THE IMAGE: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (1961) by Daniel Boorstin. Book Review by Nigel Beale
Posted in Uncategorized on May 22nd, 2006
THE IMAGE: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (1961) by Daniel Boorstin
It defines our culture, this pervasive sense of dis-satisfaction; this insatiable appetite for stimulation and entertainment, this fear and abhorrence of boredom.
For patients it’s a discontent attributed by the psychoanalyst to a lack of early parental love. Just ask Tony Soprano. For society at large, American Historian Daniel Boorstin says it’s because we expect too much of the world.
During the early decades of this century, Edward Bernays and Walter Lippmann, among others, wrote brilliantly about the power of illusion to influence and mold public opinion, prescribing it as a tool the elite must use in order to stay in power (Hitler was, unfortunately, an early, receptive admirer of Bernays).
The Image is an important, prescient work because it is among the first to critically evaluate the impact that fabricated reality has on individuals, society and its institutions.
Fuelled by the media, public relations and advertising, our spiraling expectations create, according to Boorstin, a continuous demand for increasingly grandiose illusions; addictive facades which ultimately disappoint. Due to this demand, the making of illusions has become the business of America.
Today, when we pick up a newspaper we expect to read about momentous events. Forget serious, objective, pedestrian detail. We want big news. Large scale corruption, scandal and death with big headlines.
We expect more novelty, excitement and ‘meaning’ from the world than it has to offer. The media does it’s best to compensate for this deficit, fabricating news from nothing.
No longer a factual account, says Boorstin, news is anything that makes the reader say gee whiz.
With the media constantly fabricating news in order to entertain its audiences, and P.R. fabricating events to attract attention, we the public are exposed to an unrelenting flood of ‘pseudo-events’. Un-spontaneous happenings that are planned planted or incited. Not earthquakes or train-wrecks, but interviews (or refused interviews), protest rallies and ‘leaks’.
Take for example, the hotel that wants to increase its ‘prestige’. Prior to the ‘graphics revolution’, as Boorstin calls it, management would have hired a new chef, improved the plumbing, installed new carpets and painted the lobby. Now, says Boorstin, the public relations counsel suggests staging a 30th anniversary celebration: form a committee, people it with a prominent banker, a society matron, an articulate lawyer, and a well regarded preacher; plan a banquet to celebrate the hotel’s distinguished service to the community, get the media out to report on it, and bingo, a self fulfilling prophesy: saying it’s a distinguished hotel actually makes it one, without the bother of all those messy renovations.
On the media side, reporters are now judged not by their skill at dramatic reporting, but by their adeptness at delivering ‘hard facts’ pregnant with dark intimation; their ability to manufacture intriguing ‘factasy’, and their capacity to speculate seriously on the reality of tales just told.
According to Boorstin, pseudo-events thrive on our honest desire to be informed, our duty to self-educate. By synthesizing reality they move people indirectly by providing them with a factual basis upon which to make up their minds. Propaganda on the other hand, feeds on our willingness to be influenced, substituting facts for opinion. It moves people directly by explicitly making judgments for them. Propaganda oversimplifies experience, pseudo-events over complicates it.
Freedom of the press is now a euphemism for the prerogative of reporters to produce a synthetic commodity. Freedom of speech has come to mean little more than freedom on the part of politicians, interest groups, business and the media to fabricate attractive ‘informative’ accounts and images of the world, which vie for popular acceptance.
Pseudo-events make experience more ’sociable, conversable and convenient to watch’.
Knowledge of what has been reported, and how it has been staged, becomes the test of being informed. Our demand for novelty makes most of the information we receive trivial and unreal.
If today’s reality is short on genuine events, then, says Boorstin, real heroes are virtually extinct. Fame used to come slowly and only if greatness was exemplified. Now, thanks to the media, we have overnight celebrities ‘known for little more than their well-knownness; receptacles into which we pour our own purposelessness, our selves seen in magnifying mirrors,’ as easily destroyed as created. Because celebrities dominate our world we lose sight of the grounds for greatness. ‘We come closer and closer to degrading all fame into notoriety.’
The philosopher Bertrand Russell once suggested that a quiet life is characteristic of most great men. That their pleasures have not been of the sort which appear ‘exciting’, that no great achievement is possible without persistent, all-absorbing, difficult work. Boorstin, in concluding his book, suggests that before we can follow such a path, we must first discover and understand the illusions in our world.
The first third of The Image provides a convincing original description and diagnosis of what ails our image-drenched world. Boorstin’s take on how we have all come to expect too much of the world is masterful, and now constitutes one of the most significant truths of 21st century American life. When Boorstin published The Image in 1961, today’s ‘Age of Contrivance’ had barely dawned. American ideals were just beginning to be replaced by superficial illusion. He saw what was taking place with a remarkable prescience.
Unfortunately the remaining two-thirds of the book does not warrant as close a reading as the first. Save for some insightful observations on tourism, bestsellers, and advertising, it is, to tell the truth, rather boring.
For readers who, thanks to Boorstin, know that modern culture is an illusion, but have yet to find satisfaction, Bertrand Russell’s comments, here paraphrased, are worth a more considered look: ‘Those with a serious constructive purpose in life will endure voluntarily a great deal of boredom if they find it necessary along the way. But constructive purposes do not easily form themselves in a boy’s mind if he is living a life of distractions and dissipations, for in that case his thoughts will always be directed towards the next pleasure rather than towards the distant achievement. For all these reasons a generation that cannot endure boredom will be a generation of little men, of men unduly divorced from ‘the essential nourishment of nature, from contact with the ebb and flow of terrestrial life.’ (This was written in 1930).
This book review was first published in PR Canada.
