The Real Question: Will New Technology Make Us Even Dumber? By Jeff Smith WE IN THE United States of America today are living--and living in--a paradox, an oxymoron, a purgatory...a limbo that partakes of both definitions of the term. We are caught between heaven and hell in a nowhere/everywhere deliciously and dangerously close to the gates of both. And like the West Indian dance/American beach party game, the lower we go, the higher we achieve. What set me off? Well, the presidential election silly season, the Republican and Democratic conventions, and Donald Kaul. Donald Kaul is a columnist from Des Moines, Iowa. At least that's where his checks come from. He works out of Washington, D.C., and appears in various newspapers around the country, including The Arizona Daily Star in Tucson. From his picture, he looks a bit like Don Robinson, who used to cover politics for the Star. You're too young to remember. Anyway, Kaul is funnier than shit and smart too, never mind being from Des Moines. Kaul was commenting on the sameness of the two major party conventions and said this: "It's ironic, the more the conventions are tailored to the requirements of television, the duller they become. What does that tell you about television?" It tells me, confirms rather, what I've been thinking and saying about the tube since pretty people with mics and cameras began shoving guys like me, with notebooks and pencils, to the back of the room: TV, with all its staggering potential to carry information to the masses, is the major contributor to the dumbing of America. And the better the television producers do their job, the worse it gets. Better/worse: see how my paradoxical/oxymoronic/purgatorial metaphor fits? Here we are, on the doorstep of the New Millennium, already merged from the on-ramp to the Information Superhighway and moving toward the fast lane. We're wired for everything from satellite uplinks to holographic security checks, and wireless for the rest. And what do we do with all this hardware and software, all this potential information impartment and intellectual empowerment? We stage a pair of hugely expensive informercials that, if points were awarded solely for content, would belong on after-midnight satellite TV only, along with the Psychic Connection and the Ab-Blaster. I am beholden to some nameless wag for the infomercial line, but given a few more minutes I'd have come to the same conclusion. My initial take was pep rally, but that merely dates me. But I remember when the quadrennial party conventions were some of the best television on television. When shit happened. John Kennedy had not been crowned when he arrived at the Democratic convention in 1960. Sure, he was the Las Vegas favorite, but you could still make money on him. And Lyndon Johnson for veep? Anybody holding that daily double could have retired to Bimini on his winnings. Watching this unlikely ticket emerge from the moiling, toiling mass of humanity on the convention floor, and then amid acrid clouds of cigar smoke as the doors of the backrooms cracked open, was witnessing history-in-progress... ...in real time and right before our eyes. If this was politics at its most raw, potentially corruptible and undemocratic, it was at least television at its best. What have we got today? Well we've got television that is so far advanced in technology that to watch John Chancellor covering the '60 convention is to forget the momentousness of what he was reporting, and laugh instead at the primitive production technique. We're toy-rich and content-poor. Truth to tell, there's not a lot of content in contemporary politics to which the public is privy. Conventions don't select candidates, primaries do, and this process really isn't much more democratic than the old smoke-filled room system, in which Richard Daley could nearly turn the tide of history with hysterics. I mean seriously: Is it sensible or smart to pick the two from whom the one will be chosen, by polling a comparatively few folks from Iowa and New Hampshire? Not when, in this age of instantaneous electronic access to information, we have the tools to elect a president by direct, popular vote, interactively and in the blink of an eye. And this, after each and every voter has had access via this same information network, to good data on the candidates and the issues. We could do it but we don't. Television, the most democratic of media, could be paradise but winds up wasteland. Because we vote it that way. With our remotes and our dollars. The new technologies like the Web promise to be even more democratic. Will they follow the low-road of television? And will American politics ride there with them? It's up to us.

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