57 Channels and Nothin’ On

From the End of Humanity As We Know It Vault: Bill McKibben is best known for his prophetic and tireless fight to promote climate awareness, but he also explored an area close to my heart: television. Specifically, the toxic nature of the medium, which he and I discussed in 1992 to welcome the publication of his book The Age of Missing Information.

                                                                                          

A CHILLY MIST shrouds the tops of the mountains surrounding Bill McKibben's Warren County home. As is true of most large old rural houses, his has a front door as well as a door that everybody uses. That one’s around the back.

Bill McKibben

Tall and wiry, with close-cropped hair and an high forehead, he looks like any area farmer. Boots, jeans and a plaid flannel shirt added a touch of North Country ease. “Didn’t expect it to be so cold out today,” he says. “I’m sorry you can’t see the mountains. Come on in and have some soup with me.”

McKibben, once a staff writer for The New Yorker who also ran a small homeless shelter in Manhattan, has now spent several years in what might seem like rural seclusion. But it was logical and necessary choice, explained in his books The End of Nature and, just recently, The Age of Missing Information.

“I had to do this experiment,” he explains, “and see what came of it. I was hoping for a book, but I had very few preconceptions, fewer than usual.” The experiment placed him in front of a television set for several months, auditing over a thousand hours of television programming – everything that was available on each of the hundred cable stations in Fairfax, Virginia, during the 24 hours of May 3, 1990.

At that time, Fairfax boasted the largest cable service in the country. McKibben’s purpose was to examine the information that is available during a day’s worth of TV and compare it to the information found in nature: specifically, a 24-hour camping trip on one of those mist-wrapped mountains partially visible through the kitchen window.

Although he describes himself as having gone into the experiment with no preconceptions, with no desire to slap television with adverse judgments, he didn’t emerge from it any kind of a fan of the box.

“I was in Canada recently, where I came across this guy named Dr. Tomorrow who has 20 satellite dishes and says he’s connected to 4700 computer databases. He goes around and lectures, but the topic is not, say, ‘War and Peace,’ or something that he’s learned from all that TV – it’s about how much information there is in the world. He’s simply saying, ‘Boy, there’s a lot of information out there!’ Who cares? It’s like saying, ‘If you’re thirsty, there’s all of Lake Ontario’ – but you don’t need all of Lake Ontario and if you try to drink it all it’ll do you more harm than good. You need a cup of water and then you need to go on and do something else.”

In terms of aesthetics, Television is still a black-and-white world. Although McKibben isn’t exactly a detractor – he’s more interested in why people are doing so much of this watching – it must be clear to the TV powers that he’s an enemy.

“I was on one or two interview programs,” he says, “but TV’s not very interested and I’m not very interested.” An appearance on Good Morning, America was typical of such sessions: a few minutes to describe his reaction to watching all that TV, and then “Charlie Gibson said, ‘Well, we have fifteen seconds left, tell me about the natural world.’”

It’s an ironic counterpoint to the book. “One of the conclusions I reached is that TV is pretty unimportant for particular things,” McKibben says. “It’s so constant that you can’t remember anything you just saw.”

He expands upon that topic often in the book. For example: “If God decided to deliver the Ten Commandments on the Today show, it’s true he’d have an enormous audience. But the minute he was finished, or maybe after he’d gotten through six or seven, it would be time for a commercial and then a discussion with a pet psychiatrist about how to introduce your dog to your new baby.”

McKibben writes in an easy-to-read, punctilious style that’s livened with wry humor. He seems too friendly, too accessible to be some kind of a crank, and the message of his book makes more and more sense as you go along.  “One purpose of writing, for me, is to make people doubt their perceived understanding of the world. This idea that we’re incredibly smart and live in an information age – this seems to me largely a joke. We have immense amounts of a very limited kind of information, and we’re incredibly unwise in other ways. I just tried to give a few extended examples of the kinds of understanding of things you could get from an activity as supposedly unstimulating as going for a walk in the woods.”

His book is constructed in sections that take you around the clock as you go around the channels; each time period also contains an examination of the quiet information a natural setting imparts. “I realized very quickly that I needed some kind of baseline for real reality to set against the packaging of television. It could as easily have been the middle of the city, with a lot of contact with human beings. When I lived in New York City I started and ran a small homeless shelter, and I could as easily have used that experience to play against. The point was to remind myself how incredibly information drenched any actual contact with other people is, any actual experience is, as opposed to the forgettable emptiness of letting other people have experiences for you – setting them to music and putting them on TV.”

Before beginning the experiment, McKibben had fallen out of the TV habit. To watch it again “was like going home after a semester for Christmas vacation and suddenly having enough distance to understand your parents in a way you never did when you lived with them, with all sorts of insights clicking into place.”

The appeal of television is twofold, he believes. “It allows us to feel hip while we’re doing things that are manifestly un-hip. Such as staring at MTV for hour upon hour. Even if you bought the idea that the kind of things portrayed on MTV are hip, certainly it’s only hip to go out and do them and not just sit and look at them all day. And one of the reasons television is so effective as a selling device is that it’s entirely predictable. You couldn’t put on Kraft Playhouse any more because the audience wouldn’t know from night to night if it’s going to be scary or funny, and that doesn’t work for advertisers.

“That’s how we’ve come to use TV to affect our moods. If we want to be scared, we want to know in advance that we’re going to be scared. We want the exact same mood that Jeopardy conjures up every single night. Alex Trebek is never going to offend you, arouse you, alarm you, amuse you any more or less than any other night.

“It turns out that an enormous number of people share a visceral dissatisfaction and unease with the amount of their lives devoted to television. You don’t usually find anyone who’s really happy to be spending thirty hours a week in front of a television set. If you want to use television constructively, the argument is always that you should watch Public Broadcasting. But someone said to me the other day, and I think it’s true – that’s just being passive at a slightly higher intellectual level.

“Television has made us think of ourselves as being all-important as individuals, because it’s so consumer oriented. The point of it is always: Your happiness is paramount. It should immediately be gratified.”

Television is therefore the catalyst for our rampant consumerism. “One of the strange things about a consumer society is that it doesn’t make us particularly happy. Television is the great proof of it. Everyone who sits there for a couple of hours hears that voice in the back of the head saying, ‘I wish I were doing something more interesting than this.’”

In contrast to that hollow consumerism, the quiet, insistent voice of nature has a message, too, and McKibben believes it’s a vital one. “It’s telling us that there might be some limits on what we can or should do -- or want to do – in terms of what we need. The End of Nature was largely an argument that environmental considerations should force us to change our daily habits. This book goes further: it says that we not only have to change those habits, but that we need to get back in touch with the desire to change them.”

Toward the end of his book, he writes, “ ... we live at the curious moment when this choice matters – when aesthetic notions about the good life and community and sufficiency and so on, long the province of moral philosophers and preachers, coincide with interests of atmospheric chemists. You can look at our environmental problems like this – almost everyone on the planet is causing friction, some because they have too much and consume it wastefully, some because they have too little and must abuse the earth.”

Television will never be an agent for societal change: it’s up to the individual to take control. McKibben lives in a manner that reinforces his beliefs, next to the mountains he loves to explore.

Although he’s taking on an electronic Goliath, the message was reinforced for me shortly before my interview, when a friend mentioned that she’d seen John Leonard on television disparage McKibben’s book. What did Leonard say?

“Oh. I can’t remember,” she confessed.

– Metroland Magazine, 12 June 1992