The Harvard Gazette is running an excerpt from the start of the concluding chapter of Superbloom, in which I discuss media’s Nietzschean ability to absorb threats by turning them into content. The excerpt opens with the cautionary tale of Frank Walsh, the first man to shoot a television set.
It was a Sunday night, October 19, 1952, and Frank Walsh, a Long Island electrician who moonlighted as a security guard, was worn out. He headed upstairs to bed while the rest of his family — wife, mother-in-law, five kids — stayed down in the living room watching TV. They were engrossed in the latest episode of “The Abbott and Costello Show,” a new hit comedy airing on the local NBC affiliate. Walsh tossed and turned but couldn’t fall asleep. The television was too loud, the laughter jarring. His irritation mounted, then turned to rage. He got up and grabbed the .38 Special he used in his guard job. Halfway down the stairs, the offending set came into view. He paused, took aim, and fired a bullet through the screen.
Walsh’s wife, furious, called the police. Officers arrived and confiscated the revolver, but they made no arrest. There’s no law, they explained, against shooting one’s own television. Two days later, the New York Times ran a brief, tongue-in-cheek notice about the incident, under the headline “Obviously Self-Defense.” The day after that, a Times columnist, Jack Gould, praised Walsh’s “public-spirited act.” He called on the authorities to give the man his gun back. “His work has barely started.” The paper’s coverage turned Walsh into a celebrity. Within a week, he appeared as a contestant on the popular prime-time game show “Strike It Rich.” He won a TV.
Thanks to its lack of attachments, its promiscuous flexibility, mass media has always been resilient. It absorbs the criticisms directed at it (even when they take the form of projectiles), turns them into programming, airs them, then distracts us from them with the next spectacle. Social media goes a step further. . . .
You can read the entire excerpt here.
Great article.
The last words are key: "But maybe it's not too late to change ourselves".
Now that Carr's words are out there in the universe, we are free to interpret them as we will. For me, they mean "I don't need to be on Facebook/Instagram, Twitter, or TikTok". Humans love diversion, and I'm no exception, but the ills these 3 contribute to society? Zuckerberg, Musk, and a company ultimately controlled by the Chinese Communist Party?
Nope; I don't need any of them. I can't and won't speak for others, as we all have different needs, but I know what's right for me.