man like Tolstoy knew more psychology than the whole twentieth-century social science scene will ever know. All this stuff about the stages of dying coming out now—why not just go back and read The Death of Ivan Ilyich? It said everything. And who has added any wisdom to the field of marital problems since Anna Karenina? And Dickens, oh my, what Dickens knew about human nature! (113)
Intrigued by this statement—and never one to accept opinions without my own investigation—I took it upon myself to read Anna Karenin in its entirety. (Not all translators agree on Russian naming customs: the terminal “a” of “Karenina” was dropped in my softcover version, translated by Rosemary Edmonds). It took many months to get through all 864 pages, though it never felt like a grind.
Anna Karenin opened a window into 19th-century Imperial Russian society. One reviewer called it “a stage show, a claustrophobic and closed society of prescribed, rigid roles.” The large set of characters, both main and secondary, came to life in a wholly believable way, working through personal affairs such as infidelity, forgiveness, agnosticism, family life, and the ennui of those privileged enough not to work. I always find it fascinating how a book written in the past can show culturally popular ideas in their respective time periods that seem quaint or preposterous to us now, like table-turning and healing waters. All the events that happen are offered without judgement of the observer, leaving the reader to interpret things accordingly: is it a satire, or a realist novel, or both at various times?
Naturally, Anna Karenin is a complicated book and cannot be reduced to a simple phrase such as “it had a happy ending.” For some characters, the ending was tragic, while for others it was more affirming. I, for one, liked the ending for Levin, the co-protagonist, the character that Tolstoy most identified with. (I won’t spoil the ending here. It is up to you to read Anna Karenin, or be lazy and go to Sparknotes.) The book has rightfully deserved masterpiece status, and while it may not necessarily be the final word on marital problems, it is perhaps the paramount psychological novel.
This is precisely the magic of literature: it can transport you into another time, place, or even world. It can bring that context to life with more detail and saturation than any obscenely expensive television and sound system ever could—and yes, this still applies to shows of the superlative variety like The Sopranos. Despite the requisite effort of having to focus and invest time reading novel as long as Anna Karenin, the payoff was inarguably much greater than having spent the equivalent amount of time plugged in to a screen.
The more you read, the more you’ll understand inter-textural allusions. In On Writing, Stephen King describes how he almost abandoned The Stand (the very next book I read after On Writing—and, perhaps expectedly, I opted for the over-one-thousand-pages complete and uncut edition) at “more than five hundred pages”:
I liked my story. I liked my characters. And still there came a point when couldn’t write any longer because I didn’t know what to write. Like Pilgrim in John Bunyan’s epic, I had come to a place where the straight way was lost. I wasn’t the first writer to discover this awful place, and I’m a long way from being the last; this is the land of writer’s block.
Interestingly enough, my church was doing a book study of The Pilgrim’s Progress, Bunyan’s Christian allegorical work written in 1678, at the very same time.
How often have terrific novels fallen flat after being adapted for the screen? A common lament for books-turned-movies is that “the book was better than the movie.” Recently, Apple TV+ started promoting The Mosquito Coast, a TV series inspired by the 1981 Paul Theroux novel of the same name. Though my Apple TV+ subscription had long since lapsed, I could preview the first episode for free (it would have to have been really good for me to consider resubscribing to Apple TV+). Prior to this, I read an e-book version of the 1981 novel in order to understand the original story before comparing it to its TV adaptation.
In the novel, inventor Allie Fox moves his young family from Massachusetts to Honduras to live a more natural life, free from the consumerism of North America (minor spoilers follow). On the boat voyage south, Fox clashes with Reverend Spellgood, the father of a missionary family also traveling to Honduras. Fox eventually clashes with the ship’s captain himself, using his understanding of physics to correct a listing of the ship during an intense storm, a solution the captain failed to implement. Fox goes on to create a homestead in the jungle, though things eventually take a darker turn (no further spoilers now).
The TV series changed basically everything, keeping alive only the spirit of Allie Fox being a clever inventor who moves south from America (to Mexico instead). The number of his children are different, among other details, and the motivation for leaving America was altered to include a shady past on the part of Allie and his wife, presumably to be revealed in later episodes. Response to the show has been underwhelming. In a behind-the-scenes clip, the production crew comments on a clever aerial drone shot in the pilot episode at Allie Fox’s workplace. While technically impressive, the shot added little to the storyline, perhaps a case of missing the forest for the trees. I don’t want to rag on the TV series too harshly, so let’s just say that I found the book far more compelling.
On a few occasions now, I have read novels then watched their corresponding film or TV adaptations as self-study projects. Examples include The Great Gatsby, Crazy Rich Asians, and Carrie. I find it fascinating to compare and contrast how novels and their films differ.
One notable example of this is The Princess Bride, by William Goldman, which I studied in university english. The novel satirizes the “happily ever after” ending of fairy tales:
And yes, they got away… . But that doesn’t mean I think they had a happy ending either… . Buttercup lost her looks eventually, and one day Fezzik lost a fight and some hotshot kid whipped Inigo with a sword and Westley was never able to really sleep sound because of Humperdinck maybe being on the trail. (328)
In contrast, the film—with a screenplay surprisingly also written by Goldman—does almost the exact opposite. In a wish-fulfilling conclusion, Westley and Buttercup share the most passionate kiss of all time, then the victorious good guys ride off on white horses. (Here is an essay I wrote for that course, On Fairy Tales, Success, and Happiness, which also received top marks.)
The trend that has arisen from these various comparisons is that a lot of depth is inevitably lost in translation when novels are adapted to the screen. The whole point of this piece is that slowing down to deliberately engage in written work (perhaps even including this very essay) can yield tremendous dividends. More and more lately, I’ve been skipping the film adaptations altogether of novels I read (the latest being The Firm).
One day during our study of Nineteen Eighty-Four in high school English, our teacher handed back graded essays to the class that we’d written earlier in the week. Everyone received theirs back—except for me. I had most certainly attended class earlier that week and had indeed written an essay, cranking out something I thought was OK in the 90-minute period. Just as I was starting to wonder what happened to my essay, the teacher said that there was one essay that he’d like to read aloud to the class. My friend sitting next to me picked up on what was happening and muttered “neeeeeeeeeeeeeerd” under his breath. The teacher then read my final Nineteen Eighty-Four essay, Self-preservation or Self-condemnation?, to the class. The essay, arguing the thesis that “individuals can usually be manipulated into doing things against their ideals if their survival is at stake,” received full marks.
As we have seen in this piece, however, the challenge of our generation is more Huxleyan than Orwellian. Electronic distraction knocks continually at our doors, promising to easily pass dark winter hours. Your attention span is one of your most valuable resources. Fight for it, and guard it against the tractor-beam pull of electronic distraction. When you need some downtime, try to prefer the written word over the television—and if you must watch television, be very choosy in terms of what you watch.
The written word is here to stay, and intentionally engaging with it can bring meaning and context to our humanity beyond the mere escapism of television. More than one of my high-school English teachers instilled a love for reading and writing in me. Another one—not the one I studied Nineteen Eighty-Four under but one that actually gave me my first part-time job helping manage books within the english department (prescient, I suppose)—remarked that english class is, after all, “the stuff of life.”