Don't Read This Book
If so, we think it's important to warn you about a dangerous book, one which you should go out of your way to avoid. Reading Bill McKibben's The Age of Missing Information can have a definite, powerfully inhibiting effect on your TV viewing regimen. I know, because I read it three years ago, and now I, who used to be a satellite junkie, find it difficult, almost painful to watch TV. What happened? Up front I admit I was already drifting away from the commercial- filled inanity of television before I read McKibben. Partly it was the Internet, partly it was mental and emotional growth. McKibben seems to have given me the final shove away from the 625-line wonderscreen. In the early 90s, McKibben arranged with a number of friends and acquaintances around the Fairfax, Virginia, area to do him a little favor. He would supply each of them with 24-hours' worth of blank video tape. He asked each person, on a given day in May, to record 24 hours of programming on one of Fairfax's 103 cable channels. Each person was assigned a different channel. When finished, would they please mail the tapes to McKibben. This they did. Soon after, McKibben sat down to watch it all. The Age of Missing Information is record of what he watched-- and what happened to him as he watched. Think of it as one person O-D-ing on American video culture. He couldn't take it, at least not in one long, unadulterated hit. The book is a series of alternating pairs of chapters. In one chapter he gives us snippets of what he saw on the tapes. Then, feeling his sanity slipping, he escapes by taking hikes and brief camping trips in the Adirondacks, where he lives, and we get lovely, seductive words about the beneficent therapy of nature. Next chapter, it's back to the TV feast, and so on. The effect is a kind of Walden Pond for video-depressives. The TV chapters have something wildly insane about them, manic, unreal, surreal, like McMurphy's encounters with Nurse Ratched in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. We all (those of us who still watch TV) see this stuff all the time, but never in the kind of pure feed that McKibben was subjecting himself to. Like heroin addicts, we build up a tolerance and see nothing unusual about the forced, fast-edit mix of commerce, bite-sized "news", non-stop musical clichés, canned and stale "humor," and the tiny rare morsel of "culture." Reading McKibben, you don't know whether to laugh or cry, because you're aware that the pixel world he's describing is only as far away from you as the nearest remote control. If you stick with him to the end of the book, you'll discover he's brainwashed you. No. WRONG. You've been UN-brainwashed. You won't be able to watch television in the same old pod-people way that is our general habit. Which is why, if you're content with your somnambulistic mainlining of video nonsense, you should never, ever read The Age of Missing Information. END
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