Assignment Two – “Where I Lived, and What I lived For“

 “The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum.” — Noam Chomsky

When Thoreau is speaking about “the news“, he means media in general. In his time newspapers were the biggest kind of media and they had the same function as media has today. I am not outright accusing media of lying, but they certainly have the purpose of shaping the common opinion into a form of which the people in charge of the media—namely politicians and CEOs—approve of. And Thoreau would refuse media today, as he did when he lived.

A philosopher, in Thoreaus eyes, does not need the news. For him a philosopher is a person, who is among others wise and educated. And Thoreau expects an educated person to have allready heard about all sorts of possible incidents and therefore not to be suprised by, or even interested in, other occurrences of the same type. It is enough, if you heard about a bank robbery once; any subsequent bank robbery does not offer any new information and is therefore irrelevant. This point of view certainly is arguable.

A wise person on the other hand does not need the media to serve them information on a plate, but has the ability to observe, recognise, and understand the truth. He makes a plea for an improved perception of reality by not relying on the news, but nevertheless accuses the “inhabitants of New England“—and thereby probably western society in general—of an inability to “penetrate the surface of things“ (p. 70). Therefore granting the media an importance that he neither understands nor endorses. So a person who combines these two qualities has no necessity for the news.

If we understand media as the machinery that it is, it was only improved over the decades and centuries. The multitude and accessibility—or inevitability, rather—of media causes us to call it mass media nowadays. The cogs of the printing presses developed into the radio broadcast and later into digitally distributed media. This increase in efficiency is also apparent in the generating-mechanisms of information. What information is offered by the media is extremely controlled, filtered, and altered by people who have other goals than to inform, and it is manipulated to a degree that you can hardly still call it information.

Of course no single person can be expected to understand or even know what is happening all over the world, therefore there indeed is a need for an institution that gathers and distributes information without being biased. But the purpose of mass media simply is not to inform us, but to calm us and keep us content without us even realizing that we know nothing.

Media has not changed from the time when Thoreau criticized it, it has only been improved, enlarged, and increased its influence. The farce that media is today would make Thoreau very happy to just sit on his selfmade porch and read one of his newspapers.