The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America is a 1962 book by the political historian Daniel J. Boorstin.[1]
In his book, Boorstin argues that Americans have a false "image" of
what "news" actually is. He argues that Americans mistake certain "pseudo-events" for real news, when in fact they are the contrivances of politicians and news corporations.[2]
The book gained international attention when Boorstin accused America
of being "guilty" of initiating the 1979 Iranian Revolution which halted
Iran's rapid growth and ascension towards becoming a world superpower.
Today, many Iranians hold the past actions of western nations
responsible for the revolution and declining stature of their nation. [3]
The Image begins by noting that Americans have "extravagant
expectations" when it comes to their news consumption. To a degree, they
demand to be entertained. Truly important, naturally occurring news
stories, however, do not occur regularly or predictably -- there may be
droughts of newsworthy stories. In order to "fill the gap," news
corporations report what Boorstin calls "pseudo-events." Pseudo-events
are political spectacles (usually) organized by politicians to tell a
certain narrative. For example, a mayor may "cut the ribbon" at the grand re-opening of a historic hotel; the President may "pardon a turkey"; or, most commonly, a politician might organize a press release.
These pseudo-events, however, are often mistaken for real news. And,
more importantly, the media consumers seeing these pseudo-events often
mistakenly believe these politicians are engaging "in politics."The Image is also well-known for defining a celebrity as "a person who is known for his well-knownness." Boorstin argued that in the 1960s leaders were beginning to resemble "media stars," rather than politicians. Boorstin further warned that if the voting public continued to be inundated with pseudo-events and un-nuanced media coverage, these media stars would soon dominate the political landscape. Of important note, this book was written in the years following the 1960 Presidential Election, where many commentators have noted that Kennedy's appearance and demeanor on the first televised presidential debate may have swung the election.[4]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Image%3A_A_Guide_to_Pseudo-events_in_America
Six 1962 Daniel Boorstin Quotes That Foresaw Events In 2016
December 7, 2016
In the wake of the 2016 presidential election, media pundits have pinpointed a number of seeming prophets — philosopher Richard Rorty, Supreme Court justice David Souter, the TV show Black Mirror
— that anticipated the conditions of the election before they happened.
To me, the most salient prognostication of 2016 comes from historian
Daniel J. Boorstin’s 1962 book The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America.
Megan Garber already touched on this in a recent article for The Atlantic (she calls The Image “a
blistering indictment of newspapers and television and Hollywood”). But
in the interest of letting Boorstin’s words speak for themselves, I’ve
highlighted six quotes that seem particularly predictive of what
happened in 2016.
1) On Confusing Believability With Truth
“When ‘truth’ has been displaced by ‘believability’ as
the test of the statements which dominate our lives…ingenuity is devoted
less to discovering facts than to inventing statements which can be
made to seem true.”
2) On Confusing Fame With Greatness
“We have willingly been misled into believing that fame —
well-knownness — is still a hallmark of greatness. Our power to fill
our minds with more and more ‘big names’ has increased our demand for
Big Names and our willingness to confuse the Big Name with the Big Man.”
3) On the Emotional Satisfaction of Stereotypes
“In one sense, of course, stereotypes — the excessively
simple, but easily grasped images of racial, national or religious
groups — are only another example of pseudo-events. But, generally
speaking, they are closer to propaganda. For they simplify rather than
complicate. Stereotypes narrow and limit experience in an emotionally
satisfying way.”
4) On the Emptiness of the 24-Hour News Cycle
“An innocent observer might have expected that the rise
of television and on-the-spot telecasting of the news would produce a
pressure to report authentic spontaneous events exactly as they occur.
But, ironically, these, like earlier improvements in the techniques of
precise representation, have simply created more and better
pseudo-events.”
5) On the Way Our Mass-Media Bubbles Isolate Us
“More and more of our experience thus becomes invention
rather than discovery. The more planned and prefabricated our experience
becomes, the more we include in it only what ‘interests’ us. Then we
can more effectively exclude the exotic world beyond our ken: the very
world which would jar our experience, and which we most need to make us
more largely human.”
6) On the Anonymity of True Heroes
“In our world of big names, curiously, our true heroes
tend to be anonymous. In this life of illusion and quasi-illusion, the
person with solid virtues who can be admired for something more
substantial than his well-knownness often proves to be the unsung hero:
the teacher, the nurse, the mother, the honest cop, the hard worker at
lonely, underpaid, unglamorous, unpublicized jobs. Topsy-turvily, these
can remain heroes precisely because they remain unsung. Their
virtues are not the product of our effort to fill our void. …They alone
have the mysterious power to deny our mania for more greatness than
there is in the world.”
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