Through the Cardboard Tube

Popular media blunts our understanding of the real world by training us to view life immediately but narrowly. The 'up close and personal and now' capacity of live TV and the internet engage and absorb our attention. But it also strips the subjects and objects of our attention of their context. We get a sense that we know people and events intimately and emotionally. But without their context, we can only know only a distortion of reality.

Viewing reality so immediately can be likened to viewing an event through the cardboard tube of a roll of paper towels. The action is all the more colorful and dynamic because of the static gray walls of the inside of the tube. But precisely because of the gray context of the tube, we don't realize that we're missing the real context. We unknowingly write our own explanations on the grayness of the tube. In doing so, we inescapably distort reality.

In what ways does electronic media influence our perceptions of reality? Here are some observations concerning our political landscape.

Frida Ghitis describes the effect of live TV coverage of war ("Scenes From a War" (Houston Chronicle, August 6, 2006, Chron.com | Scenes from a war: Lights, camera, agony). "The effect was the power of emotional television images to force the hand of policy-makers, building a wave of public opinion that forged soul-soothing policy. . . . To fully understand war, and to find solutions, television images alone are not enough. They bring home the wrenching truth of war's human cost, a reality that needs no language. . . . But, precisely because of their intensity, they can never tell the full story." Without the full story, the context, we cannot understand reality. Great TV makes for poor insight.

Henry Steele Commager observes, "All the media unite to require day-by-day solutions, and day-by-day triumphs. The natural impatience of the Americans has been exacerbated by the fleeting and evanescent character that the media imposes on events. . . . Today we are robbed of time for reflection over a series of actions. The daily television appearance, the weekly public-opinion poll, tend to elicit the instant response rather than to inspire us to sober and long-considered judgment. . . . Leadership-as earlier generations of Americans knew-must be founded on such old fashioned concepts as honor and virtue; wisdom and judgment. When our statesmen are prepared to disdain whatever does not comport with these, the people, then will once again turn to them for leadership" (Henry Steele Commager, "Our Leadership Crisis: America's Real Malaise," Los Angelos Times, Nov. 11, 1979 cited by Richard V. Shanklin, Letters to the Editor, The Wall Street Journal, July 18, 2006). Commager may ultimately be right in his hope for old fashioned leadership, but in the 27 years since his article, our culture and technology have intensified the focus of immediacy.

As an board member of an evangelical Christian congregation, I cannot help but wonder what effect this aspect of our culture has upon our mission and the means we use to accomplish it. In what ways can we accomodate our culture? How should we counter it? I'll have to deal with this later. My email beckons.