The Morse jag is nearly over. I have only two episodes left to watch, “The Wench is Dead” and “Remorseful Day.” In the latter, Inspector Morse dies. Shortly after it was filmed, actor John Thaw died. Talk about getting into a role. The other night, waiting for Kathleen to come home from Florida and somewhat Morsed out, I jumped ahead to the fourth season of Lewis, the ingenious successor to Inspector Morse. It’s nice to know that Lewis is doing well; already there are twenty episodes (I’ve just ordered the fifth season). I suppose the time will come for a Lewis jag.

But not yet. Watching videos has taken its toll. I stay up to late, with all that that entails. And yet I wonder if there isn’t some method to the madness. I may be watching videos to give my mind a working holiday. Ever since I finished reading Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow, I’ve sensed one of those cerebral shifts that seem momentous because they really do make the world look like a different place. The first one that I remember had to do with the subjunctive mood: I went back to the school after summer vacation and suddenly understood it. Law school occasioned another, of course. “Learning to think like a lawyer” greatly understates the essentially cyborgian transformation of the mind. Since reading Kahneman, I’ve felt that I am living in extremely primitive times. It’s as though I’ve been hurtled back several centuries to a time without interior plumbing. No wonder nothing works! Well, the miracle is that anything actually does. We are so deluded about our minds, so unaware of heuristics, confirmation bias, and cognitive dissonance.

Those terms, and the italics, come from Clay Johnson’s new book, The Information Diet: A Case for Conscious Consumption. Maria Popova noticed it at Brain Pickings and it seemed immediately indispensable. I’m about a third of the way through, at the point where Johnson begins to use stuff that I learned from Kahneman (whom he doesn’t seem to mention) to explain the sorry state of journalism, which he has outlined in previous chapters. The first half of the book is diagnostic: we’re afflicted by an epidemic of information obesity, which is not “information overload.” We consume too much junk information. In the second half of the book, Johnson will prescribe a diet. That’s what I’m keen to read.

Regular readers will know that I take a very dim view of watching television. I try not to talk about it much; I’ve made my point. But Kahneman and Johnson are remaking the case. Watching television seems more dangerous than ever. What I mean by “watching televsion” very much excludes watching old movies or old detective series. I mean sitting in front of a screen without knowing what’s going to happen, and hoping for something exciting. It’s one thing in a movie theatre, and quite something else at home. I don’t know why; possibly it’s that, at home, the pleasure of entertainment comes coated in the self-affirmation of sitting in your own milieu. Also, in a movie theatre, you have only two options: to stay or to leave. You cannot change the movie. The power to switch channels isn’t much of a power, really — it’s a choice of roughly similar toxins — but it feels impressive, especially when there are other people in the room. Ordinarily, my objection to television is simply that you’ve surely got better things to do. Kahneman and Johnson are reminding me how angry I used to be about television, years ago, when I first read the work of Neil Postman. And anger is the last thing I need.

So, here I am, thinking deeply about the problem of watching television while — watching television. I say that it’s not watching television — watching Inspector Morse is different. But it will be better when the Morse jag is over and I’m not giving what lawyers call the appearance of impropriety. 

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Thursday, January 26th, 2012 at 10:52 am.