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| Journal for Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television Introduction This is an old book as books on sociological subjects go--published in 1978. This means that the examples and details used to support the arguments are twenty years gone and force me to call up images that I’d not thought of for many years. But the book is still relevant because the problem it outlines has not changed; indeed, it has become more entrenched in the past twenty years. In fact, the ancient examples encourage me to look for continuing trends--have these things been repeated? What has happened in this arena in the last twenty years? It is the answers to such questions that justify using this book. Having said that, the first chapter doesn’t get me very far. It’s all about how a nice but ambitious Jewish boy ends up in the 60’s as a successful adman with a conscience and how that leads him to question what is really going on in our society (or was). His first conclusion is that we have accepted media-generated pseudo-experience for the real thing. The seductive lure of hours in front of the TV accomplished this in about thirty years. “In one generation, . . . America had become the first culture to have substituted secondary, mediated versions of experience for direct experience of the world” (24). I can see the trend in my own experience. My wife’s grandmother told how she and Grandfather, living in the late 40’s, were the first on their block to own a television. They would invite friends in, and all of them would sit in chairs lined up in front of that eight inch screen to watch. And at appropriate moments, they would all applaud. Their experience of entertainment was that it was a live performance. What about movies? Of course they went to movies, but that question points up the difference between television and movies. Until the VCR, movies could only be experienced in special places--theatres. Television came right into their homes, like a friend or a neighbor. Now I know that these comments are old hat--I suspect much of what I’ll say in this journal will be--because, while commentators have been commenting on the television phenomenon for years and I’ve listened, I’ve never really absorbed it or thought about it before. And I was most certainly a TV kid. Not ten years separates my grandparents’ initial viewing experience with my own memory of flopping in a chair in front of the TV for as many hours as possible. And of course it affected me--and in ways I can barely imagine. And that is the thrust of Mander’s argument in the second half of the introduction: television technology is not benign--the technology itself, while appearing neutral, is dangerous. Argument I: The Mediation of Experience How could a technology that merely delivers images and sounds be dangerous. The first argument states that television is dangerous because it creates a mediated rather than an immediate environment. In other words, while we are receiving information about our environment, our world, we are not experiencing that world directly. In fact, as a result of our reliance on technology in general and TV in particular, we often can’t believe what we do experience without some commentator or science reporter telling us what is true. Mander cites studies that prove mother’s milk is the best food for infants, the best mouse bait is cheese, and walking is better for the human respiratory and circulatory systems than riding in a car. Technology has fostered a nation of sponges, just waiting to be told what to absorb. And technology in the 20th century is a pervasive entity. Interestingly, Mander doesn’t mention television much in this section. He spends more time mourning our loss of connection to the natural world. Daniel Boorstin notes in The Discoverers that the advent of electricity revolutionized our relationship with time. Night no longer has significance in a world of hundred watt bulbs--and Mander, writing a few years earlier, blames the advent and proliferation of electricity and our complete dependence on it for our descent into a non-natural world of mediated experience, a world where we create tame, manageable environments to protect us from the wild earth, a world where science and technology have all the answers. Mander also argues that this “hierarchy of techno scientism” (69) threatens democracy. If it requires special training to understand the esoterica on which our society rests (nuclear power, medicine, genetic engineering [I’m thinking of agriculture here], computers), and if only a few of us have this special training, then only a very few of us are really competent to make decisions, and so goes democracy. I remember a Twilight Zone episode based on the idea that when the vast majority of individuals in a society no longer know how to fix their technology, that society is doomed. Certainly, the trend, which has continued since Mander noted it twenty years ago, toward less comprehension of increasingly complex systems is clearest with cars. The old ones are simple; even my wife can understand spark plugs. The new ones are computerized nightmares that only a technician (barely a mechanic) with a computer diagnostic system can begin to understand. And he only knows what the computer tells him--sometimes, he doesn’t even look under the hood. Clearly, advancing technologies do exclude people, leading to autocracy, and if democracy is the most ethical form of government, then unrestrained technology does threaten democracy. Mander questions whether technologies should be pursed just because we can. But this requires us to limit ourselves, and that seems unrealistic. Buy a new car and the first thing most drivers want to know is “what can it do?” Or buy a computer--how fast, how quickly, how much power, and how far can I push it--our technology enchants us as surely as if it had Merlin written all over it. And besides, for millennium we’ve fostered the idea that only humans are truly, fully alive and have a real claim to the planet--fill the earth and subdue it. Or even more arrogantly, we have an unlimited claim because we can manipulate our environment. This is might makes right. Mander’s argument is complicated: might makes right + technology unlimited + mediated environments = dissociation and destruction which leads to autocracy. He ends this section with an extended example of the way est dissociates its initiates by narrowing their world of experience until they believe what their trainers tell them: All information is arbitrary, the product of mind. One piece of news is equal to the next. Everything is believable and not believable at the same time. There is no reality aside from mind. The only existence is belief. (107) Mander’s example for this is the two sci-fi classics Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four, and of course, est, which he says is not really generally dangerous because it has not learned to use television, the ultimate sense-deprivation, reality- mediating machine, effectively. But all this was written before the Christian Right began its amazingly effective television campaign to convert people to its political agenda. For me this is a good example, because, if Mander is right, then the conservative Christian political agenda should be in place--and it has come close. Perhaps the only flaw is that their message is geared to a particular audience and only filters out to the rest of the population. We, as a general audience, still have the choice not to listen and watch. And we, generally, choose to watch and listen to such programs as The X Files or Baywatch: and how does that shape our reality? Argument II: The Colonization of Experience It’s finally dawned on me that Mander isn’t really trying to eliminate only TV--he wants to eliminate technology insofar as it serves to separate humans from the organic, changeable, unpredictable natural world. But that is too startling an idea, and the experienced ad-man would never jump to step four without steps one, two, and three in place. And so he continues with his arguments. The main point of the second argument is that, because of our acclimatization to mediated experience, a small group of people has control of our access to experience with TV and advertising as the primary vehicle for control. Makes sense to me. I’ve believed for some time that if there is a world-wide conspiracy of power, it is run by “captains of industry” and capitalism is their vehicle. Consider: once we began to move out of subsistence economies in the 18th century, the push was for more and cheaper goods. The young woman working ten hours a day in the textile factory (a very mediated environment) could finally afford to buy the cloth she was making. She could have two dresses instead of one. She had become a consumer. And gradually, the mill owners realized that through advertising, they could create a demand for the products they chose to manufacture. The Sears Roebuck catalogue is a perfect example--people want the things they see advertised--and what is a brand name beyond its familiarity? The practice continues in a most refined form today. Go to a toy store and walk down the aisles--probably almost half the toys are either connected to a movie or television show or they are heavily advertised items like Barbie. The next generation of willing, unquestioning consumers is well started. Mander argues that our personal isolation plays into this consumer mentality as well. And here is a perfect argument for community. While the captains of industry would disdain it, suburban isolation, each of us in our own individual homes with our nuclear families, is not healthy. It is the perfect breeding ground for consumption--one washer/dryer set, four TV’s, two computers, for every home, not to mention furniture, linens, dishes, glassware, carpeting, vacuum cleaners, clockradios, and dogfood. Community--sharing--is non-productive. But isolation has bred the society we all bemoan, and the nuclear family has undergone nuclear fission. Community is the correct response to this barrage of advertising brainwashing. I’ve often wondered why all the consumer price indexes and housing-start indexes and GNP and all the other devices used to measure the growth of the economy are supposed to constantly increase, at a “sustainable” rate. I don’t know the answer an economist would give me--something about healthy world markets and job creation and economic stability--which is to say, a bunch of encoded language that only a trained specialist can really understand. So Mander’s argument is proved once again-- the technocrats control our world. But are we really talking about human nature? I think it is human nature to constantly want to move--the direction hardly matters, it’s moving that is important. Before the Renaissance and the Reformation we channeled that impulse into religion. But it was an immature religion--one handed to us with no important questions allowed. We might consider the Renaissance and the Reformation a sort of western societal adolescence--the necessary breaking away from the parent in order to learn. Just as woodduck ducklings need to fall out of their nests, kerplunk, on the ground eight or so feet below in order to properly mature, so humankind needed to leap off the cliff and see where we landed. And now, five hundred years later, we are groping back towards a more adult, individual concept of religion. The splintering of religion forces each of us to question deeply and draw thoughtful conclusions. But it hasn’t entirely worked, for I said earlier that humans are social and do not do best in isolated environments. We are lazy and avoid the hard work when we can. And the strictly individual interpretation of even religion is suspect--the best interpretation would happen in community with others, and not necessarily like minded others. The struggle to communicate with each other, to make connection with God is the I-Thou working as it should. And I- Thou is the opposite of individuals sitting passively in front of television sets absorbing whatever images the controlling interests choose to project their way. Argument Three: Effects of Television on the Human Being This is the longest and most thoroughly researched section of Mander’s book. It is also different from the other arguments because he moves from the theoretical realm of abstract ideas to the more quantifiable area of physical effect. Personally, my own experience supports Mander. For me television is an addiction. I can easily lose myself for hours watching one show after another. It has been an act of real will for me to break that addiction and watch very occasionally. Mander also discusses our human image-making propensity and the way television bypasses the critical mind to deliver the images directly into the memory. This one is difficult for me to sort out because I am a very visual person. It’s normal for me to remember images intact--and I can be just as affected by images generated by my own imagination while reading a book as I am by images delivered by TV. So I’m trying to test the hypothesis against my observations of our granddaughter, Juliana. Juliana is four, and for about the last year she has been very taken with movies she has watched on video (her parents allow almost no television watching, so this is as close as we get). Of course, the videos are viewed on a TV screen in the same setting used for television viewing, a technology that was in its infancy if it existed at all when Mander wrote his book. But back to image-making. Juliana likes to act out the stories she’s seen with herself as the heroine. She presses the rest of the family into the other roles, which can be hilarious (her two year old brother as the wicked stepmother from Cinderella). But the question is, does she see only the picture from the movie as she acts out the stories, or does her mind allow new images to come in--does her active, creative imagination enter the process? I observed a game of Wizard of Oz recently played by Juliana and her nana, my wife, who knows the MGM movie but is just as familiar with the original written story which differs from the movie. Juliana was Dorothy and Nana played all the other parts. From time to time in the action, Nana would interrupt the story to tell how something worked in the book, and it seemed to me that Juliana accepted the new details and was adding them to the possibilities of the story. In other words, the story was working in just the way stories are supposed to, getting bits added and even bits left out depending on the storyteller, becoming personal. This is not just reception of images, and it hints at the antidote to TV. If one acts on the images, then they do not remain intact in the brain. But Mander maintains, and I certainly agree, that TV encourages lethargy, passivity, unquestioning acceptance. Which leads me into his argument that television works very much like hypnosis. Hypnosis is an intriguing idea. A few years ago, a number of my wife’s students went to see a hypnotist perform and used the experience as the basis of an essay. They were all fascinated with the notion of one person controlling the mind of another. They described kids called up to the stage as participants who, under hypnosis, seemed to completely believe they were on a beach (they took off clothing and sunbathed), playing with a kitten (it was a tennis ball), or any number of fairly simple situations. This was very entertaining for the unhypnotized audience and rather embarrassing for the hypnotized students who later kept asking, “Did I really do that?” But what struck me most was the way my students described the hypnosis itself--it was so simple--just focus on a specific object and the voice of the hypnotist. I’ve been hypnotized myself, but it never felt as though I were in an altered state (and my hypnotist was not trying to entertain a group of teenagers), but I do think I was more receptive to suggestion under the hypnosis. I’ve heard several reports from friends who’ve tried hypnosis to break unwanted habits--for one in particular, it was very effective. She couldn’t say no to chocolate, so the hypnotist suggested that chocolate was not attractive. Today, several years later, Peggy does not touch chocolate. I’ve heard her say, “It looks great, but I can’t.” Now, if hypnosis is that simple and that effective (at least for some people), it certainly makes sense that TV, focused viewing on engaging images, darkened room, could be hypnotic. I know I react to brand names in the store as though the advertising has been hypnotically effective. It’s a real leap of faith to purchase something I’ve “never heard of” before. And if it’s true for advertising, then it is also true of other things we receive from television--our conception of the world and of what is important or unimportant in the world. And this hypnotic effect leads to what Mander calls “turning into our images.” We become, or try to become, what we are trained to see. And since the controlling interests of television want us to buy their products, they train us to see that the products will make us like the telepeople--attractive, witty, engaging, always available, (telepeople never do any real work unless it is relevant to the plot), able to “come to closure” in half an hour or an hour. It’s no wonder our attention spans are so short and we get frustrated if we are confronted with problems that don’t have quick and easy solutions. Another example of this power of TV advertising involves my sister who is fifteen years younger than I am. When she was four years old she was with me in the grocery store and when we went by the toothpaste section, she saw Ultra Brite and began chanting, “I have sex appeal.” This was a part of their advertising at the time. Argument IV: The Inherent Biases of Television Mander here is arguing that television, because of the technology itself, has limits to what it can convey well. Advertising and death it does well; subtlety, not. It is also highly selective, which means large categories of possible inquiry are ignored, passed over, excluded. Now, some of this is possibly changing with all the new channels devoted to specific sorts of information. But I think even that is an illusion lulling us into believing, as the telegurus would wish, that we are experiencing something unique or worthwhile if we are watching the history channel or the sci-fi channel or the cooking channel rather than the mass marketed, plebeian, scatter-shot networks. But when did you last see a program on Hasidic Jews (oh, yeah, that movie with Melanie Griffith that reduced kashrut--dietary laws--to having two refrigerators and made all non-Hasidic Jews look venal and uneducated). Or quilting--channel six--boring. Or a couple getting through a day of kids and work and life without snappy patter or a laughtrack. And that’s the point. Television has to be interesting to a broad number of viewers. It has to sell time (even PBS). And even if it does a show on some out-of-the-way idea, it must still pick and choose what to show, and it can never replace the experience of visiting Crown Heights or taking a few stitches around the quilting frame with the Busy Bees Quilting Society or just being married and living in a family. Mander’s argument has come full circle. Television is limited because it cannot provide the full range of real, unpredictable, unmediated experiences that life provides every day. Particularly, it is no good at conveying subtlety. During this election season, my wife and I have had several discussions about what makes Bill Clinton so popular a candidate despite the character flaws, the lack of real accomplishments (what, exactly, will he be remembered for?), the insistence by the conservative press that a Watergate style coverup is going on. Television is the way most of us interact with the campaign. Watching Clinton’s campaign ads, it occurs to me that it just might be his lack of subtlety that works so much to his advantage. His facial expressions are immediate and suffuse the whole face--there’s no ambiguity between his non-verbal and verbal communications. And comparing listening to him on radio to watching him on television, what comes across as arrogance when you only hear the voice reads as supreme confidence when you see the image as well. One commentator on NPR claimed that Clinton was the best presidential campaigner of all time. This translates into an ability to massage the message so that viewers are lured or hypnotized or whatever phrase you want to use into believing that this man is worthy of the arrogance he exudes. Clinton is right to compare himself with Kennedy--they both have this unambiguous visual quality that works in a visual medium that does best with few nuances. And they both realized the importance of using the media to enable them to win. It costs a great deal of money to do it properly which is why this campaign spent more money then any other according to a story on NPR. Is it ethical to buy the vote? Prior to television and radio, the answer would have been no. But we the people seem to be turning our backs on this kind of arrogant disregard of ethics. But what difference does it make if nuance, subtlety, ambiguity, uncertainty are lost on television? According to Jerry Mander, it makes the difference between a populace capable of complex analysis and one capable only of seeing extremes. And our nation and world are desperate for solutions that deal effectively with the complex. But we continue to be polarized--attention is concentrated at the extreme ends of almost any spectrum while the moderate middle is nearly forgotten. Is Mander right? Is television much to blame? If enough people thought so, wouldn’t things be different now, twenty years after his book was published? But it isn’t. In every house we clean, there are at least two televisions and usually more, all strategically placed to provide the easiest access--a kitchen counter, the bedrooms, the livingroom or family room. Most of the kids have their own TV’s--never should they have to share the controls or watch something not to their liking. Ours is even more a TV culture than twenty years ago. And the only sign of change I see is that, perhaps, though access is easier, perhaps more people are restricting their watching time or that of their children. We may be naturally coming to a place of moderation. Mander might say it is not enough--that any television is bad. I think I actually agree with him, yet it would be very hard to give up television altogether as long as we live in a world where it is encouraged to be solitary. As with other conclusions I have come to, I see the same answer beckoning here. That answer is a community of people who take time to be with one another rather than a ball of radiated light that sings its siren song in every home at every moment of life. The shipwrecks to be seen from this siren are nothing less than civilization itself and any hope of an ethical world. There is a Midrash that states that Sodom and Gomorrah were not destroyed because of their immorality, but rather because their laws and society stopped believing there was anything wrong in what they were doing; and therefore they were unable to be saved. Do you see any similarities here? |