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Television: Democracy at its Ugliest
A quote by Paddy Chayefsky
Saul Landau
Progreso Weekly, 15 November 2002
"Television", said comedian Fred Allen, "is a triumph of equipment over people, and the minds that control it are so small that you could put them in the navel of a flea and still have enough room for a network president's heart".
Like most American parents, I conceded control of my children’s minds at certain ages to the perfidious and profit-seeking imaginations of those who program our nation’s television stations. I argued against accepting as truth the slush they would encounter on the tube. But I rejected outright coercion as a tactic. I sarcastically quoted David Frost who said that "television enables you to be entertained in your home by people you wouldn’t have in your home".
Despite endless hours of exposure to "The Brady Bunch", "Three’s Company", "Friends" and "Seinfeld", the kids have evolved into conscientious, empathetic people. But the kids did ingest some of what television taught them. How could anyone develop an immune system that could withstand the constant barrage of messages that dictate all aspects of life and lifestyle? I’m not even referring just to shows like "Jerry Springer" or "Cheaters", where people eagerly sacrifice their dignity to appear on television as millions applaud their lack of self esteem. "Never miss a chance to have sex or appear on television", Gore Vidal said.
Behind the façade of this "entertainment" medium, a hidden hand has inserted itself. Within the elaborate mechanisms of machines and human hierarchy, television, like all technologies, directs not only personal taste but social life as well. Like the pernicious dictator that hid inside the cute little automobiles of the early 20th Century, the imps inside the tube have also become designers of life, organizers of time and manipulators of space.
Yes, many children continue to read and participate in public life despite the televised assault on their cognitive apparatus. But who would deny the power of a medium that 60 years ago was still a sci-fi notion and 55 year ago a kind of silly source of amusement for nit wits? "Television", wrote Ann Landers, "has proved that people will look at anything rather than each other".
Except for the Canadian sociologist Marshall McLuhan (The Medium is the Message) - few predicted in the late 1940s and early 1950s when clumsy, middle aged fat men wrestled and Milton Berle’s "Texaco Hour", and Sid Caeser’s "Show of Shows" dominated the black and white 10-inch screen - that this medium would become an all-encompassing cultural pillar.
As a child in the late 1940s and early 1950s, I watched the box, the tube, the boob tube, the telly, TV, as it became known. That was before its executives understood the power of their new technology. At some point, perhaps it was the televised hearings at which Senator Joe McCarthy lost his cool and his dignity in a confrontation with the Secretary of the Army, and the whole nation (actually less than 10% of adults watched it) witnessed the fanatical anti-Communist junior Senator from Wisconsin expose himself as a buffoon.
At some point in the 1950s, television turned from a struggling new media form into a command medium. Now it offers important directives to members of the family from its place in the living room, kitchen, bedroom and even bathroom. Its silent command, "turn me on or else", is hard to refuse. This cool medium, as Marshall MacLuhan dubbed it, induces passivity while simultaneously exciting anxiety, thereby becoming a multipurpose technology. It sold products, amused the masses and changed the cognitive basis of several generations of people. By invading the cognitive realm, television created new forms of knowing, through its moving images and constantly changing sound track. On the other hand, it destroyed traditional sensibilities as it challenged reading and writing for control of the human imagination.
Leading the charge to convert citizens into consumers, television programmers have replaced much of the concern that might have existed for the common good with a focus on the personal as universal. Thanks to the penetration of television into almost every home, Americans share common images, music (jingles), one-liners, and anxieties.
Life’s goal, I once thought, was an ideal combination of love and work. Now, leisure in its idealized TV form, substitutes for life. Forget the ads showing people at play, fishing, lounging and basking in the sun - never a mention of melanomas. Think of the TV sitcoms and serials and count the hours where you actually see our heroes working (except for lawyers, doctors and cops). Leisure rules in the world of "Seinfeld" where some of the characters work from time to time, but where their childless lives revolve around trivia.
Love and work, in the context of family and community, has given way to eternal play, defined on TV as watching other adults play "professional" sports, or staring endlessly at changing electronic images from cooking shows to "important" public and educational events, to test patterns.
Our technology shows it can produce wonders and dominate the mysteries of nature. New machines revolutionize production, usually done by reducing the amount of labor involved in a process, or figuring out how to extract more labor from the worker. On TV and in the movies, the cell phone plays a crucial part in modern drama. On the street, millions of people chat with their lovers, family members and friends. But think of how the cell phone also allows for the extra utilization of time from salesmen, executives of all levels and managers. For many workers, what once were leisure hours have turned into work time thanks to those very attractive - if scary on the highway - mobile telephones, lap tops, palm pilots and pagers. Often, the ads hype them as amusement machines, objects to play with as if they epitomized leisure - the quest of life.
But life requires obedience to the norms of fashion, at which viewers are by definition inadequate. Thus television offers anxiety and an opportunity to medicate the daily symptoms of tension through consumption. Whether you’re over or underweight, too tall or short, too old or too young, lack body or skin tone, clothes, cars, toys or the latest gadgets, TV has the prescription: shop and make whatever deficiency you suffer temporarily better.
Television - which like the car and computer have become forces of modern production and life - has etched its methods into the brain. What does this daily barrage of images and sound do to human sensibilities? By placing explicit pictures and exaggerated sound into their cerebral cortexes, it strips people of creativity. Indeed, what does a trip to the shopping mall do? From my own experience, both TV and the mall leave me fatigued, irritable and unsatisfied.
TV has also become one of the most dynamic means through which to export the best way of life God has ever fashioned. US television has found its way into homes in eastern China, modeled after Orange County, California, where "Dallas", the TV drama of the 70s, has become the rage; and into the Arab world where "Baywatch" is number one. Yes, there is T & A on the screen in the lands where women must cover even their faces in public. In these countries, the television sales machinery has just begun to weave its nefarious thread of consumption-as-the-ultimate-happiness.
Malls from sea to sea dramatize the notion that shopping represents family spirituality. A day spent traversing the fluorescently-lit aisles of chain stores and fast food outlets in search of "bargains" may erode sensibilities and destroy creativity, but it does leave the shoppers anxious and tired. Masses, as the marketers think of people, will focus on their personal problems - as sensory overload and stress fatigue increase - and seek medication through purchases of more commodities. This nullifies any possibility of thinking about public affairs, let alone listening to, or engaging in meaningful discourse.
Television provides a constant reminder that we are all inadequate, thanks in large part to the values promoted not only through the commercials themselves, but through the exposure of the public to the fabulously undernourished people that populate the shows. But you can do something about it. Buy! Buy! Buy! Try! Experience!
It has altered the nature of leisure. We once applied our skills as artisans; we read and then discussed, even by correspondence, with others who shared the same literary experience. We learned from grade school through university that Americans historically made decisions through voting, based on ideas of the public good. But we didn’t learn back in the 1940s and 1950s that our real daily and weekly decisions would involve brand names and fashions.
I watch my teenager thumb through Seventeen and YM. I surreptitiously filch them for quick bathroom reads to discover that the publishers of these teen magazines fill their pages of anxiety-producing stories about weight, acne and looming failure with boys. The girl whose skin is not perfect, who possesses an extra ounce in the "wrong place", should feel the fears of imminent malfunction. Boys will shun her! These teen magazines reproduce themselves on TV.
Television has designed for the "teenage market" versions of some mainstream magazines like People and Cosmopolitan. Shows like "Beverly Hills 90210" and "Melrose Place" have evolved into product pushing "teen-friendly" serials like "Dawson’s Creek", "Buffy the Vampire Slayer"(featuring a slightly curved toothpick who slays sexy vampires), and "Charmed", which shows that "female empowerment" derives from well-coifed girls having cute but very bare midriffs, the clues to possessing special powers. Each girl can and should aspire to such heights, says the subliminal message.
In China, India, Indonesia and much of the third world, how could an individual conceive of herself as the center of the world, alone fighting the competition for boys, status, prestige, recognition, and honorific deference? The masses of the third world receive daily doses of consumption assumptions. The reality of their lives, however, removes them from the possibility of even tasting the sweet-sour essence of modern middle class America. But the superimposition of media aesthetics often leads them to reject, or at least question, their traditional roots.
Television promotes individualism in a mass market world. It elevates leisure to the level of a life goal. One works to gain money to afford leisure. One uses the money to buy things that will bring individual and family happiness. This weapon of mass distraction tries to confuse us by equating individuality with individualism. Luckily, several billion people still understand that they are not what they wear. They have not yet imbibed the pervasive distortion of philosophy offered by this once cool, but now tepid medium:
"I shop therefore I am".
Copyright 2002 Radio Progreso
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