HOMO VIDENS:

TELEVISION, INTERNET, AND POST-

THINKING

Giovanni Sartori
Revised and updated by Andreas Kinneging
Translated by Mario Fantini and Andreas Kinneging

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface

I. The Primacy of the Image

1. Homo sapiens
2. Technological Progress
3. The Video-child
4. Progressions and Regressions
5. The Impoverishment of Understanding
6. Counter-deductions
7. Internet and “Cyber-navigation”

II. Teledirected Opinion

1. Video-politics
2. The Formation of Opinions
3. The Government of Polls
4. Less Information
5. More Disinformation
6. Even the Image Lies

III. Whither Democracy?

1. Video-elections
2. Politics Embodied in Video
3. The Global Village
4. The Weakened demos
5. Regnum hominis and Men-Beasts
6. Competition is Not a Remedy
7. Rationality and Post-Thinking

Bibliographic References

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Preface

We are in a full and rapid multimedia revolution. It is a process with many tentacles:
film, television, internet, personal computers, smartphones, tablets, etc. But it is also
characterized by a common denominator: tele-viewing and, as a consequence, video-
living. For that reason, the basic thesis of this book is that video is transforming
homo sapiens, the product of a written culture, into homo videns, the result of a
world in which the word has been ousted by the image.

Everything has become visualized. But what happens with things which cannot be
visualized, which are more numerous? While we worry about who controls the media,
we don’t worry about the media in and of itself, as a tool that has gotten out of hand.

People complain that television encourages violence, that it provides very little or bad
information, that it is culturally regressive. All true. But it is even more true and more
important to understand that viewing television — tele-viewing — is changing the
very nature of man. This is its single most essential aspect, which to date has largely
escaped people’s attention. Yet it is quite evident that the world we live in now rests
on the frail shoulders of the “video-child”: a brand new kind of a human being raised
on tele-viewing — that is, raised in front of a screen, even before knowing how to read
or write.

Thus, in the first part of this book I consider the primacy of the image. This is the
prevalence of the visible over the intelligible, a process which leads to seeing without
understanding. It is on this foundational premise that I subsequently examine video-
politics — that is to say, the political power of television and the internet.

Along the way, my focus remains on the paideia, on the growth of the video-child,
and thus on the formative processes of public opinion — and on how much is known
through channels of mass communication about what is and is not going on. What is
certain is that unlike earlier communication tools, up to the advent of the radio,
television and the internet destroy more knowledge and understanding than they
transmit.

Let me be clear: if I inveigh against homo videns, I do so without any illusions. By

now, a majority of the world’s population has, in addition to one or more televisions,
several computers at home connected to the internet. In the coming decades, we will
gradually see ownership approach one hundred percent. This development is
inevitable and, to an extent, useful; but it is only useful as long as one does not plunge
into a useless life — a life that is only about killing time. And it is only useful if it does
not endanger our freedom.

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I do not pretend to be stopping the inevitable. I do, however, hope to sufficiently
alarm parents about what will happen to their video-child — so that they may become
more responsible parents. I also hope schools will free themselves from bad pedagogy
and emerge from the degradation into which they have fallen. I hope to eventually see
schools that are able to counteract the ‘post-thinking’, which they are now facilitating.
I also hope for better television and quality content on the internet. Even if I were
waging a losing battle from the start, so be it. In the words of William of Orange, “It is
not necessary to hope in order to attempt, nor to succeed in order to persevere.”

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I. The Primacy of the Image

1. Homo sapiens

Homo sapiens: It is thus that Linnaeus classified the human species in his System of
Nature of 1758. Physiologically, there is nothing about the homo sapiens that makes
him unique among the primates. What makes the homo sapiens unique is his
symbolic capacity. This is what prompted Ernst Cassirer to define man as a “symbolic
animal”. Cassirer explains this in the following way:

“Man does not live in a purely physical universe but in a symbolic universe.
Language, myth, art and religion [...] are the various threads that make up the
symbolic tissue [...] Every human achievement in thought and experience
strengthens this tissue [...] The definition of man as an animal rationale has
lost none of its value [...] but it is easy to see that this definition is a part of the
whole. Because side by side with conceptual language there is a language of
feeling, and side by side with logical or scientific language there is the language
of poetic imagination. In the beginning, language does not express thoughts or
ideas but feelings and affections.” (1948, pp. 47-49)

Therefore, Cassirer’s term animal symbolicum includes all forms of man’s cultural
life. And the symbolic capacity of human beings unfolds in language — in the ability
to communicate by articulating sounds and signs of “significance”, equipped with
meaning. Today we speak of languages in the plural — and hence of languages whose
significant unit is not the word: for example, we speak of the language of cinema, the
language of the visual arts, of emotions, and so on. However, these are transferred
meanings because the founding language that really characterizes and establishes
man as a symbolic animal is “language-speech”, the language of our talk. We can say
this in the following manner: that man is a talking animal, an animal loquax,
“constantly talking to himself” (Cassirer, 1948, p. 47), and that this is the
characteristic that radically distinguishes him from any other species of living being.

One could argue that even animals communicate with their own language. Yes—but
not really because so-called ‘animal language’ transmits signals. The fundamental
difference is that man possesses a language capable of talking about himself. Man is
capable of reflecting on what he says. The communication that characterizes man as a
symbolic animal, as well as his thinking and knowing, are all produced in language
and with language. Language is not only an instrument of communication but also an
instrument of thinking. And for thinking, seeing is not necessary. A blind person is
only hindered in his thinking by the fact that he cannot read. He therefore receives
less support from written knowledge — but not because he can’t see whatever he is
thinking about. The truth is that most of the things that we think about are not even
seen by those who can see: They are not “visible”.

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Civilizations develop with writing. It is the transition from oral communication to the
written word that develops a civilization. But until the invention of printing, the
culture of every society remained largely dependent on oral transmission. As long as
written texts had to be reproduced manually by copyists, one could not yet speak of
“man who reads”. Until the end of the 15th century, to read — and to have something
to read — was the privilege of a very few learned people. The homo sapiens who
increased his knowledge should thus be called Gutenberg man. While it is true that
the Bible printed by Gutenberg between 1452 and 1455 had a circulation of only 200
copies (which is laughable for us today), those 200 copies were reprintable. A
technological breakthrough had occurred. And so, with Gutenberg, the written
transmission of culture became potentially available to all.

The progress of print reproduction was slow but steady. It culminated, between the
18th and 19th centuries, in the advent of the newspaper, the “daily” that is printed
every day. At the same time, from the mid-19th century onwards, a new and different
cycle of technological advancements began: first, the invention of the telegraph, then
the telephone (by Alexander Graham Bell). With these two inventions, distance
disappeared and the era of instant communications began. The radio, which is also an
annihilator of distance, added a new element: voice easily spread to every house. The
radio was the first formidable diffuser of communication; but it is one that does not
undermine the symbolic nature of man. Since the radio “speaks”, it always spreads
things said with words. Thus, books, newspapers, telephones, and radio are all — in
concordance — carriers of linguistic communication.

The rupture occurs in the middle of the last century with the television.

Television — as its very name says — is “seeing from afar” (tele). That is, it brings
within view of an audience of viewers things that can be seen from anywhere, from
any place and distance. With television, viewing prevails over speaking; that is, the
voice of the medium (or of a speaker) is secondary and is a function of the image. The
image thus predominates.

It follows then that the viewer is more a seeing animal rather than a symbolic animal.
Things represented in images count more for him and have more weight than things
said in words. And this is a radical reversal of direction because while symbolic
capacity distances homo sapiens from the animals, in the ability to see he is closer to
his animal ancestors.

The internet has done nothing to reverse this reversal. In theory for all kinds of
symbolic communication. One finds on it brilliant scientific papers, the collective
works of Shakespeare, and all of Beethoven’s piano concerto’s, in several renderings.
But only a tiny minority makes use of the internet for these purposes. In practice, for
most people, it is an extension of television. They watch movies on it or the news,

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they look at pictures and clips. And yes, they listen and read as well, but as on
television, the text on the computer and the smartphone is mostly an add-on to the
images. It is short and simple. Anything long and complex is sure to be skipped by
most people. 160 characters is about the limit.

2. Technological Progress

Every technological development, upon its appearance, was feared and even opposed.
It goes without saying that every innovation is disruptive because it changes
established structures. But we cannot and must not generalize. Historically, the
invention that was most opposed was the industrial machine. Upon its appearance, it
was quite feared because it was said that it would eliminate work. But for two
centuries this has not been so. It was and remains true that the human cost of the
first industrial revolution was terrible. But even if the invention of the machine was
unstoppable, and despite the immense benefits it has produced, the criticisms of the
‘machine age’ dealt with real problems.

Compared to the industrial revolution, the invention of printing and the advancement
of communications have not encountered major hostilities; rather, they have almost
always been applauded and accompanied by euphoric predictions. Upon their arrival,
the newspaper, telegraph, telephone, and radio have been hailed by almost everyone
as healthy “progress” towards the dissemination of information, ideas, and culture.

In this context, objections and fears have not been directed against these tools but
rather their content. The emblematic case of such resistance — I repeat, not
resistance to communication itself but to what was being communicated — was the
case of the Great Encyclopedia.

The Encyclopédie of Diderot, whose first volume appeared in 1751, was banned and
then placed on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum in 1759 with the argument that it
concealed a conspiracy to destroy religion and undermine the state’s authority. Pope
Clement XII eventually decreed that all Catholics who owned copies of the
Encyclopédie had to have them burned by a priest under pain of excommunication.
Despite this threat, and the size and cost of the work (as many as 28 folio volumes
produced by hand), about 24,000 copies of the Encyclopédie were printed between
1751 and 1789, a truly colossal number for the era. The progress of enlightenment
proved unstoppable. And though we must never confuse the instrument with its
message, or the means of communicating with the content they transmit, the point is
this: that without the tool of the printing press, we would have remained without the
Encyclopédie and, therefore, without enlightenment.

Let’s return to the tools of communication. Even when technological progress does
not raise major concerns, each invention does give rise to predictions about its effects
and about the consequences that it will have. While communication technology has

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not provoked catastrophic predictions (if anything, the opposite has occurred), we
have often failed to anticipate its impact — in the sense that what has happened was
unexpected.

Take the case of the invention of the telegraph. The problem that nobody anticipated
was that the telegraph provided a formidable monopoly on information to those who
first installed its cables. In fact, in the United States, Western Union, a monopoly of
the telegraph service, and the Associated Press, the foremost news agency, quickly
became natural allies. This alliance pre-fabricated, so to speak, the newspaper
because it was the Associated Press that determined which news to pass on and it was
Western Union which then got the news out with unbeatable speed. Luckily, and
rather unexpectedly, the monopoly problem resolved itself through the invention of
the telephone — which was also a cable but one that allowed individual users to
communicate whatever they wanted.

Even the radio has had unexpected side effects — such as, for example, the
“musicalization” of our everyday life and the large-scale launch of “radio-
commentary” on sports such as football.

And what about television? Well, now we have come to the heart of the matter. Until
the advent of television in the middle of the 20th century, man’s ability to “see” had
developed in two directions: We knew how to enlarge tiny things under a microscope
and we knew how to see things across great distances with binoculars and, even
more, with a telescope. Television, instead, has allowed us to see much of the world
rather freely without going out to see it: That which we can see on television enters
our homes freely from almost anywhere.

That is not the end of it: Over the course of a few decades, technological progress has
immersed us in the cybernetic age. We have passed into a “multimedia” age in which,
as the word suggests, television has become one among many. We now also have a
computer, a smartphone, and a tablet, all connected to the internet. As a result our
capacity to see once more increased a millionfold. In fact, due to the internet we have
moved into the age of total, global visibility. Anyone can see anything now. We are
just a click away.

3. The Video-child

A turning point occurs when one informs oneself by seeing. This turning point begins
with television. Whatever the developments of tele-viewing are after television, it is
television that first and most fundamentally modifies the very nature of
communication, moving it from the context of the word, whether printed or
broadcast by radio, to the context of the image. This is a radical difference. The word
is a “symbol” whose meaning is wholly revealed in that which it makes
understandable. The word is understandable only insofar as it is understood, that is,

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only if we know the language to which it belongs; otherwise, it is dead letters, just a
random sign or sound. In contrast, the image is a pure and simple visual
representation. You see the image and that’s it; to view it, it is only necessary to have
sight; it is enough not to be blind. The image is not seen in Chinese, Arabic, or
English; it is, as I have already said, enough to merely be seen.

It is clear, then, that the case of television cannot be approached through an analogy
— that is, as if television was a mere continuation or expansion of the communication
tools that preceded it. With television, we venture into a radically new ‘newness’.
Television is not an addition; it is, above all, a replacement: It reverses the
relationship between understanding and seeing. Until now, we were told about the
world in writings; but today we are made to see events — and the story (their
explanation) is almost exclusively in the service of the images that appear on the
screen.

If this is true, then it follows that television is producing a permutation, a

metamorphosis, which overturns the very nature of homo sapiens. Television is not
only a communication tool; it is also, at the same time, a paideia, an
“anthropogenetic” tool, a medium that generates a new anthrôpos, a new type of
human being.

This is the thesis — or the hypothesis, if you will — that runs through this entire book
and to which I will obviously return several times, It is a thesis primarily based on the
pure and simple premise that we and our children watch television or look at a
computer screen for several hours each day, even before learning to read and write.

Curiously, the exposure of our children has come under fire because it is said that it
accustoms the child to violence and turns him into a more violent adult. I say
“curiously” because a small aspect of the problem here has replaced and obscured the
broader problem. The argument that a child younger than three is incapable of
understanding what he is seeing but is still likely to “absorb” violence, seeing it as an
exciting and perhaps profitable model for his adult life, is probably true. But why
limit the argument to violence? It is altogether true that television is the child’s first
school, the entertaining school that precedes the boring school. The child is a
symbolic animal who receives his imprint — his formative stamp — entirely from
images of a world that is viewed. Under this paideia, the predisposition to violence,
as I have said previously, is only one aspect of the problem. The larger problem is that
the child is a sponge, indiscriminately recording and absorbing everything since he
does not yet have the power to discriminate what he sees. Eventually, the child
formed by viewing, atrophies and develops into a man who does not read and who,
more often than not, is a “video-weakling” with a life-long addiction to the screen.

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“In the beginning was the Word”: It is thus that the Gospel of John begins. Today we
should say “in the beginning was the image”. And with the image replacing the word,
a juvenile culture is established, as so well described by Alberoni (1997):

“The boys walk amidst the adult world of the school, of the state [...] of a
profession, like a bystander. At school they listen lazily to lessons [...] which
they quickly forget. They don’t read newspapers [...] They barricade
themselves in their own rooms with posters of their heroes, watch their own
shows, walk the street lost in their own music. They come alive only at night
when they find themselves in a discoteque when, at last, they savor the thrill of
being crowded together, the rapture of existing as a single collective dancing
body.”

I could not offer a better portrayal of the video-child, of the child brought up by
viewing television. Does such a child ever truly become an adult? In a way, yes,
inevitably. But he is an adult who remains deaf for life, unable to enjoy the
stimulation provided by reading or the knowledge transmitted by written culture. The
stimuli to which he continues to respond as an adult are almost entirely audio-visual.
And so the video-child does not grow much. At thirty years of age he is found to be an
impoverished adult, weaned on a message of “culture, what a bore”, an adult marked
for life by cultural atrophy.

The term culture has two meanings. In its anthropological and sociological sense, it
means that any human being lives in the sphere of his culture. If man is as he is —
that is, a symbolic animal — it follows eo ipso that he lives in an interconnected
framework of values, beliefs, conceptions, and, in short, symbolizations that
constitute his culture. In this general sense then, even primitive or illiterate people
have their own culture. And it is this sense we have in mind today when we speak,
example, of a leisure culture, or a culture of the image, or a youth culture. But culture
is also synonymous with “knowledge”: A cultured person is a person who knows and
is well read or at least well-informed. In this limited and appreciative sense, culture
belongs to the “educated” or the “cultured” not to the ignorant. And this is the sense
that allows us to speak, without any contradiction, of a “culture of the uncultured”,
and of cultural atrophy and poverty.

The self-aggrandizing message given by the new audio-visual culture is that the
culture of the book is only for the few, and is hence elitist, while audio-visual culture
is for the many and thus democratic. But the number of users, whether just a few or
many, doesn’t change the nature and the value of a culture. And if the cost of having a
universal culture is downgrading it to a sub-culture that is — qualitatively — really
just a “lack of culture”, then the transaction only represents a loss. Is a mass of
uncultured people perhaps better than having a few educated people? Do we want a
culture in which nobody knows anything? So, if the teacher knows more than the

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student, then we must kill the teacher; and he who does not reason like this is just an
elitist. This is the logic of those who have no logic.

4. Progressions and Regressions

We take it for granted that any technological development is, by definition, progress.
Yes and no. It depends on what we mean by progress. By itself, progress is just the
action of “moving forward”, something that signifies an increase. But it is not clear
that this increase should necessarily be positive. One can say that a tumor is in
progress; and, in such a case, that which is increasing is bad, a disease. In many
contexts, the notion of progress is neutral. But in reference to the progress of history,
the notion of progress is positive. For the Enlightenment — and still for us today —
progress represents an increase in civilization, an increase in the good, an
improvement in circumstances. So when television and internet are declared a sign of
progress, the implied meaning is that they are a “good” invention.

Take heed: We are not talking here about the rise of television and the internet but of
the idea of television and the internet producing or contributing to progress. A second
warning: Any improvement that is only measured in terms of quantity is not in itself
an improvement; it is only an expansion, an increase in size. The progression of an
epidemic and hence its spread is not, so to speak, a progression that helps progress.
The caveat is, therefore, that a quantitative increase does not improve anything if it is
not accompanied by substantive progress — which is to say that a quantitative
increase is not qualitative progress, and hence it is not progress in the positive and
appreciative sense of the term. And while qualitative progress can occur without a
quantitative increase, and thus stay within the scope of the few, the reverse is not
true: The widespread diffusion of something is considered progress only insofar as
the content of that diffusion is positive.

That said and clarified, the question is: In what sense are television and the internet
“progressive”, in the sense that they improve the existing state of things? It is a
question that must be answered by making distinctions. Television and the internet
do both good and ill; they help and hinder. They should not be exalted as a whole; but
neither can they be condemned indiscriminately.

In broad terms, it is clear that television distract and entertain: Homo ludens — man
as a playful animal, who loves to play — has never in history been so satisfied and
gratified. But this positive fact is due to television and internet as “spectacle”. But if
They transform everything into a spectacle, then their value changes.

A second generalization is this: Television and the internet surely “awaken” people.
In part, radio has already done this; but television’s and the internet’s awakening
effect is disruptive and also quite different. To wake up with the word, via radio, is a
small thing compared to waking up to a vision of the entire world, which can

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potentially be seen in any home. Up until the 20th century, three-quarters of people
were shut-in and asleep in their villages, or, at most, small cities. Now we are all —
nearly seven and a half billion — awake or about to be awakened. This is a colossal
avalanche, whose disruptive impact we still cannot assess. At present, however, it is
certain that such an awakening constitutes an opening of the mind to progress in the
Enlightenment sense of the word. On the other hand, it is also certain that in the face
of these advances, there has also been a fundamental regression: an impoverishment
of understanding.

5. The Impoverishment of Understanding

We now return to homo sapiens who owes everything he knows — and, above all, his
progress in understanding — to his capacity for abstract thought. It is a fact that the
words that constitute human language are symbols that also evoke “representations”
which call to mind depictions, images of visible things and of things we’ve seen. But
this is only the case with proper names and with “concrete words” , that is, with
words like ‘home’, ‘bed’, ‘table’, ‘meat’, ‘car’, ‘cat’, ‘wife’, etc., our practical vocabulary.

Otherwise, most of our cognitive and theoretical vocabulary consists of abstract

words that have no precise equivalent in visible things and whose meaning cannot be
reduced or translated into images. A city is still a “visible” thing; but nation, state,
sovereignty, democracy, representation, bureaucracy, and so on are not. They are
abstract concepts, developed from abstract thought processes, which stand for
entities constructed by our own minds. The concepts of justice, legitimacy, legality,
liberty, equality, law, and rights are also “invisible” abstractions. Likewise, words
such as unemployment, intelligence, and happiness. Our entire capacity to manage
the political, social, and economic and natural reality in which we live, depends
exclusively on being able to think of concepts that are, to the naked eye, invisible and
non-existent entities. So-called primitive people are the way they are because in their
primitive language they primarily use concrete words. They can communicate but
have very little scientific-cognitive capacity. And, in fact, for thousands of years
primitive people have remained at the organizational level of the small village or
tribe. In contrast, so-called advanced people are the way they are because they have
acquired abstract language, which is also a logically constructed language, that allows
for analytical-scientific thinking.

Let’s be clear: Some abstract words — some, not all — are translatable in some way
into images. But such translations are always an uncertain and poor substitute for the
concept, which they seek to “make visible”. For example, ‘unemployment’ is
translated into an image of an unemployed person; ‘happiness’ translates into a
photograph of a smiling face; ‘freedom’ into a picture of a person leaving a prison.
Taking it to extremes, we can also illustrate the word ‘equality’ by showing an image
of two billiard balls and saying “these things are equal”; or we can illustrate the word
‘intelligence’ by showing an image of the brain. But these are only translations of the

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original concepts in question. Even the translations which I suggested hardly
translate anything. To show an image of an unemployed person does not in any way
help us to understand why unemployment exists or how to deal with it. By the same
token, to show the image of an inmate leaving a prison does not explain freedom, the
image of a poor person does not explain poverty, and the image of a sick person does
not explain disease. Therefore and in summary, all the knowledge developed by homo
sapiens evolved within the context of a mundus intelligibilis (a world of concepts and
mental conceptions) that is not in any way the mundus sensibilis (the world perceived
by our senses). The point is this: television and the internet reverse the progression
from the sensible to the intelligible, returning to the pure and simple act of seeing.
Television and the internet produce images and destroy concepts; but in doing so,
they atrophy our capacity for abstract thought and, with it, our entire ability to
understand.

According to the doctrine of sensualism, an epistemological doctrine long abandoned

by everyone, ideas are carbon copies derived from the experience of the senses. The
reverse is actually true. The idea, Kant wrote, is “a necessary concept of reason to
which no suitable object can be assigned (kongruierender Gegenstand)”. Therefore,
that which we see concretely or perceive does not produce “ideas” but rather is fitted
within ideas or concepts that encompass it and give it “meaning”. This is the process
that atrophies when homo sapiens is supplanted by homo videns. With the latter,
conceptual or abstract language is replaced by perceptual or concrete language, which
is infinitely poorer — not only in the number of words but, above all, in terms of the
richness of meaning, of connotative capacity.

6. Counter-deductions

These are grave accusations. And one of my reasons for putting it so forcefully is to
see if the accused — whether they be video-apologists or multimedialists — know how
to rebut it.

The typical response is to say that every technological breakthrough has always been
demonized and that, in the end, the critics have always been proven wrong. But we
have already seen that this claim is false. Who demonized the invention of the
printing press? Who demonized the telegraph or the telephone? The invention of the
radio took everyone by storm. Most people loved television and the internet at first
sight. To respond by invoking non-existent cases of ‘demonization’ is, therefore, an
empty answer that evades the problem before us.

A second response is that the inevitable must be accepted. I agree: The advent of
television and the internet was truly inevitable. But one should not blindly accept
everything that is considered inevitable. One of the unexpected consequences of
having an industrial society has been pollution, the poisoning of the air and the

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environment. And pollution is something inevitable that we are now fighting.
Similarly, the advent of the nuclear age — and with it the invention of an atom bomb
that can exterminate us all — was inevitable; nevertheless, many people now object to
the production of nuclear energy and everyone fears and seeks ways to prevent the
wartime use of atomic and hydrogen bombs. We cannot stop technological progress;
but this does not mean that we should accept it blindly or let it run amok.

A third response is that there is no conflict between word and image. Contrary to
what I have been arguing, it is said that understanding through concepts and
understanding through images combine to produce a “positive sum”, with concept
and image reinforcing — or at least integrating with — each other. The thesis is that
reading man and viewing man, written culture and audio-visual culture, give rise to a
virtuous synthesis — to which I reply, in turn, that if this were so, it would be
wonderful. In fact, the solution of the problem must be sought in just this a sort of
virtuous synthesis. But for the moment the facts patently show that reading man and
homo videns are not being integrated into a positive whole. In fact, the relationship
between the two is a “negative sum”, a lose-lose game in which everyone loses.

The fundamental fact is this: reading man, whether he is a reader of books or of

newspapers, is in rapid decline. In Italy, one in every two adults does not even read
one book per year. In the United States, between 2003 and 2014 newspapers lost
almost thirty-five percent of their readers. As much as one would like to affirm that
the blame for this precipitous drop in readers should be placed on the poor quality of
newspapers, or their inability to adapt to competition from television and the
internet, this is not a sufficient explanation. It is far more useful to note that with
television viewing among US households having grown from three hours per day in
1954 to five hours per day in 2016, there is simply no time left outside of work for
anything else. Five hours of television, on top of more than nine hours of work
including the commute, plus six to seven hours for sleeping, and some hours for
personal hygiene and eating, add up to twenty-four hours: The day is complete.

All such accounting aside, the fact remains that the image by itself is hardly
intelligible. An image must be explained; and the explanation that is provided is
wholly insufficient. If in the future there were to be television and the internet that
provided much better explanations, then the question of a positive integration
between homo sapiens and homo videns could be reconsidered. But for the moment
the truth is that there is no real integration between the two but rather a subtraction,
and that the act of viewing is atrophying the capacity to understand.

A fourth response is that even if we admit that the act of viewing impoverishes our
understanding, this impoverishment is more than offset by the spread of the message
seen and by its being made accessible to most people. For the ‘new media’
triumphalists, knowledge through concepts is elitist, while knowing through images is
democratic. But this is shameless and dishonest praise. I have already explained that

14
any progress that is solely quantitative and which involves a qualitative regression is
not really progress in the positive sense of the term. Consequently, the conclusion
again is that “knowledge through images” is not really knowledge in the cognitive
sense of the term and that, rather than disseminating knowledge, it undermines its
very foundations.

One last possible response is to concede that the criticisms being made here only
apply to television but are not applicable to other parts of the multimedia world. We
shall now examine this.

7. Internet and “Cyber-navigation”

Twenty years ago, with the advent of internet, television was declared declared
obsolete by some. The new frontiers were the internet and cyberspace. That
supposedly was a huge leap. The principal difference was said to be this: that
television is a single-purpose tool that receives images and is used by a passive
spectator who views them, while the multimedia world is interactive and thus
composed of active users and capable of multiple uses.

Is television thus outdated? If the comparison is between machines, then the best
machine is undoubtedly the computer. But it does not follow from this that the
average man will eventually abandon the viewing of television entirely. In the same
way that radio was not killed by television, there is no reason to suppose that
television will be killed off by the internet and the computer. You can add one to the
other.

The internet — the “network of networks” — is a miraculous, all-purpose tool: It

transmits images as well as written texts; it is open to dialogue between users who
seek and interact with each other; and it allows one to pursue any interest to virtually
unlimited depths. It is like a universal library entirely connected through various
mechanisms. Amid such a cornucopia, we must distinguish between three possible
uses: (i) a strictly practical use, (ii) a recreational use, and (iii) an educational-
cultural use.

(i) With regards to the use of the internet to manage our activities and services, there
is no doubt that we are all “practical internauts” now. Although there are some
downsides to this development too, the “computerization” of whatever business we
have appears to constitute real progress.

(ii) To the extent that the internet is fun entertainment, television will continue to
triumph among the lazy or the weary, those who prefer to simply watch things, while
the internet will triumph among those who are more active, those who love to have a
dialogue and to search for things. But the question of whether or not the number of

15
video enthusiasts remains greater than, or becomes less than, the number of those
who are network-dependent only leads me to observe that everyone entertains
oneself according to his pleasure.

(iii) The real question is whether or not the internet will produce cultural growth. In
theory, it could do so because he who seeks knowledge on the internet ends up
finding it. The question is how many people will use the internet as an instrument of
knowledge. The obstacle to this is that in his infancy, the tree-year-old child begins by
watching images on a screen and never stops. Thus, his cognitive interests are not
sensitized to abstractions. And since one does not enter the mundus intelligibilis
without the capacity for abstract thought, it is quite likely that the knowledge stored
on the web will remain largely unused. In theory, I said, the internet could promote
cultural growth. In practice, however, the opposite happens since the web forms
homo videns. Of course, the internet can lead some people to leave the narrow
confines of the mundus sensibilis. But how many people?

In a word, as a practical tool — like a walk through a flea market, as a tour of our
various hobbies, to fill in forms, or keep in touch with friends — the internet is useful.
But as a cultural tool, as a way to raise the level of our culture, the merits of the
internet are modest at best.

I’ll state it once more: The potential of the internet, whether for good or for bad, is
endless. It is positive when the user uses it as a tool to gather information and acquire
knowledge, that is, when he is inspired by genuine intellectual interests, by the desire
to know and to understand. But most internet users are not this kind of user and I
expect that they shall never be like this. The paideia of video provides the internet
with cultural illiterates who quickly forgot the little they learned in school and,
instead, provides many users who waste their time on the internet in the company of
“soul mates” who enjoy the same sports, the same erotic material, or minor hobbies.
For this type of user, the internet is principally a terrific way to waste time, investing
it in futilities. Some will say that there is absolutely nothing wrong with this. Yes, but
there is certainly nothing good about it either, let alone any progress — in fact, the
contrary is true.

The ultimate destination is probably the “cyber-world”, that is, the world simulated
by the computer of which the user himself in a sense becomes a part. One experiences
a largely visual and visualized reality that, of course, is not real at all. The experience,
however, is so real that the distinction between the real and the unreal is blurred and
even erased.

I do not deny that navigation in the virtual world — that is to say, in the simulated
world — can be highly useful and effective. Flight schools for airline pilots, for
example, have long used “flight simulators” for training purposes with great success.
However that may be, for the average mortal, cybernetic navigation is just a kind of

16
video game. And if they take this navigation too seriously, the “average” cybernaut
risks losing his sense of reality — that is, losing sight of the boundaries between true
and false, between the real and the imaginary. But since video games are not actual
reality, they are likely to generate on the one hand a sense of alienation and
frustration, and on the other a public composed of perpetual dreaming children,
spending their entire lives in imaginary worlds. The ease of the digital age is the ease
of the drug.

Will we all end up as “gamers” in the cyber-world? I certainly hope not. The
proponents of this bright, new multimedia world tell us that it is a freer and more
creative world, no longer governed by linear logic and causal chains but governed by
“circular logic”.

It sounds good, but it means nothing because “circular logic” is just a metaphor. As
logic, it does not exist. “Circular logic” only evokes a whirling carousel of inconclusive
thoughts. In one of his commentaries on Dante’s Inferno, T.S. Eliot described hell as
a place where nothing is connected to anything. In the same way, “circular logic” is a
logical hell.

All hopes aside, television has remained and will remain as central as it has been for
the past half century, despite cyber-navigation and its siren songs. While the internet
certainly satisfies, “passive viewing” is easier and more comfortable than the “active
viewing” required by cybernetic navigation.

Homo sapiens is in crisis — characterized by the loss of knowledge and the capacity
to know.

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II. Teledirected Opinion

1. Video-politics

Television and internet excel at one thing: They entertain, distract, amuse. As I said
previously, they cultivate homo ludens. But television and internet also pervade our
entire lives, asserting themselves like a demiurge. After having “formed” children,
they continue to form or influence adults by means of “information”. First of all, they
inform them of the news, which is to say they provide news about things that are
happening in the world, whether near or far. Most of this news ends up being about
sports, crime, romantic or sentimental gossip, or various catastrophes. Yet there is
also news of more consequence, of greater objective importance: political
information, information about the polis, our own and of others. Although it may not
matter to many people, knowing about politics is important because politics affects
our personal lives and communal life. A bad city imprisons us, limits or abolishes our
freedom; and bad politics — which obviously includes economic policy —
impoverishes us.

Today, politics has become video-politics. This term refers to one of the many aspects
of the power of video: its incidence in political processes and, along with this, its role
in radically transforming how we think about how to “be political” and how to
“behave politically”. It is clear that video-politics isn’t only a characteristic of
democracies. The power of the image is also at the disposal of contemporary
dictatorships. But in this essay I will focus only on video-politics in liberal-democratic
systems — that is, on systems based on free elections.

Democracy has frequently been defined as a government of opinion. This definition

has become most apt with the advent of video-politics because television and internet
are certainly formidable formers of opinions. Today, the opinion of the sovereign
people is, above all, the result of how television internet induce them to have an
opinion. And in determining the opinion of people, video-power really becomes
central to all contemporary political processes.

To begin with, television and internet strongly condition the electoral process — in
the choice of candidates, in the way they engage in electoral battles, and ultimately in
the way they help the winner to win. Television and internet also affect, or can
strongly influence, government and the decisions taken by government: that which
government can do, that which it cannot do, and that which it concretely decides to
do.

In this part of the book I will provide an overview of the following three themes:
First, the formation of public opinion — and, in this context, the function of opinion
surveys — in order to also arrive at an understanding of “democratic leadership”.

18
Second, I will consider how video-power determines who is elected and how. Third
and finally, we will seek to understand the degree to which television and internet
helps — or, inversely, is an obstacle to — good politics.

2. The Formation of Opinions

Democracy is often said to be a system of governance guided and controlled by the

opinions of those governed, by “public opinion”.

It is worth emphasizing that it is correct to speak of “opinion”. Opinion is doxa not

epistêmê. It is not knowledge; it is simply a “semblance”, a subjective opinion for
which proof is given. Mathematics, for example, is not opinion. Inversely: Opinion is
not like mathematical truth. Opinions are convictions, sometimes well-founded,
sometimes not.

For democracy to function, it is necessary that public opinion is somehow connected

to knowledge. That is precisely why direct democracy is impossible, and every
functioning democracy has to be a representative democracy, in which an elite,
representing the people as a whole, governs. The elite must provide the knowledge
and the leadership to persuade the people of what is veritably, given the facts, in the
common interest.

All of this is far from easy to achieve. Much depends on the quality of the channels of
information. As long as public opinion was mainly formed by books, pamphlets, and
newspapers, the nature of these media assured that reasoning remained central to the
formation of public opinion, that is the reasoning of a literate, knowledgeable elite,
directed at a broad public of readers-citizens-voters. The advent of the radio did not
substantially alter this. The problem arose with television to the extent that the act of
viewing replaced the act of reasoning.

On television and internet the image is what counts, het text is merely an add-on, a
series of subtitles that come along with the images. Hence, the text must be short and
pithy, otherwise it will be drowned out by the image. Catchy one-liners work best with
viewers. Heaven forbid long arguments: everyone zaps to a different channel. So the
act of reasoning is discarded almost completely. What we get is opinions, put forward
and defended with none or the most flimsy of arguments, in thirty seconds at most,
put forward by politicians and other “opinion leaders” whose authority depends more
on their “image” than on the quality of what they are actually saying.

With television and internet, vision itself is the authority — it is the authority of the
image. It doesn’t matter that images can be more deceptive than words. No, we keep
telling each other that “one picture says more than a thousand words”, and we believe
it too. The point is that the eye believes what it sees; and, thus, one most believes in

19
the cognitive authority of the thing one has seen. What one sees appears to be “real”,
which implies that it appears to be true.

This changes the whole political game. The nature of public opinion to begin with. It
is much less susceptible to reasoning and argument, if at all. Homo videns is not used
to reasoning and argument. And he does not need them to have an opinion. The
image suffices, supported by a few words. As a consequence, the nature of leadership
changes too. Knowledge and facts recede into the background. What really counts is
the image. The image of what is going on and the image of the leader. Moreover,
leadership by reasoning and argument has become nigh impossible. How can one
convince people who are not listening? He who wants to be a leader, must lead by
following the opinions of his followers. Hence, it becomes more important than ever
for a leader to know public opinion. So the question arises how to most accurately
estimate public opinion. The answer widely given was: by opinion polls. It is no
coincidence that polls became widely popular in the fifties, at the same time television
entered our lives.

3. The Government of Polls

Opinion polls supposedly indicate in percentage terms “what people think”. Do they
really? Polls consist of responses provided in reply to questions formulated by the
interviewer. This definition immediately clarifies two things: that the answers
depend largely on the way questions are formulated — and, therefore, upon who
formulates them — and that often the respondent feels “forced” to give an
instantaneously improvised response. Is that what people really think? Anyone who
affirms this is being misleading. In fact, most responses obtained through polls are:
(a) weak, that is, they do not express intense opinions that are strongly felt; (b)
volatile, in other words, they can change within a few days; (c) made up on the spot
just to be able to say something. For many people, to reply with an “I don’t know”
puts them at risk of losing face before others; (d) untruthful, for instance when people
have an opinion that is not “politically correct”; (e) dependent upon the way the
questions are asked; and, finally, (f) a reflective effect, that is to say, a rebound effect
from what the media say. Television and internet function as the spokesmen of a
public opinion that is really the echo of their own voice.

(a, b, c) The opinions obtained from polls are generally weak; and it is rare that
profound opinions can be gathered from any of them. Russell Neuman writes:
“From about ten questions regarding national political issues that confront the
country in any given year, for example, the average citizen is likely to have a strong
and consistent preference on perhaps one or two of them and virtually no opinion
whatsoever on the rest. Yet when an eager survey research interviewer [… ] starts to
ask for opinions on ten political issues, most respondents feel obliged to have an
opinion, in effect to help the interviewer out. [… ] In effect, opinions are invented on
the spot”. The result of this is that opinions gathered are, for the most part, fragile

20
and inconsistent. The interviewer who asks questions about a “law of metallic
metals”, or about an equally fanciful and absurd “public affairs law”, does not go
home empty-handed: A third or even two-thirds of those polled will provide him
with responses.

Mind you, sometimes we have a strong and strongly felt opinion. But even when this
is the case, it is not certain that this is the opinion that will determine our voting
choice. When a voter enters the voting booth, he has only one shot in his rifle
chamber; and if he has, say, five firm opinions, he will probably have to sacrifice a few
of them. For fifty years, the experts have explained to American politicians that to
balance the budget deficit, or to reduce the debt, it would suffice to raise gasoline
taxes a little bit more. (In the United States, gasoline costs, on average, one-third of
what one pays in Europe.) Polls show that Americans are opposed to this and hence
the politicians oppose it. I’m willing to bet, however, that making gasoline more
expensive would have no electoral impact. The point is that to ascertain an opinion
about an issue is not in any way equivalent to predicting behavior. An opinion on an
issue, on a question, is not a declaration of a voting intention.

(d) Sometimes, too, people will lie about their opinion, for instance if they thing the
interviewer will hate them for it. Or, they answer truthfully, but when push comes to
shove, their decision differs their previously held opinion. Economist have long
known of this phenomenon. People often just do really know what their preferences
are, until the decisive moment, when they buy or vote. That’s why economists speak
of “revealed preference”: preferences cannot be determined by asking. It is revealed
merely in the choice itself. This explains the to all poll-believers very surprising
outcomes of the Brexit-referendum in Britain, and the presidential elections in the
USA in 2016.

(e) Then there is the problem of the easy manipulation of polls (and of their
institutionalized form, which is the referendum). To ask whether abortion should be
allowed, or whether the right to life must be protected, is to present the same
question in different words — and it’s an issue that is better understood than perhaps
many others. Wording the question differently can change the responses of 20% of
those polled. During the Watergate scandal in 1973, seven polls were conducted in a
single month asking if President Nixon should resign or be impeached. According to
one study, “the proportion of affirmative responses ranged from a minimum of 10 to
a maximum of 53%. And these differences were almost entirely attributable to
changes in the formulation of the questions”. This is rather extreme oscillation for
such a simple question. The risk of this grows, of course, when the problems are more
complicated. When the British were polled about joining the European Union, the
number of those in favor oscillated (frightfully) from 10% to 60%. Once again, the
results varied widely depending on how the questions were formulated and to what
extent they varied.

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(f) Finally, even if polls would render a precise picture of the public opinion, that still
does not mean that they reveal the authentic vox populi. For the vox populi itself is
often but an expression of the power that the media—television and internet—have
over people. Conservatives have long complained about this, arguing that the
mainstream media were dominated by liberals who brainwashed the people with
their lies. “Lügenpresse” is the term used by German conservatives: the lying press.
Liberals have always denied the allegations. Until they Donald Trump won the
presidential election. Now, they too have woken up to the fact that the media—in this
case various internet sites—can make people believe just about anything.

From the above, then, it is clear that polls are highly problematic. Polling is the
auscultation of falsehoods which trap us and deceive us simultaneously. Their
influence often blocks useful and necessary decisions, or even leads to erroneous
decisions supported by mere “rumors”, by weak, deformed, manipulated, and
misinformed opinions — in short, by blind opinions.

Yes, blind opinions — because, as all the insiders of the polling-trade know very well,
the vast majority of respondents know hardly anything about the questions asked of
them. Two out of every five Americans do not know which party — and there are only
two — controls Congress, nor do they know where most countries in the world are
located. In Europe most people do not know the difference between government and
parliament. One might say: What difference does it make if these things are not
known? It makes very little difference in and of itself but a great deal if these
elementary gaps are understood as indicators of a general lack of political knowledge.
If a person doesn’t even know such simple things, then there is an even greater
chance that he will have no notion whatsoever of more difficult problems.

I think many of us agree — albeit sottovoce — that poll-dependence is dangerous, that

polls should have less importance than they do, and that the democratic credentials
of the instrument are spurious. But nearly everyone has surrendered before the
supposed inevitability of polls. And even the fact that in crucial instances the
predictions of the polls turn out to be ghastly incorrect, as in the Brexit and Trump
cases, still don’t affect our faith in them.

4. Less Information

I have said that a government of polls is based on, inter alia, uninformed opinions, a
consideration that leads us to the problem of information. The almost undisputed
merit of television and internet is that they “inform” us better than ever before. At
least, that’s what we are told.

To inform is to provide news. One can be informed about events but also about other
things, such as ideas. But whatever the information is about, information is not in
itself knowledge. It is not ‘knowing’ in the full meaning of the term, since in and of

22
itself, information does not provide an understanding of things. One can be very well-
informed about a great many things but still not understand them. It is appropriate to
say, then, that information provides only a superficial notion, which is not at all a bad
thing. So-called ‘notional knowledge’ can also contribute to the formation of homo
sapiens. But even if we do not disparage such rote learning, its importance should not
be overestimated either. To accumulate notions, as I have said, does not imply
understanding.

It must also be emphasized that information varies greatly in its importance. A lot of
information is merely frivolous, of small news value, or merely of value as spectacle.
That is to say, a lot of information is devoid of any significant value or relevance.
Instead, other information is objectively important because it is information that
contributes to the formation of a public opinion about public problems, about
problems of public interest. And when I speak of under-information or of dis-
information, I am referring to information of “public relevance”. It is in this sense —
and not in the sense of sports news, celebrity news, or crime news — that television
and internet inform us very little and badly.

It is useful to distinguish between under-information and dis-information. By under-

information, I mean totally inadequate information about the the thing that it
purports to provide news about, information that does not inform us at all. Therefore,
under-information is an excessive reduction of information. By dis-information, I
instead mean a distortion of information: giving false news that deceives those who
hear it. Mind you, I have not said that the distortive manipulation of information is
deliberate; often it just reflects a professional or ideological deformation. This makes
it less culpable but also more dangerous.

Obviously the distinction is an analytical one and it serves merely to contribute to a

clear and precise analysis of the problem. In practice, under-information and dis-
information have overlapping areas and one overflows into the other. But this should
not prevent us from examining them separately.

The dissemination of information, presented as such, began with the newspaper. The
English word “newspaper” exactly describes its own nature: a sheet or paper “of
news”. In Italian, the word “giornale” emphasizes its quotidian aspect: something
that appears day to day. But that which we properly call “mass information” only
really emerges with the advent of the radio. By its very nature, the newspaper
excludes the illiterate, those who cannot read — and until fairly recently most people
could hardly read or not at all. Radio, on the other hand, reaches even those who can
neither read nor write. This quantitative extension of information dissemination is
accompanied by a qualitative impoverishment (except when compared with scandal-
based tabloids). Since radio speaks even to those who cannot read, it must simplify
more and become more brief, at least with regard to the news. In effect, it can be said
that radio popularizes the newspaper.

23
And what about television? Television informs as many people as radio, in the sense
that it can reaches the same broad audience of the literate and the illiterate. But
television provides less information than any previous instrument of information.

Everyone will have noticed that national and trivial news is all the rage on television
and that international news is scarce. At its best, television informs us about
elections in a few foreign countries that are regarded as important. These are
reported hurriedly, in 30 seconds. After this, the viewer gets some national politics.
And then there is “human interest” footage of some tearjerker story, like the mother
who has lost her child in a crowd or a contentious story about some murder, both of
whose informational and opinion-forming value is virtually zero. The news
broadcasts on television today use 80% of their allotted time to saturate us with
trivialities. Information? Yes, even news about the death of a chicken crushed in an
avalanche can be called information. But it is not worth mentioning.

Why is this? The descent into the trivial and the insignificant is not due to any
objective necessity or to any technological imperative. In France, England, Germany,
and elsewhere, there continue to exist serious news bulletins that choose serious
news and which provide them without images, if they don’t have them. The level to
which most television has fallen is due fundamentally the tyranny of television ratings
and, hence, to its catering to the mediocre and the superficial. CBS, one of the major
US networks, matter-of-factly said: “It is simply a matter of the preference of the
viewers. The ratings soar with events such as earthquakes and hurricanes.”

This comment is chilling in its myopia and its cynicism: It places the blame for the
media’s faults on the public. If the man on the street knows nothing of the world then
it is evident he will find little interest in it. Initially, acquiring information represents
a “cost”. The act of informing oneself requires an investment of time and attention;
and it only becomes rewarding — it’s a cost that gets offset — after the information
that is stored reaches a critical mass. To love classical music you have to know
something about it, otherwise Beethoven is just noise. To love soccer you have to
understand the nature of the game. To become passionate about chess you must
know the moves. Similarly, those who have passed the “critical threshold” in politics
and in international affairs instantly grasp the importance of the day’s news because
they instantly understand its meaning and implications. Those who do not have such
a “store of knowledge” can make an effort but will fail to grasp the same information
and so will turn their attention to something else.

An audience that doesn’t care about the big issues is an audience that has been
formed by the television networks. If an audience prefers a focus on trivia, crime
stories, human interest stories, and the like, it’s because the networks have produced
citizens who know nothing and who are only interested in the frivolous.

24
The stupidity of a public raised by television is well illustrated by the television flop
that was the US broadcast of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, probably the most
important political event, world wars aside, of the 20th century. The audience rating
of that event — which was transmitted live on the ABC network, and which counted
with the participation of two important commentators — was the lowest of all the
programs in that time-slot.

The proof of this accusation is this: that up until the advent of television, the public
was interested in international news — so much so that it was published in all the
newspapers. Now there is hardly any interest. Why? Has the citizen’s interest
atrophied all by itself? Of course not. Obviously, the written press nourished certain
interests and stoked curiosity which video-politics has, in turn, extinguished.

The man of written culture — and, thus, of the newspaper era — read about, say,
fifteen significant events, whether national or international, every day. As a general
rule, let us say that each of these events on average was covered in one newspaper
column. All of this is reduced by at nine-tenth in television news. The process of
reduction-compression is enormous; and what disappears in that process is, above
all, the discussion of the problem to which the images refer. We already know that the
image is the enemy of abstraction and to explain something verbally is to engage in
abstract discourse. The problems are not “visible”. In short, the visible imprisons us
in the visible. To the man who can only see, that which cannot be seen does not exist.
This amputation is colossal. By dint of being under-informed, and as a result of
focusing on and inflating local news, we end up losing interest in the world and
“losing sight” of it.

Moreover, the visible that we can see on television is that which “moves” our feelings
and our emotions: murders, violence, shootings, arrests, protests, expressions of
lament, or alternatively, earthquakes, fires, floods, and other incidents. The image is
emotional, much more so than the word, which is often rather cerebral. Of course,
inflammatory speeches are not impossible, but at least every speech contains pathos
and logos. The image is only pathos. Imprisonment in the visible thus also enthrones
the emotions. That is extremely dangerous, especially in politics, since it can lead to
reckless decisions. An image, a picture, a video never tells the whole story.

Finally, the rule of the image also produces a desire or a need to “be seen” — which
produces the pseudo-event, an event that only occurs because there is a camera that
is filming it and which would not have occurred otherwise. The pseudo-event is,
therefore, an event pre-fabricated for television and by television. Sometimes this
fabrication is justified; but it still remains a “falsehood” at risk of serious abuse — and
it easily can evolve into real dis-information.

What about the successor of television: the internet? Is it a change for the better?
Have things improved? It is certainly true that internet supplies us with even more

25
information than television. Everything is a mere click away. But who uses these
possibilities? A minority. What limits the rest is not what objectively available, but
their own cognitive limitedness and lack of interest. It is also true that those who are
knowledgeable can quickly find more valuable information than ever before in
history. But to homo videns internet is not very different from television. It is simply
more of the same.

5. More Disinformation

We come to true and actual dis-information: not informing a little (too little) but
informing badly, distorting things. I begin with this: that in part, disinformation is
involuntary and somehow inevitable. And I start from this observation: that
McLuhan’s global village is only half “global” — and, therefore, it is not at all global.
Television and internet operate easily and freely in free countries; they operate less
easily and freely in less free countries; and they are severely limited tyrannical
countries. It follows then that the more a regime is tyrannical and bloodthirsty, the
less television and internet have to say about it. In doing so, they paradoxically
absolve the regime. In the recent past, atrocious massacres have occurred in
Abkhazia, Algeria, Bosnia, Cambodia, Iraq, Ruanda, Syria and many other countries.
Many of these killings remained invisible. No one ever saw them and, therefore, for
most people they have never occurred — to the point that Idi Amin Dada, who killed
at least 250,000 of his own people, was received across Africa with praise and paeans.
Television hardly ever enters Sudan, a country that continues to exterminate its own
people through starvation and civil war, exactly as was done in Mengistu’s Ethiopia.
And what about the estimated seventy million people starved in China after Mao Tse-
Tung’s great “leap forward”? No one entered China at the time and so what happened
to those people was not — in the context of television — news. And what about
contemporary North-Korea? Probably the single worst country in the world. How
much do we see and hear about that? Virtually nothing. Non vidi, ergo non est.

It’s understood that one cannot blame television and internet for not showing what
they cannot show. But one can blame them for endorsing and reinforcing a
perception of the world based on double standards and which is, therefore, highly
unfair and distorting. Television and internet — albeit unintentionally, but without
too much concern — thus penalize free countries and protect countries in which
dictatorships govern by killing people.

Let’s move on to other types of dis-information. I have already anticipated the

manufacture of pseudo-events. But compared to other types of dis-information, this
is a minor thing. I proceed, then, to the most important distortion of information. Let
us begin with false statistics and random interviews.

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By false statistics I mean statistical results that are “false” because of the
interpretation they are given. The written press is also versed in this kind of
falsehood; but it is television that has imposed it upon everyone — including the press
— as dogma. This is because for television (and most websites), statistical tables —
duly simplified and reduced to the bare bone — are a gift from heaven. With tables
and percentages, everything can be condensed into a few images — images that
appear to be of indisputable objectivity. When presented with statistics, we think we
hear the voice of mathematics. And mathematics is not based on idle chatter.

Indeed, mathematics is not; but the interpretation of a statistical analysis often is.
Take the truly sensational case of the statistics used to demonstrate and measure
racial discrimination in the United States, especially against blacks but also, in some
cases, against other minorities.

How does one prove that blacks are discriminated against and that they are
deliberately disadvantaged solely because they are black? For the past fifty years, the
proof of discrimination readily accepted by most people and certainly by the media is
the under-representation of blacks, compared to their proportion in the population,
in universities, on Wall Street, in large companies, and ultimately on the list of
billionaires. The argument used is this: If blacks are proportionally fewer than whites
in these places, it must be because they are discriminated against. The conclusion is
put forward as obvious; but the only thing that is obvious is that the evidence
provided proves nothing — absolutely nothing — because any student who passes an
exam in basic statistics knows that under-representation cannot be apriori attributed
to discrimination. The cause could be something else entirely. The statistics in
themselves do not tell us anything about what causes under-represention.

Note that blacks are highly over-represented in many sports. Track, boxing,
basketball, football, and various other athletic competitions are all heavily populated
with blacks. Is this because there is discrimination against whites in these activities?
Nobody argues this for the simple reason that it is evident to everyone that this would
be patent nonsense. But the same nonsense is accepted without flinching when
reversed. And then, continuing on with this illogical logic, what about Asians? In the
best American universities, Asian students are now over-represented compared to
their share of population. Why? Is it because perhaps someone has discriminated in
their favor? Obviously not. It is because they are more studious and perform better as
students. A correct reporting of information would say this; but today’s dis-
information does not.

To false statistics must be added another factor that contributes to distortions: the
random interview. This is the case of an interviewer who is sent around to ‘flesh out’
an event — and, more often, a non-event — with video footage, strolling through the
streets and interviewing those who pass by. In this way, it is argued, the voice of the
people is heard. But this is really an absolute falsehood. Never mind that these

27
interviews are always “cooked up” with an opportune distribution of ‘yes’ and ‘no’
responses. The main point is that the “randomness” of these random interviews is not
statistical randomness and that the passer-by who is interviewed, does not represent
anything or anyone: He speaks only for himself. At best, such random interviews
provide a colorful story. But when they deal with serious problems, they are, in
general, formidable spreaders of stupidity. Because, once said on video, stupid
statements become public opinions: a dim-witted person says something, and the
next day it is repeated by tens of thousands of people.

Let us continue. Apart from false statistics and random interviews, dis-information is
nourished by two the typical idea that the news to be shown must be exciting at all
costs. Hence a of rewarding eccentricity, and a favoring of attacks and aggression.

With regard to the first point, I merely note in passing that extreme positions,
extravagances, and exaggerations all guarantee visibility. The more outrageous a
thesis, the more it is promoted and disseminated by television and internet. Vacuous
minds specialize in intellectual extremism and, in this way, acquire notoriety and
spread vacuity. The result is an alarming race to the bottom. Charlatans, mediocre
thinkers, those who seek novelty at all costs are all highlighted, while people who are
serious and who truly think remain in the shadows. This is really serving a badly.

The other aspect is, as I said, privileging attacks and aggression. This can occur in
different ways. Many journalists aggressive in the sense that they feel they have a
“critical function”. So they becomes an adversary, constitutionally predisposed to
sting and bite the powerful, to bring them under suspicion and accuse them. This
aggressiveness is considered part of the professional ethic, although a second, less
noble, objective is to also “build an audience” and become famous. It is true that in
some countries this is not yet the case. The journalists of the daily news programs are
still quite cautious: They don’t want any trouble and they protect their career by
treating the government with velvet gloves. Everyone must be satisfied, even in terms
of footage. In such countries, therefore, aggression and the “adversarial function” of
the self-confident journalist remains repressed or compressed. Nevertheless, even
there television and internet are inevitably attracted to altercations and conflicts, and
they end up highlighting them.

Television and internet always arrive quickly wherever there is unrest — someone
protesting, holding a demonstration, occupying buildings, blocking roads and
railways, or attacking someone. One could argue that it is so because an attack is a
spectacle and the media are spectacle. In part, this is inevitable. But the real world is
not a show and those who disguise it as such deform its problems and misinform us
about reality. That is extremely dangerous.

The most serious aspect of this preference for attacks is that it violates the principle
that lies at the root of all civil society: the principle of “hearing the other side.” If

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someone is accused, the accused has a right to be heard. If streets and trains are
blocked by protesters, we should also hear from and see those affected by such
actions: the innocent travelers, as well as those who are the target of the protests. But
this almost never happens. Television and internet routinely show only images of
those who attack, those who stir things up. In this way, protesters become the main
character, completely out of proportion to the story, and are always seen as acting
with the utmost sincerity even when dead wrong. Giving voice to demands, laments,
and complaints is a good thing. But to truly serve a good cause and to do good, a
protest must be treated impartially. Where there is an accusation there must also be a
defense. The attack itself, however, is a “visible” thing and makes an impression; the
defense is normally a discourse of some sort. God forbid! This is why video screens
are filled with marches, placards, people yelling and throwing stones, or even
Molotov cocktails. And these images seem to say that such people are always right
because no other voices are ever heard opposing them. In addition, and related to all
this, is the fact that the interviewer often sympathizes with his subject—one could call
it the Che Guevara complex—, so that a protester becomes by definition a hero who
must move us. The truth is often quite different.

I conclude by asking: Was it worth discussing, as we have done so far, information,

under-information, and dis-information? For the video-children turned adults, the
question is answered even before it is posed. Worse still, they don’t even understand
the question. My argument is that information is the communication of content, the
saying of something important. But in today’s confused media jargon, information is
everything that circulates and draws attention. What counts is to be “trending topic”.
Never mind what it is about.

6. The Image Also Lies

It is hard to deny that substantial under-information and dis-information are the

drawbacks of television and internet. Even so, some argue, they triumph over the
written word because “the image does not lie”. (This was the favorite slogan of Walter
Cronkite, the dean of American television anchormen.) It does not and cannot lie
because the image is as it is and speaks for itself. If something is photographed, that
something is there and is just as it appeared. In the same vein, it is often said that “a
picture says more than a thousand words”.

Now, there’s no doubt that images and give viewers the feeling that what they see is
true, that the events they see occurred just as they were seen. Yet it is not necessarily
like this. Images can lie and distort the truth, just like any other form of
communication. The difference is that the credibility that resides within an image
makes a “picturesque” lie more effective and, thus, more dangerous.

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Video-politics is at its best in the so-called ‘talk shows’ — at least when they are good,
serious talk shows. In the United States, England, Germany, and a few other
countries, they are generally produced by very good and independent journalists. In a
well-managed discussion, liars and dimwits are immediately exposed. But this
happens because, as the name itself indicates, people talk in talk shows. In such a
context, the image is, at least to some extent, subordinated. To be sure, the fact that
some people are less telegenic than others does matter a lot. But on the whole, what
really matters in these talk shows is what is said and how it is said. This is the way it
is with television programs that best inform us. Unfortunately, this is also the least
typical kind of programming, and it is never aired in “prime time”. The typical
television show is totally centered on the images it shows; and what it shows us may
well enough deceive us. An image lies, for instance, if it is photo-shopped, like the
famous picture of Lenin from which Trotsky was erased. Images also lie, however, if
they deviously suggests something that is not the case, if the suggested context differs
starkly from the real context. Think of the images that were shown in the UN, as
proof of the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, to justify an American
invasion. Soon after, it turned out that there were no such weapons in Iraq.

As I said, the boundary between under-information and dis-information is porous, in

practice. Something analogous can be said about untruths. In certain cases, they are
unintentional errors. In other cases, they are outright lies. But often it is difficult to
determine whether a falsehood is the result of an error or whether it occurred because
of deliberate manipulation and intentional deceit. Even with regard to this there are
grey areas.

In general, the images you see on film or video are always a bit fake in the sense that
they are de-contextualized, since based on close-ups taken out of context. Those who
remember the first war ever watched and lost on television, the Vietnam War, will
remember the image of the South Vietnamese colonel shooting a Vietcong prisoner in
the head. The civilized world was struck with horror upon seeing this image. But what
the image didn’t show were all the other dead bodies lying around, not only of
American soldiers but also of women and children, whose bodies were horribly
mutilated. Therefore, although the image of the man being executed with a shot to the
head was real, the message it contained was misleading.

Another case in point was Rodney King, the black man beaten to the ground by some
police officers on a Los Angeles street on March 3, 1991. The images of King were re-
played hundreds of times on American television. But they did not show was that the
man in custody had taken police on a long and dangerous car chase at 110 miles per
hour, that he was drunk and on drugs, and that he did not obey orders to stay put.
The images broadcast almost resulted in a race war. There’s no doubt there was police
brutality. But once put into context, the incident doesn’t justify in any way the riots
that later occurred. The image, as it was offered, was deceptive.

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In the past few years we have witnessed many similar cases. What we saw were
pictures of policemen chasing and shooting black men. In the media these were
quickly judged to be cases of unjustifiable police brutality, supposedly driven by
racism. Statistics were deployed: “37% of unarmed people killed by police were black
in 2015 despite black people being only 13% of the U.S. population.” Violence broke
out in various cities, as a result of the images in the media and the way journalists
discussed them. The truth is, however, that the crime rate among blacks is three to
five times as high as among whites (including latino’s.) Moreover, guns are legal in
most American cities, so apprehending a suspect is a very dangerous undertaking.
Taking chances, means dying at a young age. Hence, the statistics are much less
damning for the police than the appear at first sight, at least to sensationalist
journalists.

There’s no need to provide further examples. The simple truth is that images often
lead us astray. Images do not speak for themselves. They need a lot of explanation to
become understandable. And for the explanation to be true, often a lot of research is
needed. But journalists are in a hurry, and usually don’t take the time to do the
research. They want to have a scoop now.

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III. What About Democracy?

1. Video-elections

In the second part, we examined the underlying effects of video-politics, especially its
impact on the formation of public opinion. Two other aspects remain to be examined:
its electoral impact and its impact on governance.

Already during the hey-day of the newspaper, the question was: To what extent do
newspapers influence voter choices? It is difficult to know. Usually we respond with
indirect evidence. For example, the majority of newspapers — or the most important
newspapers — supported candidates and parties that did not win. In Italy, the press
in the country’s “red regions” during the post-war period (for example, the Resto del
Carlino in Bologna and the Nazione in Florence) was anti-communist; but the
Communists were winning hands down all the same. Does this prove that the
influence of newspapers was minimal? Surely not. To truly measure their electoral
influence one would need a “counterfactual” case — such as the absence of
newspapers or a swap in their home base. For example, would the Communist vote in
Tuscany have remained the same or would it have gone up to, say, 65% in the absence
of the Nazione? And if instead of the Nazione it had been the communist daily Unità
that had sold 350,000 copies in Tuscany, would the Italian Communist Party have
remained at 65% or would it have gone up to 75%? These questions do not have a
definitive answer because a hypothesis such as “if X were different, then …” is not
verifiable.

The problem with regard to television is analogous: we are missing the

counterfactual case. Yet, it is almost certain that the influence of television is decisive.
Experimental studies are quite conclusive. Iyengar and Kinder distinguished between
the power of television news to “command the public’s attention (agenda setting)”
and the power to “define criteria which inform one’s judgment (priming)”. In both
cases, they concluded that “television news decisively affects the priorities attached
by people to national problems and the considerations on which they evaluate
political leaders”.

The case of the United States is simple. Four out of five Americans say they vote
according to what they learn from the television or computer screen. These are most
probably people who do not read any newspapers; and since parties in the US are
weak and radio stations are local, with very little political news, it is easy to draw a
conclusion. But in Europe, newspapers and political parties still have an influence —
though it is rapidly declining — which can counterbalance the influence of video. But
assessing their influence is hard to do. In any case, the rule of thumb is that television
and internet are more influential when there are fewer contrary forces in play,
especially when newspapers and political parties are weaker.

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What we can calculate is the change in voting intentions during electoral campaigns.
For example, in the Italian elections of 1994, Luca Ricolfi calculated (by conducting a
sample poll every 15 days) that television had moved more than six million votes to
the right. Hence, millions of voters were tele-directed. Let me be clear that a strictly
monocausal explanation almost never holds. But, it is plausible that the influence of
television is decisive.

On the other hand, the example also makes clear that the bulk of the electorate do not
change their votes. Why not? Here again we are on the shaky ground of
circumstantial evidence. It is possible that they did not change their votes because,
given the multiplicity of different and contrary appeals, the appeals of the media were
neutralized.

We must not limit ourselves, however, to analyzing how much television and internet
affect voting. The effects of video-politics are wide-ranging. One of these effects is
surely that the screen personalizes elections. On the screen we see people not party
programs; and people forced to speak in sound bites. Earlier political leaders gave
speeches, in which they informed their audience of the political ideas of their party.
The contemporary video-leader, on the other hand, hardly transmits any such
messages; he is the message. He is the message itself in the sense that if we analyze
what the video-leader says we discover that “the media create the need for strong
personalities with ambiguous language [...] that allow each group to find in it that
which [...] they want to find”.

Whatever the reason, when it comes to the personalization of the elections, we can
say that what matters most are “faces” (whether one is telegenic, if one fills the screen
or not) and that the personalization becomes general from the moment that politics
focuses on showing people. Moreover, the personalization of politics unfolds at all
levels, including — if the vote is in single-member constituencies — at the level of
local leaders.

The last observation reminds us that with regard to personalization, the electoral
system is an important variable. Here the rule of thumb is that the power of video is
less when the vote is given over to party lists, and it acquires its full force when the
electoral system is also personalized — that is, when you vote in single-member
constituencies for individual candidates. However, we must be careful: The electoral
system always interacts with the party system — more specifically, with its
structuring force. The United States and England have the same electoral system: the
single-member constituency system based on one round. But the incidence of video-
politics is very strong in American voting while it is more modest in English voting.
The reason is, I repeat, that the party system is weak, very weak in America, while it
remains strong and highly structured in the UK.

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The electoral system and the party system are, therefore, important variables with
regard to providing support or resistance to the personalization of politics. So, too, is
the political system, particularly the difference between presidential and
parliamentary systems. In presidential systems, the head of state is designated by a
direct popular election. And, consequently, in such systems, the personalization of
politics is at its highest. It is especially so in the United States, where the power of
television and internet is the greatest.

American commentators characterize their presidential election as a “horse race”,

and television coverage of this race is like game reporting. I give the word to T.E.
Patterson: “Before [..], candidates built their followings in great part on substantive
appeals. Now they must contend with the dynamics of game reporting”. This is
because reporting, at one point, became “reporter-dominated” and game-centered,
that is, focused on the game. The heart of the matter is that the presidential race has
been transformed into a spectacle, into “show-business”, in which the show is the
most essential part, while information is a residue.

The last point is this: that video-politics — sometimes more, sometimes less — tends
to destroy the political party or at least the mass organized party, which in Europe
has dominated the scene for about a century. It is not only that the screen is more an
instrument of and for candidates rather than a medium of and for parties; but also
that gathering votes no longer requires an extensive organization made up of offices
and activists. Berlusconi obtained a quarter of Italian votes with no organized party
behind him, but his back was well protected by his own television empire. In the
United States, Ross Perot was able to get a fifth of the vote in the presidential election
of 1993 by doing everything himself, with his own money, simply with talk shows and
by paying for his own television ads. And in 2016 Donald Trump won the presidential
election, thanks to the media, and in the face of tremendous opposition from the
leadership of his own party.

I do not anticipate that political parties will completely disappear. But, of course,
video-politics reduces the weight and the essential importance of parties and thereby
forces them to change. The so-called “strong party” is no longer necessary; a “weak
party” is sufficient.

2. Politics Embodied in Video

It goes without saying that video-elections pass into broader video-politics; thus,
there is no interruption between electoral influence and the overall influence of
television and internet. With this warning, we proceed to a broader analysis, to a view
of the overall picture.

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We begin again with this premise: How did politicians do politics until about fifty
years ago? They did it knowing little — and even caring little — of what their
constituents wanted. Polls did not exist; and, furthermore, no one thought that a
representative was or should be the agent, the spokesman, of the people he
represented. Constitutions, all constitutions, prohibit “imperative mandates”. And
because of this, the representative in the past was largely independent of his voters.
But this independence was, in fact, a privilege or prerogative only of the so-called
‘gentleman politician’ — typically, the lord or notable of a place — of the 19th century.
The gentleman politician was a wealthy landowner, not linked to any party or limited
by any programmatic constraint, and was regularly elected without opposition (it was
a time of limited suffrage). This state of affairs changed with the expansion of
suffrage, the emergence in Europe of ideological politics, and with it mass organized
parties: workers’ parties and, on the opposite side, Christian and conservative
parties.

In the early 20th century, the political party prevailed over its elected members
through the force of the ideology it institutionalized and which it represented. Party
dependence thus began in this way. And the more the voters voted for symbols,
ideologies, or a party platforms, the more candidates depended on their party to get
elected.

So, for about a century, the representative has been dependent on his party, at least
when we speak about large mass parties. Today this dependence has weakened and is
now failing. But this does not mean that we are returning to the era of independent
and “responsible” representatives as as eulogized by Edmund Burke in his famous
address to the electors of Bristol of 1774. In fact, we are in the age of representatives
who are dependent on their constituents, on television, internet, and polls. In short,
independent political representatives have not existed for quite some time; and the
transition from “dependence on the party” to other forms of dependence should not
necessarily be seen as an improvement. The representative freed from party control is
not necessarily a representative, who performs the duties of his office better.

Let us start with the constituency-dependence which characterizes the district system
that develops within a weak party system. In this case it is true, as is said and widely
accepted in the United States, that all politics is local, that ultimately all politics
devolves into local or rather regional politics. Of course, in a democracy there is
always regional politics — that is, people who are elected to satisfy the wishes and
interests of their regional constituents. It does not follow, however, that all politics is
or should be regional because in that case constituency-dependence is no longer a
matter of, shall we say, serving the region in a natural way; rather, it becomes
pathological and can have severe consequences.

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To see how, we should be attentive to the fact that the demos in question is not the
people as a whole. Instead, it is an assemblage of “small nations”, fragmented and
enclosed in their own small regions; these form the constituencies.

This supposedly most democratic electoral system, therefore, transforms parliament

into a constellation of special interests constantly in conflict, an arena of
representatives turned into agents whose mandate is to bring the booty home. In this
way, the more politics becomes regional, the more a vision of the common good and
the general interest disappear. And thus politics becomes a zero-sum game and even
a negative-sum game: a loss-generating activity.

Together with the constituency-dependence of the representative, I have mentioned

his video-dependence. This has several aspects; but the most important seems to me
to be this: that politicians relate less and less to genuine events and more and more
to “media events”, that is, to events selected for their video-visibility, which are then
inflated or sometimes distorted by the camera. This mental dependence on media
events is dangerous, particularly so in international politics. The video usually
simplifies and distorts the truth, it evokes intense emotions, and a cry for an
immediate response.

Another important aspect of video-fashioned politics is that it gives unprecedented

and devastating weight to false testimonies. Television and internet transform movie
stars, models, singers, football players, and so on, into cognitive authorities, while
true experts — competent cognitive authorities — become “quantité négligeable”. Yet
it is clear that the only truly useful “testimonies” come from those who are educated
in the things they are talking about. A musician knows about music, a mathematician
about math, a poet about poetry, a soccer player about soccer, a dramatic actor about
acting. As citizens, they all also have the right to express their views on politics; but
they do not have the right to offer accredited opinions — or endorsements — to which
we should attach any particular significance or value. Video-politics, however,
attributes a weight to the opinion of people who are not “authoritative sources” —
that is, to people of who it makes absolutely no sense to speak as opinion leaders —
that is disproportionate. This is really a disservice to democracy.

The last aspect of video-politics to be considered here is that television and internet
favor —whether willingly or unwillingly — the emotionalization of politics, that is, a
politics guided by and reduced to clusters of emotions. I have already noted that it
does so by telling a multitude of tearful stories and touching events. It also does so,
inversely, by increasingly ‘decapitating’ the talking heads who understand and can
discuss political problems. The point is that, in general, the culture of the image
generated by the primacy of the visible is tuned to transmit “hot” messages that stir
our emotions, ignite our feelings, excite our senses — in short, impassion us.

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To become impassioned is to get involved, to participate, to generate ‘sympathetic’
energy. When it occurs at the right time and place, to become impassioned is a good
thing; but when it does not, it is bad. Knowledge is logos not pathos. And to manage
the political city logos is necessary. Written culture does not reach such a state of
“agitation”. Even when words can inflame passions, via the radio, for example, words
are still less inflammatory than images. Therefore, the culture of the image breaks the
delicate balance between passion and rationality. The rationality of homo sapiens is
in recession. And emotional politics provoked by images raises and aggravates
problems without providing any idea how to solve them.

3. The Global Village

The term “global village” is an apt coinage by McLuhan, the author who, more than
any other, first made us realize the significance of the advent of the television and
internet age. The term is spot-on, albeit ambiguous, and perhaps its success is due to
its own ambiguity.

Let’s start with the meaning of “global”. Television and internet annihilate visual
distances: They allows us to see, “live”, events anywhere in the world. McLuhan
believed that this would increase mankind’s responsibility. In truth, being
responsible for everything is too much.

Nonetheless, “anywhere in the world” has an important psychological effect. The

global citizen, the citizen of the world, “feels” himself to be involved everywhere, and
so he is ready to embrace causes from anywhere. At the same time, the screen
dwindles his capacity for abstract and rational thinking. So he is interested mainly in
what is concrete, visible and emotional.

As a result, anything in the world can now become a global causes celèbres, as long as
it is concrete, visible, and emotional. The tragic death of Lady Diana in 1997, while
still in the bloom of her life and beauty, touched and united in grief two billion
viewers around the world. It confronted us with a “media event” that awakened a
common human sensitivity, they say. Yes, perhaps. But it is also a disproportionate
response to an event mounted by the media — which made history only because of
this. Or think of the picture of the drowned three-year old Alan Kurdi, on a Turkish
beach. Understandably, the emotional response all over the world was enormous.
Very few things cause more outrage than a small kid, who died unnecessarily and
cruelly. Because anyone can identify with this. The drive to protect little children is
deeply rooted in human nature. Nevertheless, it is clear that it is a very bad idea to
base political decisions, involving millions of people and billions of dollars on such
emotional pictures.

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McLuhan’s says that the world becomes one global village. And it is true. But at the
same time, television and internet “villagify” in a very different sense. In fact, as we
have already seen, video-politics tends to reinforce localism and regionalism.
What, then, is the union of the world and the village? It seems to me that the
hierarchy of belonging, so to speak, is very clear. When emotionally gripped, we are
ready to embrace various distant causes, feel ourselves at one with persons on the
other side of the world, and embrace the idea that the globe has become one village.
But as soon as these distant causes touch our purse-strings and affect us in person,
then the defense of that which is “mine” is fierce, the small fatherland prevails, and
regionalism triumphs over universalism.

It must be emphasized that the above does not conflict in any way with the realization
that television and internet are homogenizing patterns of life and tastes across the
world. This homogenization is undeniable, although it must still be qualified, but it
does not solve the problem posed by regionalism and villagification. We may be equal
in taste, lifestyle, ambitions, criteria of success, and other things, yet still remain
fragmented. Indeed, homogenization may accentuate conflicts between our villages,
since hatred can still be intense, especially among brothers. We take an interest in the
same things — for example garbage, polluting industries, or prisons — and want them
to be placed or located in some location. A place must be found for them; but not in
our own village. I repeat: When we face a concrete problem, the village wins and the
idea of “being from everywhere” vanishes.

In conclusion, we may ask if television and internet promotes a “small”, regionalized

mind or, instead, an enlarged, globalized mind? There is no contradiction in the
answer: sometimes one, sometimes the other. But always with the condition that
they do not collide. If they do collide, then the small mind — that is, narrow-
mindedness —prevails.

4. The Weakened demos

Democracy literally means the “power of the people”, the sovereignty and command
of the demos. No one questions that this is the principle of legitimacy underlying a
democracy. The problem has always been how much power to transfer from the base
to the summit of the system and in what way. One thing is the title; quite another
thing is the exercise of power. The sovereign people is the titular holder of power. In
what way is it also able to exercise power?

To answer this we must return to public opinion and the question of what it knows or
does not know. We know — because we see it every day — that the majority of the
public knows almost nothing of public problems. Every time it turns out that the
informational base of the demos is alarmingly poor; indeed it is of such poverty that it
never ceases to surprise us.

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One could think that it has always been more or less this way and, despite this, our
democracies work. This is true. But the building that has withstood the test of time is
representative democracy. In a representative democracy, the demos exerts its power
by electing those who will govern. In this case, people do not make decisions on the
issues but only choose those who will decide. The problem is that a representative
democracy no longer suits us; and because of this, we are asking for “more
democracy”, which means, in practice, increasing doses of direct democracy. The
number of referendums is growing and they are increasingly invoked. Also, a
government based on opinion polls ends up being, in fact, a direct democracy of a
kind, in view of the pressure from below that profoundly interferes in problem
solving. This could be a good thing. But to really be so, each increment of demos-
power should correspond to an increase of demos-knowledge. Otherwise, democracy
becomes a system of government in which the most incompetent are the ones making
the decisions — which is a suicidal governmental system.

Unlike the progressives of our time, the progressives of the past never pretended not
to understand that all democratic progress — that is, every increase of the real power
of the people — depended on the demos being sufficiently concerned with and
informed about politics. Therefore, for the past century, we have been asking what is
the cause among average citizens of the high degree of disinterestedness and
ignorance, which have assumed unprecedented proportions in the past decades. That
is the crucial question, because if there is no diagnosis, there can be no treatment.

When the battle over universal suffrage was being fought, the response to those who
objected to it by saying that most people had insufficient knowledge to vote and, thus,
were not able to use this tool responsibly, was that in order to learn how to vote one
must vote. Later, the response to the objection that this knowledge had not
progressed, was that poverty and illiteracy blocked such progress, which was
undoubtedly true. Nevertheless, it is a fact that the reduction of poverty and the
strong increase in literacy rates we have seen in het past century have not much
improved the situation.

It is clear that education is important. But it is also clear that a general increase in
education levels does not in itself result in a specific increase in the number of
citizens informed about public affairs. That is to say that education in general does
not necessarily bring about a political education. On the contrary, increasingly,
education is specialized and limits us to specific competencies. Even if we had a
whole population composed of university graduates, this would not result in a
significant increase of the part of the population that is interested and specialized and
competent in political matters. A chemist, a doctor, an engineer do not have political
skills acquired through their education that distinguish them from those who have no
such education. About political matters, they will utter the same banalities or
nonsense as anyone else.

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But let us specify even more. So far I have not insisted on the distinction between
information and cognitive competence. However, this is an essential distinction. The
fact that I know about astronomy does not make me into an astronomer; the fact that
I am informed about the economy does not make me an economist; and the fact that I
am informed about physics does not transform me into a physicist. Similarly, when
we talk about people being “politically educated”, we must distinguish between those
who are informed about politics and those who are cognitively competent to solve
political problems. In the West, people who are politically informed and interested
range between 10% and 25% of the total population, while those who are truly
competent barely reach levels of 2-3%.

The point is that every increase of demos-power — all growth of direct democracy —
requires not only an increase in the number of people who are informed, but also an
increase in the number of people who are competent and knowledgeable. If we go in
this direction, then the result is an empowered demos, able to do more and act better
than before. But if, instead, we go in the opposite direction, as we do, more direct
democracy simply means more irresponsible decisions.

What has set us on this suicidal path? First of all, the wreck of the entire educational
system. The demands of “self-development” and the “needs of the labor-market”
determine what the pupils learn. The demands of citizenship have no priority.
Secondly, as we discussed, television drastically impoverishes the information and
the formation of citizens. Finally, related to this, and most of all, the world
represented in images that is offered to us by video-viewing ruins our capacity for
abstraction and, with it, our ability to understand problems and deal with them
rationally. Under these conditions, he who invokes and promotes direct democracy
and referendums is either an unscrupulous fraud or simply an irresponsible
ignoramus.

Yet, it is so. We are beset by hucksters who, with great fanfare, recommend new
mechanisms for consensus-building and who promote direct citizen participation in
government decisions. They are as silent as a grave when faced with our arguments
with regard to what citizens know or do not know of the issues upon which they must
decide. The idea that this is a major problem is lost on them. The protagonists of a
self-governing demos distribute driving licenses without asking if those being given
licenses even know how to drive.

The overall picture is therefore this: that while reality is complicated and complexity
has skyrocketed, people’s minds are simplified and we are raising — as I have already
said — a video-child who does not grow up, an adult who is configured for his entire
life to remain a perpetual child. This is the predicament we are in.

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Therefore, it is hard to be worse placed than where we are to make a democracy work
whose demos should participating in decision making. And if that does not give us
pause, maybe it’s because we are already too far immersed in post-thinking.

The press, the radio, television and internet are granted a special democratic
significance: broader diffusion of information and ideas. But the democratic value of
television and internet within established democracies is deceptive: a demos-power
attributed to a hollow demos. “The fact that political information and education are in
the hands of television [...] represents serious problems for democracy. Instead of
enjoying a direct democracy, the demos is directed by media manipulators”. It is not
just a matter of “informational malnutrition” but also that “those who select
information become the managers of the symbolic domain of the masses. It is enough
to increase or reduce certain doses of images or news to see the consequences of the
nutritional techniques adopted”.

In the end, power passes to Big Brother. Negroponte puts it this way: “The future will
be nothing more and nothing less than the electronics industry. An immense memory
will be available, which will produce an immense power [...] Whichever way you look
at it, it will be the power of the computer.” Yes, but with one important addition:
that computers are machines made by persons made of flesh and blood. Negroponte
completely disregards this. Big Brother is not a machine. The digital “technopolis”
will be run by a master race of tiny elites, highly equipped with techno-brains, which
will result — as anticipated by, among others, Aldous Huxley and Neil Postman — in a
“technocracy that becomes totalitarian” and that shapes everything and everyone
according to its pleasure. With the exception of this master race, however, what
Negroponte says is true: it is now quite likely that the rest of humanity will be
dependent on and slave of the computer.

5. Regnum hominis and Men-Beasts

The first philosopher who understood the power that science offered man was, in the
early 17th century, Francis Bacon. In his utopian New Atlantis, Bacon imagined a
technical paradise, a huge experimental laboratory, a regnum hominis in which
scientific knowledge would have given man the power to dominate nature. So it
happened. But scientific knowledge is all abstract knowledge based on conceptual
thinking. No science was ever born from just seeing things. Therefore, from a
Baconian perspective, regnum hominis is about to end. We no longer have a man who
“reigns” through the technology he invented, but rather we have man who is
submissive to technology and dominated by machines. The inventor has been
overwhelmed by his inventions.

In 1909, E.M. Forster wrote The Machine Stops. Forster imagined, a century ahead of
his time, a world in which an electronic network connects us all, a world in which

41
everyone shuts themselves in their houses and isolates themselves in their rooms,
while constantly communicating electronically. And the hero of the story exposes this
madness. He says: “The machine works [...] but not for our purposes.” Then the
machine breaks down and with it, the entire world. Who says predictions never come
true?

The node around which everything revolves is the idea of man as a rational animal.
That does not mean that he is a rational animal by definition and a priori. His
rationality presupposes a logical language, not only an emotional language, and
abstract thinking that unfolds deductively, from premise to consequence, or
inductively, from example to general rule. It presumes a respect for facts. And most
importantly, it presumes reasonableness in the classical sense of the word. However,
this rationality — and this is the point — is a potentiality and a need, which is difficult
to achieve and easy to lose. It is just one part of our being; but it is the sine qua non,
the indispensable condition, the necessary condition of civilized life. Yet the animal
rationale is profoundly under attack, more than it ever has been. Much contemporary
philosophy, and many within the wider culture, assault the very notions of “reason”
and “truth” as a monolithic concept that has been erected deceptively and artificially.
And the cultural climate that is most supported by the media consists of attacking the
model of Western rational man, which is now considered “elitist”, abject, and passé.
Today, those who resist this trend — which is the trend of post-thinking — are clearly
in trouble or at least on the defensive.

It is certainly true that for those who focus on and worry about democracy it is hard
to preach anti-rationalism or irrationalism. Therefore, the solution in political theory
is found by postulating that the voter is rational by definition. It is maintained that
the rationality of the voter — and, broader, of the citizen — consists of “choices that
maximize perceived utility”. From this definition, which is the one in use, we can
easily deduce that the voter is always rational, given that he always seeks to maximize
his perceived utility.

But this is hardly a cogent argument. What we perceive to be useful might turn out to
be the opposite. One could say that in the latter case, we have been irrational. The
classical utilitarians, from Bentham to Mill, distinguished between utility properly
understood and utility misunderstood: and “rational” utility was only the former. A
rational voter is thus a voter who choses utility properly understood. This brings us
right back to the problem that is discarded by the idea of “rationality by definition”.
For example, we could think that it would be most useful to us to get paid without
working. But this perception of what is in our best interest is the result of short-range
thinking and would be catastrophic for everyone. Thus, it is utility misunderstood.
Let’s not play dumb: Rationality is when we formulate a rational question to which
we give a rational and reasonable answer. Even if voters were to vote only for what is
in their own self-interest and forget the common good, they still have to be rational in
order to master the problem of intelligently ascertaining and pursuing their utility.

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Now, the rational animal is either spat upon or is saved in name only. The third
alternative is not to mention it at all. For the prophets of the digital world and cyber-
space, the fact that users of the computer screen and the web are potentially rational
beings has absolutely no importance. These prophets understand very little about
rationality; and, in any case, they offer something in return: an almost infinite
freedom. This is the latest fanfare. Between television, the internet, and cyberspace,
the options that will become available to viewers and cybernauts are hundreds,
thousands, millions: so many that it is impossible to even count them. They won’t
even need to search for programs or information that they may want; the machine
does it for them. And, in this way, an individual will be able to easily satisfy any of his
curiosities or interests.

Can one be more mentally free than this? Let us ask ourselves: freedom of what and
for what? So we can engage in zapping and clicking? The video-child, being a child, is
irresistibly attracted to this game. It ends in the following way: The loquacious will
fill the internet with their need to express themselves — with their virtual graffiti —
while others will devote themselves to video games, and still others to passively
watching the images that roll by their eyes. It is true that, thanks to the machine, the
video-child might ask and get to know, say, how many speeches the Pope makes each
day. But the video-child is not interested in this, nor does he even know who the Pope
is.

The truth is that though the prophets of the digital world and cyber-space say
“freedom”, what they really mean is an increase in possibility and power resulting
from an ever-growing, infinite number of channels and bits, and ever-increasing
processing and transfer speeds. But none of this has anything to do with freedom or
choice. In fact, having infinite and unlimited choices leads to infinite and unlimited
fatigue, and weariness. The disproportion between the products offered on television
and the web and the users who would consume them is colossal and even dangerous.
We risk drowning in an exaggeration of options. The excessive bombardment of
options leads us to anomie, a burn-out and acedia — and, in this way, it all ends
concretely in very little happiness.

Another aspect of our new way of being and living is an increasing and now pervasive
artificiality. The Pleistocene hominids were already equipped with prehensile hands,
which enabled them to do many things and allowed them to become homo habilis
and homo faber. Paradoxically, for the man of today, prehensility serves almost no
purpose. The homo prensilis has atrophied into homo digitalis. In the digital age, our
day-to-day affairs have been reduced to pressing buttons on a keyboard. We do not
use our hands anymore. So we live in a closed greenhouse without any real contact
with reality, with the real world. The “hyper-mediatization” has deprived us of our
experiences — first-hand experiences — and has left us at the mercy of second-hand
experiences on the screen. This can have serious consequences. Each of us only really

43
understands the things with which we have direct, personal experience. There is no
book, no speech, no representation that can take the place of “banging your head”. To
learn how to swim you have to jump into the water.

The point is that in the telematic world, the direct experience of most people is to a
large extent limited to pressing buttons on a keyboard and reading answers from a
screen. For homo videns, there is no learning to be gained from knowing by doing. In
his Scienza Nuova (1730), Giambattista Vico drew up a plan of an “ideal eternal
history” divided into three ages, the first of which — the initial age — he imaginatively
depicted as a society of “horrible beast-men” lacking the capacity for reflection but
with strong senses and great imagination. Post-thinking man, incapable of abstract
and analytical thinking, increasingly sputtering when faced with demonstrations of
logic and rational deduction but, at the same time, strengthened in the sense of
seeing (the ocular man) and fantasizing (virtual worlds): Is he not exactly the man
described by Vico? It sure looks like him.

He also resembles him in credulity and superstition. The progress of science — as we

are told from the Enlightenment onwards — would liberate man from his irrational
beliefs. Instead, the more it advances, technology is producing a man who is even
more of a “sucker” than medieval man. Why? Because although medieval man
believed in quite a few absurdities, they were bounded by a rational Weltanschauung,
a rational conception of the world, while contemporary man is a spineless creature
who doesn’t know what to believe in, because everything can be said to be good and
true, depending on one’s point of view.

It is not a paradox, therefore, that the same country that has the greatest
technological science, the United States, is also the country with the greatest
superstitions and the country which most embraces third-rate cults?

6. Competition is Not a Remedy

Before concluding, let us return to the specific problem of political information.

Everyone or almost everyone agrees that television and internet information has a
very low level. The “new class” that manages video-power defends itself against these
accusations and instead heaps blame upon the audience. Yes; but this is a defense
made in bad faith, because on television and internet, more than anywhere else, it is
the manufacturer that produces the consumer. If it were to provide a sufficient
volume of critical information about world news, the audience would become
interested in the world. If the world disappears from the screen, it is obvious that the
viewer no longer has any interest in the world, not even, as mentioned above, in the
fall of the Berlin Wall. How to resolve this difficulty?

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Until recently, the usual answer was that this would become better once we truly
achieved a pluralistic order stimulated by competition from private television and
internet. This argument sounded plausible in all countries where the government had
a monopoly over television and controlled what was broadcast. Since then, we saw
the introduction everywhere of commercial television channels and internet. And the
effect? The situation is far worse than ever before.

Before proclaiming that privatization improves things, it would have been better to
have kept in mind that for the large European tycoons of today — the Murdochs or
the Berlusconis — money is everything, and civic or cultural value is zero. The irony
of the situation is that in their climb to create immense media empires, Berlusconi
and Murdoch have portrayed themselves as “democrats” who offered the public what
it wanted, while dismissing public television as “elitist”, offering the public what it
ought to want. Molière’s Tartuffe would have been envious of this kind of rhetoric, so
worthy of an impostor. The fact remains that private television and internet do not
raise but rather lower the level of what we see on the screen.

Some may say that privatization is one thing and competition something different.
True. But we can learn from the lesson America teaches. If there is one country that
has never had media monopolies, and in which television and internet developed and
operate in conditions of full independence and competition, it is the United States.
Yet the United States is, with regard to the tele-formation of public opinion, worse off
than any other Western country. Why? One’s perplexity is justified, since competition
is considered by all to be a self-correcting mechanism. According to the theory of
competition, the consumer should punish the producers of bad news in the same way
that he punishes the manufacturer of shoddy automobiles or refrigerators. But this is
not the case.

I have always maintained that the analogy between the economic market and the
political market, between competition among producers of goods and competition
between parties, is a weak analogy. But it seems that competition between media — in
terms of its self-correcting features — functions even worse than political
competition. What we have there is not a race to the top, to the best price quality
ratio, but a race to the bottom, to the dirtiest sleaze and the fakest news. Obviously
not all competition is equal in its virtuous outcomes. We have to take note of the fact
that competition between the media does not produce competitive benefits but rather
a debasement of its products.

What to do? I have no magic bullet to propose. A democracy cannot exist unless it
keeps television and internet under control. Without such control, tele-democracy
fosters a suicidal attitude that, as I have already said, entrusts the rule of a
government to drivers who don’t have a driver’s license. The first step is always
becoming aware of a problem, and then being determined to resist and react. It’s thus

45
really important to react head-on against the arrogance and intellectual charlatanism
of the prophets of the brave new electronic world.

7. Rationality and Post-Thinking

The contrast I am drawing between homo sapiens and, say, homo insipiens does not
presuppose any idealization of the past. The homo insipiens, dumb and ignorant, has
always existed and has always been numerous. But until the advent of mass media,
these ‘large numbers’ were dispersed and, thereby, largely irrelevant. Mass
communications instead has created a mobilized world in which the “dispersed” find
each other and can “assemble”, and in this way create a mass and gain strength. In
principle, this is fine; but it is less so in practice. And here, above all, the internet
comes into play, opening up a huge new game because the highways of the internet
are open — indeed wide open — to all kinds of crazes, from the extravagant to the
deviant, ranging all the way from pedophiles (private vices) to terrorists (public
scourges). Therefore, even if the poor of mind and spirit have always existed, the
difference is that in the past they did not count — they were neutralized by their own
dispersion — while today they can find each other and, by connecting themselves, can
multiply and strengthen.

The thesis of this book, however, is not so much about homo insipiens, as about
homo sapiens. It is that we are witnessing the latter’s extinction, and that this will
have grave consequences. A man who loses the capacity for abstract thought is eo
ipso unable of rational thought. He is, therefore, a symbolic animal that is no longer
able to feed, let alone sustain, the world built by homo sapiens.

About this, the media specialists fall conspicuously silent. Their fanfare speaks only of
the radiant advent of a bright, new world in which the new man, homo communicans,
is immersed through the mass media in permanent communication with everyone
else. Yes but communicating what? The vacuum communicates the void and the
video-child — the man dissolved in streams of mass media — is lonely. And hollow. A
hollow man.

We are the hollow men

We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats’ feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar

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The truth — underlying the trumpeted news that obscures it — is that the world
constructed of images is disastrous for the paideia of a rational animal. As a result,
television and the internet destroy democracy by weakening its basis, which is a
relatively enlightened public opinion.

Today as always, societies have problems. Until fairly recently, it was believed that
the solution to some of society’s most pressing problems was to entrust things to
politicians, in the same way that help is asked of a doctor if one has a medical
problem, and from lawyers in the case of a legal problem. But today, we attribute the
problems to politicians and the solution to the people — hence, the demagoguery of
the polls, the referendum, and direct democracy.

I have referred to this annihilation of thinking several times. Let me explain myself
once more. The attack on rationality is as old as rationality itself. But it has always
been — from Aristotle down to us — a rational attack. Think of Tertullian and his
credo quia absurdum. Think of Ockham’s distrust of the human mind. Think of
Pascal, Rousseau, and Nietzsche, who, in their own different ways, countered the
Cartesian cogito. But these were great men of letters and in their attacks on the
cogito, they were also formidable thinkers. In short, they were not man-beasts. Those
who exalt “perennial communication”, on the other hand, are. What they propose is
not genuine anti-thought, a demonstrated or demonstrable attack on logical-rational
thinking; it is simply a loss of thought, a banal descent into the inability to articulate
clear and distinct ideas.

So the point is not so much that we find a large number of famous authors to attack
rationality. The point is mainly that the relationship between mainstream and
secondary streams, between reply and counter-reply, has been turned around. Today
weak minds abound and they are rampant because they come across a public that has
never been trained to think. And the fault of television and internet in this vicious
circle is, amid all the confused thoughts, to give priority to the wacky, the excited, the
exaggerated, the charlatans. Television and internet reward and promote
extravagance, absurdity, and senselessness. And in this way it strengthens and
multiplies homo insipiens.

Post-thinking is triumphant. Ignorance has almost become a virtue, as if a

primordial, untouched, and incorrupt being had been re-constituted; and, in the
same way, incongruence and mental cowardice is now depicted as a “superior
sensitivity”, as an esprit de finesse that liberates us from the narrowness of the esprit
de géometrie, from the aridity of the rational.

While many civilizations have vanished without a trace, Western man was able to
overcome the decline — to truly “low” depths — of the early Middle Ages. He rose
again and re-emerged by virtue of the unum necessarium, which is the infrastructure

47
or logical-rational armor. Although I do not despair, I also do not want to hide the
fact that a return from our inability to think to actual thought is an uphill fight. This
return will certainly not happen if we do not defend reading, books, and written
culture to the bitter end.

It is not true — as suggested by the superficiality of the multimedia specialists — that

the loss of written culture is offset by the acquisition of an audio-visual culture. It is
not clear that upon a king’s death he will be succeeded by another, since we could also
find ourselves without a king. Fake money does not make up for real money: It
eliminates it. And between written culture and audio-visual culture there is only a
stark contrast. As observed by Ferrarotti with great finesse, “reading requires
solitude, concentration on the page, the ability to appreciate clarity and distinction”;
while homo sentiens (the Ferrarottian equivalent of my homo videns) exhibits
characteristics that are quite the opposite:

“Reading tires him [...] He senses. He prefers summarized meaning and

lightning-fast synthetic images. This fascinates and seduces him. He renounces
logical connections, the rational sequence, the reflection which necessarily
implies a return to himself [...] He gives in to the immediate, warm,
emotionally engaging impulse. He chooses to live (the) way of life that is
typical of an infant, who eats when he wants, weeps if he experiences
discomfort, sleeps, wakes up, and meets his needs in the moment.”

This portrait seems perfect. Audio-visual culture is “uneducated” and, therefore, not
culture.

I was saying that to solve problems, one must always start with awareness. Parents
should be frightened of what is becoming of their children: more and more lost souls
and stragglers, bored, in psychotherapy, in depressive crises, and “sick from the
emptiness”. We should react with schools and at schools. Their bad habit is to fill
classrooms with televisions and internet-connected computers. Instead, we should
ban them, allowing them only for technical training, as you would in a typing course.

In school, the poor children are supposed to have “fun”. But with such an attitude,
you cannot teach them to write or read, let alone to help them become literate. And
thus schools reinforce the growth of the video-child instead of providing an
alternative.

The bad habit of newspapers is similar: It is to imitate and catch up with television
and internet by getting rid of serious content and, instead, exaggerate and give voice
to emotional events, increasing the “color” of the pages and the number and size of
the images, or crafting small packets of news, as in the television news. And at the
end of this road one arrives at USA Today, the emptiest of all newspapers in the
world. Newspapers would do better if they were to dedicate a page every day to the

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nonsense, frivolity, triviality, mistakes, and blunders seen on television or internet
the day before. The audience would enjoy it and they would read the newspapers to
“get their revenge” on the mass media— and perhaps in this way these might
improve.

And to those who say these are retrograde actions, I reply: What if, on the contrary,
these are avant-garde actions?

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