Who is Daniel Boorstin?
Daniel Boorstin, born October 1, 1914, was a historian, professor, writer, lawyer, librarian, curator, and social theorist. His work as a historian, primarily focusing on early American history, prompted his critical thinking about society and how constructed realities shape our everyday experiences. He was a professor at the University of Chicago for 25 years, teaching mainly history. Upon retiring, Boorstin served as Librarian of Congress until his passing in 2004, where he implemented programs to promote literacy, opened the library to the public, and hosted a slew of public events, making the library a center of intellectual activity (“Daniel J. Boorstin,” 2004).
The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America
Boorstin wrote over 20 books, including a groundbreaking 1962 publication titled, “The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America.” The Image revealed Boorstin’s concerns for a shifting American culture that was threatened by “the menace of unreality” (Boorstin, 1962). This profound work is saturated with the notion that Americans were beginning to become more enraptured by fake, constructed realities than the ones they were living. Simulations, fabrications, and carefully constructed images of reality were becoming the perceived reality of American society. Neil Gabler, in a 2012 LA Times article states that, “no single book has so well framed how the American consciousness was reformed from one that seemed to value the genuine to one that preferred the fake.”
The shift Boorstin illuminated was, according to him, mainly caused by advertising and public relations. People, events, and campaigns were all becoming “fake;” they were illusions of reality that were allowed to triumph over the more concrete realities of the worlds that people were living in. From this identification sprang the concepts of pseudo-events and hyperreality, and more concretely defined the idea of postmodernism.
Boorstin coined the term “pseudo-event” to describe over-dramatized happenings that were driven by public relations, with little other purpose than a sheer “media moment” (Rushkoff, 2012). These events and activities contributed to a false sense of reality, a “facsimile of life” (“Daniel Boorstin,” n.d., para. 2). Boorstin points out that pseudo-events “tend to be more interesting and more attractive than spontaneous events,” as they are more controlled, more calculated, and less “real” (Boorstin, 1962). This idea of a media-constructed reality was later termed “hyperreality,” and further illuminated by scholars such as Jean Baudrillard and Guy Debord.
Boorstin discussed pseudo-reality with regard to celebrity, political figures and campaigns, and tourism, among other aspects of American culture. Fame, according to Boorstin, is constructed in such a way that celebrities are well-known simply for being well-known. Applied to politics, Boorstin highlighted the Kennedy-Nixon debate of 1960 in The Image, explaining that the campaign events and candidates’ performances became more important to the public than their qualifications. The pseudo-event highlights pseudo-qualifications (Boorstin, 1962). Similarly, travelers make use of pseudo-events to create their tourist experiences. Tourists are not exposed to the “real,” natural experiences of a place, they are exposed to a constructed reality associated with a specific place.
While more recent media theorists attest that older media criticisms are inevitably less relevant than they were decades ago, Boorstin’s concern with hyperreality is still on the table. The Image, according to some, remains a classic example of the “older” media criticism. Steven Johnson, in Interface Culture (1999), states that:
The older tradition of media criticism – Daniel Boorstin’s classic work The Image being the ultimate example – sees the tendency for self-reference as a kind of hall-of-mirrors effect, where the real body politics of face-to-face existence slouch toward a vanishing point of endless reflection (p. 29)
The notion of “unrealities” reflecting further “unrealities,” or constructed realities, is still very much present. In my own personal experiences and conversations, I have heard concerns echoed over and over that due to media, we are never quite getting to the “real reality,” if such a thing exists (this could get quite philosophical – what is reality to us other than the way in which we experience the world?).
Ever a fan of printed literature, Boorstin felt that technological advances in television, film, cinema and the like would further distance Americans from reality, particularly in the absence of grappling with language. Books and literature, according to Boorstin, take time to ingest and to think critically about. Images, like those on television and in advertisements, were everything all at once: what you are supposed to see, how you are supposed to feel, what the take-home message was, however “pseudo” it may have been. “While words take time to utter and hear,” Rushkoff says of Boorstin’s ideas, “the image is frozen in time – its impact immediate, and its influence decadent.” In a speech about the rise of computer technology, Boorstin attested that “the book…remains our symbol and our resource the unimagined question and the unwelcome answer.”
Boorstin & Rushkoff
In the last chapter of The Image, Boorstin describes hyperrality’s threat on America as “the danger of replacing American dreams by American illusions”
Douglas Rushkoff, in the afterword he wrote specially for the 50th edition reprint of The Image, builds on the shift in American dreams described by Boorstin. He explains that we went from one dream, before images and pseudo-events and constructed reality took over, to another dream hyperreality from which Boorstin was imploring us to wake up. Prior to the shift, he says, there were human beings utilizing their creativity before the image factories took over (Rushkoff, 2012). He describes The Image as an “analysis of how we were lulled to sleep.”
To Rushkoff, the slumber that we are now in is characterized by the inability to reach the greater narratives of humanity. According to Rushkoff, we are stuck in the present. Rushkoff describes the current presentist state of society in his book Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now. While focusing on the present may seem like a nod to conscious living, we are living unconsciously in the sense that we are more aware of a cell phone buzzing than of the grand scheme of our lives with a beginning, middle, and end. We are oblivious to the story. This shift into oblivion is what Boorstin would consider a shift from “the world of language and text to the world of the image” (Rushkoff, 2012).
If Boorstin’s notion of the “image,” as a real-time moment of impact, is aligned with Rushkoff’s presentist idea of the “now,” we might say that words, in the Boorstinian sense, are the anti-presentism. Boorstin’s belief that words require critical thought, contextualizing, and a deeper understanding of how a text is situated into one’s life is similar to Rushkoff’s idea that we need to awaken our creativity and open our eyes – to do more than just shallowly experience whatever sensory information is coming at us right now.
Although Rushkoff’s opinions on media and technology inevitably differ from scholars of more than four decades prior, Rushkoff acknowledges earlier theorists’ concerns, like those of Boorstin, that media are but a fabrication of reality. In Media Virus (2010), Rushkoff states:
Philosophers who grew up before television…view media or even technology, for that matter, as something outside the realm of the natural. To them, media can only display of comment on something real. They cannot acknowledge that the media is something real itself, something that exists on its own and that might have its own needs and agendas (p. 21).
Rushkoff credits Boorstin with picking up on the detrimental shift that was just beginning in his time. Imagery and media were just beginning to take on lives of their own. Like McLuhan predicted the internet, Boorstin predicted a complete mass-mediated disconnect from reality. According to Rushkoff, “where Boorstin proved the most prophetic and relevant to our age…is the extent to which created imagery would be able to supplant reality itself.” As a result, Rushkoff explains, we are now consumed with sensory overload and are unconscious (Rushkoff, 2012). Rushkoff has dubbed the final years before this shift into hyperreaality occurred, when human creativity and storytelling was essential, “Those last wonderful moments before we drifted off to sleep.”
Boorstin undoubtedly made evident a problematic shift in American culture towards a “zombie-like” state of mass mediation. While most media theorists today have a more nuanced sense of the implications of mass media, Boorstin was influential in sparking critical thought and, in a sense, warning us of an impending loss of creative human qualities. He stirred the pot. During Boorstin’s time as Librarian of Congress, his controversial order to open the majestic bronze doors of the main Library of Congress building was met with rebuttal. His response, in my opinion, speaks to his character: “They said it would create a draft,” Boorstin told reporters, “and I replied, ‘Great — that’s just what we need.’” (“Daniel J. Boorstin,” 2004)
References
Daniel J. Boorstin, RIP. (2004) The New Atlantis. Spring 2004.
Boorstin, D. J. (1962). The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-events in America. New York: Vintage
Rushkoff, D. (2012). Afterword. In D. J. Boorstin (1962), The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-events in America. New York: Vintage
Daniel Boorstin. (n.d.). In Hyperreality. Retreived from http://enterhyperreality.weebly.com/daniel-boorstin.html
Gabler, Neil (2012, April 15) Daniel Boorstin got it right in ‘The Image’. Los Angeles Times. Retrieved from http://articles.latimes.com/2012/apr/15/entertainment/la-ca-neal-gabler-20120415
Steven, J. (1997). Interface culture: How new technology transforms the way we create and communicate. Basic Books.
Making Sense of Media 