Day 49

Haven't given up, was just on holiday. More to follow.

Day 40 - "TV is the most efficient medium ever invented for cloning"

Among other things, Jerry Mander ran around with the Merry Pranksters & put out a book called Four Arguments For The Elimination Of Television. This is from a piece he wrote a few years ago:

Tom Hayden once said to me that television "is the biggest subject in the world that we have stopped talking about." He's right, because TV is the most efficient medium ever invented for cloning corporate consciousness.

In the US, television is the main thing people do. It's replaced community life, family life, culture. It has replaced the environment. In fact, it has become the environment that people interact with every day. It has become the culture, too-and I'm not talking about so-called popular culture, which sounds, somehow, democratic. This expresses corporate culture, and damned few corporations at that...

This situation is really weird. It's almost sci-fi in its feeling and in its possibility for autocratic control-the few speaking to the many. If you were an anthropologist from the Andromeda Galaxy sent to study Earth people and you hovered over the US, chances are you'd report back something like this:

"They're sitting night after night in dark rooms. They're staring at a light. Their eyes are not moving. They're not thinking. Their brains are in a passive/receptive state; we've measured them as 'alpha' waves (which, by the way, heavy viewers get into), and nonstop imagery is pouring into their brains-images coming from someplace they're not, thousands of miles away. These images are being sent by a very small number of people, and the images are of toothpaste and cars and guns and people running around in bathing suits. The whole thing looks like some kind of weird experiment in mind control."

And that is exactly what it is.

In the US, the average television viewer is seeing about 23,000 commercials every year. The specific content of those messages may vary, but the intent is identical-to get people to view life as a nonstop stream of commodity satisfactions.

Day 38 - "History all at once and not at all"

I conveniently forgot to mention this earlier: last weekend I binged on a DVD & a trip to the cinema. TV is such a distant object in my day to day life that I'm getting lax about how I deal with its cousins. Fortunately, unlike the last time I watched a DVD, urges to watch more haven't popped up in the aftermath.

If you go to this site and search for a definition of TV, this is what you get:

TV is a multifarious instrument which is best described as `history all at once and not at all'. It is by and large alienating, yet we still see it as the locus of the global village. It is empowering if only because all the messages are accessible, and we decide when to watch and what to watch...

Today, cable TV stations broadcast sitcoms and commercials from earlier decades that play as ironic relics from a crude and naïve culture. The medium continually allows for a re-broadcasting, re-visiting, and re-contextualizing of our cultural moments.

Some critics argue that television birthed the Postmodern condition, creating a realm in which we are alienated from each other personally, but recognize each other in the fears and stereotypes writ large across the small screen. The massive reach of televison broadcasting gives rise to a monitoring of our collective consciousness that has been matched by no other art form. As we watch, we all share the same pair of eyes. We see Rodney King on a L.A. highway; aerial shots of SWAT teams escorting students from a mid-western school; fictional dramas played out between beloved characters; game shows won by people eerily similar to ourselves...

We see footage of actual events, but it is a record of life as witnessed by no one: film editors construct the sequence of events and our understandings of their consequences, and voiceovers are our storytellers. Indeed, television is a telling representative of the patchworked psyche of our modern state.

Day 36 - "Watching television is neurologically analogous to staring at a blank wall"

Something we already know intuitively, but here's how Wes Moore from Disinfo puts it:

Psychophysiologist Thomas Mulholland found that after just 30 seconds of watching television the brain begins to produce alpha waves, which indicates torpid (almost comatose) rates of activity. Alpha brain waves are associated with unfocused, overly receptive states of consciousness. A high frequency alpha waves does not occur normally when the eyes are open. In fact, Mulholland's research implies that watching television is neurologically analogous to staring at a blank wall.

I should note that the goal of hypnotists is to induce slow brain wave states. Alpha waves are present during the "light hypnotic" state used by hypno-therapists for suggestion therapy.

When Mulholland's research was published it greatly impacted the television industry, at least in the marketing and advertising sector. Realizing viewers automatically enter a trance state while watching television, marketers began designing commercials that produce unconscious emotional states or moods within the viewer. The aim of commercials is not to appeal to the rational or conscious mind (which usually dismisses advertisements) but rather to implant moods that the consumer will associate with the product when it is encountered in real life...

...But the really sad thing about television is that it turns everyone into a zombie, no one is immune. There is no higher order of super-intelligent, nefarious beings behind this. It's the product of our very human desire to alter our state of consciousness and escape the hardships of reality.

Static

 

Day 34 - "Hitler would not work well on TV"

So here's what Camille Paglia had to say in an interview in defense of TV:

I love television. I love soap operas. I love The Young and the Restless. It's my favorite show. I love everything about television. The ads. I love the glitzy part of TV. I love Hard Copy. I learn a lot of things from Hard Copy. You'd be surprised. Television to me is the culture.

In point of fact, that is where politics is being decided, for good or for ill. The TV screen is now like the national community forum. It's a way that people test out candidates. Without television, Clinton could have never won the presidency. We watched him being tested over time.

I just don't believe that television has been negative. In fact Marshall McLuhan quite correctly pointed out--a thought I had independently--that Hitler could never have risen if television had existed, because Hitler would not work well on TV. He was primarily an orator. If you really look at him up close, he looks ridiculous. So I think especially now with C-SPAN--my God, what a change! C-SPAN has allowed us to really look unedited at major news events, even minor news events, and then to compare how they're reported on the major network news shows. We see that kind of naked bias and manipulation of the news...

Day 33 - The "Now This" Conjunction

Long ago, Neil Postman (Amusing Ourselves to Death) & Camille Paglia (Sexual Personae) engaged in some skirmishes that they called "She Wants Her TV! He Wants His Book!". Here's what Postman said about TV in an interview:

...human intelligence is among the most fragile things in nature. It doesn't take much to distract it, suppress it, or even annihilate it...in this century, as you must know, we have had some lethal examples of how easily and quickly intelligence can be defeated by any one of its several enemies: ignorance, superstition, cruelty, cowardice, neglect, moral fervor.

Television is the principal instrument of this disaster, in part because it is the medium Americans most dearly love, in part because it has become the command center of our culture. Americans turn to television not only for their light entertainment but for their news, their weather, their politics, their religion, their history, all of which may be said to be their furious entertainment. What I'm talking about is televisions preemption of our culture's most serious business. It is one thing to say that TV presents us with entertaining subject matter. It is quite another to say that on TV all subject matter is presented as entertaining and it is in that sense that TV can bring ruin to any intelligent understanding of public affairs.

...And stranger still is the fact that commercials may appear anywhere in a news story, before, after or in the middle, so that all events are rendered essentially trivial, that is to say, all events are treated as a source of public entertainment. How serious can an earthquake in Mexico be or a highjacking in Beirut, if it is shown to us prefaced by a happy United Airlines commercial and summarized by a Calvin Klein jeans commercial.

Indeed, TV newscasters have added to our grammar a new part of speech altogether. What may be called the "now this" conjunction. "Now this" is a conjunction that does not connect two things but does the opposite. It disconnects. When newscasters say, "Now this,' they mean to indicate that what you have just heard or seen has no relevance to what you are about to hear or see. There is no murder so brutal, no political blunder so costly, no bombing so devastating that it cannot be erased from our minds by a newscaster saying, "Now this." The newscaster means that you have thought long enough on the matter, let's say 45 seconds, that you must not be morbidly preoccupied with it, let us say for 90 seconds, and that you must now give your attention to a commercial. Such a situation in my view is not news. And in my opinion it accounts for the fact that Americans are among the most ill informed people in the Western World.