We might or might not be in the middle of a shift in popular consciousness as a result of the invasion of electronic media, as Sven Birkerts and others suggest. It is certainly true that my students today behave differently from those of a mere fifteen years ago. They are, for instance, much better at judging performative aspects of my teaching than their predecessors. And they are, if not worse at reading, much less apologetic. (On the other hand, academics write more to less purpose, and more obscurely, than ever before, so maybe the grounds for indignation are less ample than one might think.)

But even if we’re looking at a consciousness sea change, I don’t think that’s what the authors of Terminal Reading are mostly responding to. I think what they’re noticing is the wholesale commercialization of our culture. Or if they’re not, they ought to be. It is not the medium, pace McLuhan (and Birkerts), but the message that’s bothering me. It’s not what the medium is but how it’s used.

You can use television to transmit wall-to-wall commercials, like MTV; headlines from Homogenization Central, like CNN; or such domestic mythology as "The Brady Bunch." Or you can use it to transmit citizen-filmed scenes of police brutality, in-depth discussion of the Gulf War, city council meetings, programs that encourage reading (and actually work) like "Reading Rainbow," and at-home college classes. You could even use it to offer a primer on how to "read" television, how to decipher the codes that television’s programmers use.

Mostly it’s the first and not the second kind of example we see. But that’s not because television’s aesthetics are different from those of print (although of course they are). It’s because television has grown to be the monster it is by being fed advertising. Advertisers rarely prescribe programming–they’re as baffled as anybody else at what makes a hit–but they do avoid what’s unlikely to draw as large an appropriate audience as possible.

The advertisers are everywhere in mass media–even in books, now, thanks to Chris Whittle. Their language is universal (reach out and touch someone). Their message–be all you can buy–is inexhaustible. You will never be done with it; there will always be a new you to discover with the new fashion. It’s a way of life.

I was recently interviewed by a clutch of reporters and producers on the occasion of MTV’s tenth anniversary. Several of these twentysomething professionals admitted that although they had been watching MTV for years, they had never, until researching this story, thought about the fact that the music videos themselves were commercials. And this in spite of a glut of "entertainment industry" reporting, in electronic media as well as print. Why hadn’t they noticed? Presumably because nobody to whom they paid attention told them in a way that mattered. Some of my students have trouble grasping why it’s even an issue that a program should be nonstop commercials.

But I don’t think it’s the fault of televison, or even MTV, that they don’t or can’t draw out the implications of an advertisement-driven culture. I don’t think MTV could possibly have become a successful format if it didn’t come to well-prepared ground.

Media have certainly been the conduit for a marketing-led commercial culture, a culture in which people are promised a full-time, lifetime job creating their own identities through consumption. And electronic media have been extremely persuasive sales agents for the national transformation from citizen and producer to consumer. They would not today be universal objects if they were not such good marketing vehicles. And yes, they game is intensifying; as the endemic headache of the marketers–"clutter"–gets worse and worse, they search out bathroom stalls and supermarket checkout lines and airport terminals for more advertising space. But the problem isn’t electronic media any more than the aesthetics of print are responsible for the envelope copy on direct mail packages.

Among the things we don’t need to worry about, I think, is a concern for the future of reading. If we do, then I need the people who mourn the passing of print to give me better answers than I can find for these questions:

– How much were the working poor reading in the day before mass circulation newspaper sand magazines? And what most effectively boosted that circulation? does buying a newspaper to get "The Yellow Kid" comics count as involvement in a linear, somehow better culture?

– Has the professional elite in this country, and its technical support class, really declined in their reading capacities When Jeffrey Katzenberg wanted to communicate with Disney executives last summer, he wrote a memo and people read it, far, far beyond the confines of the corporation.

– Have computers reduced the amount of writing and reading? Not if we judge by the amount of paper generated in the computerized workplace. the "paperless office" is becoming the hula hoop of New Age concepts. And is computer "literacy" supposed somehow to be "nonlinear"? Certainly not at the receiving end, even when manipulating software. WordPerfect, the most popular software, is supremely linear.

– Have digital computer innovations reduced the domain of print? If so, please explain to me the multiplication of faxes around the world.

So I think we are all uneasy about something real, but it’s not electronic media. It’s the ingenuity of marketers at using them in order to sell, not just their products, but a way of life defined by endless choice among few, and very limiting, options. For instance, when Todd Gitlin notices a greater credulity going hand in hand with a greater "weightlessness," he’s deliberately describing the results of commercialism. When Ella Taylor describes the erosion of contemplation, she describes it against the background of a rising commercial youth culture.

And we’re uneasy about something that the seamlessly commercial mass media have accomplished, which is a shallow but superficially convincing national consensus. "We" like strawberry ice cream (something the newspaper USA Today, not a radio or television program, tells us, please note), and "we" "support the troops." But we"– or rather the programmers of our mass media, who dislike intensely distracting us from the business of consumption, and possibly dividing not only our attention but also the "we" that’s created when dividing issues are removed from the discussion–find analysis of stinky, ugly issues like the militarization of the economy, the corruption of social welfare programs, the generation of and disposal of toxic wastes, the ecological cost of development either tedious or uncomfortable. The creation of a pseudo-public, a cheaply unified national culture stuck together with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles chewing gum, has a terrific cost.

That doesn’t mean that I think that in the days before mass circulation newspapers, rock radio, and music video, Americans flocked to town meetings and perused daily papers for information to bolster high-minded discussion of public issues. the history of American democracy is the history of hucksterism and foolishness; you don’t need to be a Mencken to notice that.

But the changing element brought by the mass culture marketers, the purveyors of salesmanship as a central form of discourse, was the illusion of a common political, or public culture. The sleight of hand executed by marketers is one of substitution: for self-definition through relationships with people they substitute self-definition through relationship with things–an infinitely more lonely and never-ending pursuit.

Are we to sink, like Neil Postman, into an old-fogey gloom, dreaming of a return to a better past when (fewer, better selected) people read and discussed? Are we to celebrate, à la Camille Paglia, our ability to ingest simultaneously ever greater amounts of information?

I think if we focus on the medium and individual reception of information, jumping directly from the technological to the psychological, we won’t come up with any interesting alternatives to being curmudgeons. I think we out to ask ourselves how we can organize for more public space in our local and virtual communities; for better public policy (in telecommunications especially); for better education in schools and in the media about the media; and In all the ways we can, with our polycultural ingenuity fully at work, organize to make citizenship something sexier than sixth-grade civics can’t, to make it something we want as much as we want our MTV.