I introduce a précis of this book with a bit of trepidation, but here goes: Bill McKibben records 24 hours worth of programming from every single one of Fairfax, Virginia’s 93 television stations. Then he watches all of them, eight hours a day, for basically a year. On another day he heads off into the mountains and writes about that. Compare and contrast.
I hesitate because this will give you at least one immediate idea, namely that McKibben is a wanker or condescending, or both. Thankfully McKibben himself was well aware of both possibilities, and avoided them studiously.
It’s a fun book, profound, and a quick read. If you’ve read David Foster Wallace’s essay “E Unibus Plurum” (collected in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again), you’ll have one of the threads, namely a look at TV’s involution. In “E Unibus Plurum,” Wallace noted that television shows increasingly only referred to other television shows: you don’t need to know anything about the culture of the outside world to understand all of the jokes. Wallace, at some level, thought this was cute. He was singularly unwilling to say that television is crap; instead, he took television to be a great object for scholarly study. McKibben has no problem calling out the low quality of most television.
