Bill McKibben: The Age of Missing Information

Book cover via AmazonBill McKibben is a Christian environmentalist; or rather he's both a Christian and an environmentalist, and one of the people I want to look to in my effort to reconcile my values on one side (the Christian side, for lack of a better word) with the values on the other side (the uneasy side; the countercultural side). I first discovered him through Long Distance, a book he wrote about taking a year off to train as a cross-country skier. I liked that book a lot: it was short, it was linear, it was a personal narrative with a strong human voice, and it was a book about an obsession.

I'd heard about The Age of Missing Information some years ago: McKibben gets tapes of everything broadcast on the Fairfax cable system, then sits down and watches it all. In the book he contrasts this with a day spent hiking, camping, and swimming in the Adirondacks.

There are several ways to approach a narrative like this; one is to lay out facts for the reader and encourage him toward conclusions. Another is to lay out a narrative and fit bits of story into it. McKibben chooses the latter, and the book suffers for it. This is a problem that crops up repeatedly with these adventure-as-activism narratives: Barbara Ehrenreich doesn't make the choices a real person who had to live on the proceeds from a minimum-wage job would have to make, and she doesn't take advantage of all the services society offers someone in that position: no earned income credits on her taxes, no food stamps, no public transit, etc. Judith Levine splurges and compromises until her experiment in not buying things is empty and silly, so she pads out the book with protest rallies.

McKibben doesn't compromise; his narrative is subjective from the beginning. He doesn't tell us what he watched, and he doesn't tell us where he went camping, etc. So while his experience may have been valid his representation of it is just one long unbroken appeal to experiences we haven't shared and can't observe. And while I'm not that eager to visit his idyllic Adirondacks village, I guess I found myself discounting every uncritical thing he had to say about it.

I guess what I'm saying is this: I think his book would have been improved substantially if he'd bothered to share the Fairfax cable TV schedule with us, instead of just his impressions of it, arranged to suit his points.

Instead what we get is an impressionistic portrait of the day arranged in chapters with headings that suggest that they took place at different parts of the day: 10AM, 2:30PM, Twilight, Deeper Twilight, etc. Against this background McKibben arranges sections about how television is ruining society because it does various things: presents lots of a certain kind of information, but none of another kind, portrays unrealistic lifestyles, suggests unrealistic expectations for conflict resolution, etc. Unfortunately this too is weakened by the lack of facts in his story: he tells two stories, one about a future we can interpret and another about a past we can't see, and suggests that one of them is better than the other, but without suggesting anything helpful for moving from one to the other.

I very badly wanted to like this book: I like the idea of watching everything that can be seen on one cable system in one iconic day. But I honestly don't care how homesick Bill McKibben is for some disappearing past; he's welcome to go live there as far as I'm concerned.

In the interest of full disclosure I'll say the following: I don't own a television, and haven't lived in a house that had one in over a year. I haven't watched the late local news in years, and I couldn't tell you if for example Nightline is still on the air. I suspect that we'd all be better off if we were more in tune with the cycle of seasons and could feed ourselves from our own little gardens, etc. I just found this book to be a needlessly emotional nostalgic soup. And I was insulted by the author's approach of sticking fact-like things to a narrative rather than making observations and presenting us with warranted conclusions.

Oh yeah: I'll probably read more McKibben. But it'll be a while.

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Image via WikipediaWork's been crazy, and last week doubly so: I don't know about you, but I'm a lot less secure, financially speaking, than I was a month ago. I've been rearranging my media consumption, too, adding the NPR Planet Money podcast and both (for the moment) Richard Land podcasts.

I do not like Richard Land. I blame him for the Iraq War.

Well, it's not really that simple: Land is the author of the Land Letter, a document that made one of the big mistakes conservative Christians make in confusing the authority to do something and the rightness of doing it. Yes, a head of state has the authority to declare war, and yes, a head of state holds the power of life and death, but Land, along with Bill Bright, Chuck Colson, Carl Herbster, and D. James Kennedy should not have jumped on the bandwagon for the current Iraq war. Their reading of "just war theory" is responsible (not to say primarily responsible) for the deaths of thousands of Iraqis, many of them Christians.

I'm listening to Land anyway; I've ignored the mechanics of the relationship between conservative Christians and whatever Land is selling (the Republican Party? the American Way of Life? who knows?) for too long. I honestly believe Land is intentionally repackaging Republican talking points for consumption by Southern Baptists for the purpose of making conservative Christians a captive constituency of the Republican Party. I'm listening to him primarily because I "know" this stinks, but I can't yet put exactly what's wrong into words I can stand behind.

(For the record that's a picture of Kennedy, not Land; Zemanta can't seem to find a good picture of Land. I blame his name.)

I also read Steve Brown's book What Was I Thinking? Things I've Learned Since I Knew It All, partly because Brian at BrianDBlog suggested it. I'm outside the Reformed Theology camp, so I don't know much about Reformed celebrities, and I'd never heard Brown or read anything by him.

This is a terrible book, chock-full of the sort of profiteering nonsense celebrity Christians perpetrate against their fellow believers. It merits a post of its own, though, and I'll get back to it later.

I'm partway through Bill McKibben's book The Age of Missing Information now. It's a fixed experiment, and I'm waiting to see if McKibben owns up. It reminds me of Nickel and Dimed in terms of its unfair comparisons: short on facts and full of comparisons between real unpleasant things and unreal pleasant things. Frankly he reminds me of the sort of people I grew up with who compared the homes they grew up in to Ozzie and Harriet and from that perspective condemned All In The Family for being vile and slanderous (as opposed to just vile).

Anyway, work is crazy busy still, and most of my words are going into work-related documents; I love reading and writing, but most of the reading and writing I should be doing is work-related right now.

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Does anyone remember Bill McKibben's 1992 book The Age of Missing Information? It was one of the earlier "I did something silly as an experiment and now feel qualified to comment on society" books (see e.g. Morgan Spurlock, Barbara Ehrenreich, Judith Levine): McKibben videotaped everything that was available on his cable system in one day (some summaries say 1700 hours, some say 2400 hours) and spent a year watching it, then contrasted the experience with taking a camping trip. Why a camping trip? I'm not sure; maybe that's what he'd rather have been doing anyway.

Regardless, he'd have a hard time repeating the exercise with YouTube today; according to a post on the Official Google Blog today, thirteen hours of new video are posted on YouTube each minute. That's 780 minutes of video per minute. You'd need eight to eleven Bill McKibbens to watch all that video (and take the corresponding camping trips).