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Talking with George Gilder

ER: So what becomes of the herd instinct? Does it go away?

GILDER: There will always be certain things that people still want to do in large numbers, but in general it's people as individuals or as members of homes and families that can cement to more edifying disciplines. A mob can just say yes or no, whereas an individual can articulate, can express subtle and complex ideas, can respond to art, can aspire toward God. Rather than encouraging the mass tendencies of the population, we should be trying to counteract them and to educate the population. Education is a fulfillment of individual distinction and excellence; it shouldn't be a pandering to mass taste and appetites. And to the extent that schools do try to cater to their students rather than to teach them, the schools will fail and will contribute to the general deterioration of learning.

ER: If we think of life before television as the age of the amateur (with social life focused on the family piano, on amateur theater groups, on sandlot baseball games), and life during television as the age of the professional (with social life organized around boob tube performances by millionaire actors, comedians, athletes, and politicians), how should we think about the quality of life after television? Will it help us back to the idyllic past of the amateur? Or will it be better than our past as well our present?

GILDER: I think it will be better. I think the culture will take a form more resembling the book culture than the TV culture. There are 55,000 books published in the United States every year. There's a religious book market as big as the trade book market, and each of those markets amount to about $2.5 billion. There are a huge number of successful technical books and career books, and there's a wide diversity of literature. I think the book market is a much better reflection of American culture than the TV market, which I think is a perversion of American culture. In general, the interactive media culture will resemble book culture and literary culture more than it will the current mass culture. You know, the people who produce mass culture are the ultimate elitists. I've often debated with them, and they'll say to me, "You don't understand, George, the reason that the boob tube is an idiot box is that people really are boobs. We've done market research. We know they're boobs."

Well, I think they just don't understand the business. Of course, confronted with the boob tube, we're all boobs; when I get into a hotel room at night and start clicking through channels, I get distracted by the shocks and sensations just as anyone else would. The critical fact is that a mass medium is no good whatsoever at conveying educated ideas; if it happens to convey a sophisticated idea, that's just an accident. I think the French were perfectly right in trying to exclude U.S. television programs, because for the most part such programs are the ultimate realization of mass taste, and they are depraved and destructive. They are deeply destructive to American society, particularly to any effort to educate anyone in it. And yet the schools increasingly try to simulate the TV culture, which is their worst betrayal!

ER: Simulate TV culture in what way?

GILDER: By having students read dumb books that seem to be simulations of TV sensibility. By avoiding anything difficult. By trying to pander to the kids, to entertain them rather than teach them.

ER: Compare two serious approaches to television: PBS and C-SPAN. Some people have said that C-SPAN is what public television ought to be. What do you think?

GILDER: C-SPAN now exists without the aid of public TV, and PBS works at all only because of the garbage that's on all the other channels. Just by being explicitly elitist, PBS can shine luminously in the darkness. But beyond that, I just don't really believe any of these channels or networks have a future. And, particularly, I don't think TV news has any future at all. So I believe that although within the existing regime of thirty channels or whatever, C-SPAN and PBS are better than the others, it's all still a vast wasteland. A channel like C-SPAN will still have a place in a world where you have one channel and it's yours, but enterprises like PBS and CNN are resources only for a world in which there are few channels and no control over them.

ER: Why is there no future for TV news?

GILDER: Because TV news is all governed by the two-minute rule, which says that you can't devote more than two minutes to a story unless it's a war or something. But the reason for that is not that people have any particular desire for two-minute stories; to the contrary, people want much more than two minutes on any story that actually interests them.

TV's two-minute rule exists because people will zap any story longer than two minutes that doesn't interest them. And so network news is guided entirely by that negative constraint, and within the two-minute limit, it necessarily has to go for sensational images and crashes and fires and murders and whatever. News is getting worse and worse that way, and the only reason TV news now succeeds is its timeliness and its ability to present video, but newspapers will shortly be able to present video and pictures and everything else in just as timely a way as television does; moreover, the newspaper of the future will be able to give you access to archives and to advertisements that actually step you through to the transaction itself, a process that requires text.

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