Reflections on the submerging culture
By Cecil Bothwell
Asheville, NC
A couple of weeks ago I was pleased to note that the television in the downtown Asheville post office had been removed, hopefully for good—though the clerks were unable to confirm my optimistic question.
I definitely don’t miss the constant chatter of talking heads and advertisements that used to blast down at customers waiting for service, and I have no idea how clerks could handle the onslaught throughout the day. Queried about programming choices, employees had told me they were only permitted to tune to CNN or the Weather Channel, which I guess must have been deemed by some distant bureaucrat to be content-neutral, though both channels are heavily laden with ads and therefore represent a tacit government subsidy to private business. (This point is tangential to the current subject, but I’m looking into it. Perhaps another network successfully challenged the commercial favoritism.)
The first time I was aware of that particular TV was in the week before Bush invaded Iraq. CNN was running a teaser for the upcoming war coverage which would presumably offer more of the great high-tech fireworks delivered in the first Gulf War while bodies were charred and homes and families destroyed. The teaser used a staccato repetition of Bush bringing down his arm as he intoned, “Let’s roll!”
“Let’s roll! Let’s roll! Let’s roll!”
I understood why former New York Times journalist Richard Reeves refers to America’s TV networks as PNN: The Pentagon News Network. And I had never felt more like I was being forced to attend to Big Brother. At least such propaganda wasn’t being piped into my house, since I quit watching TV at home 30 years ago.
Of course, one can’t function in modern society and entirely avoid television and its discontents. The local daily paper features front page reports on the Super Bowl, American Idol and Britney’s hijinks, and I occasionally expose myself to TV in other people’s homes. But I have noticed that banishment of the medium from my day-to-day existence has left me more sensitized to it than most other folks appear to be. I find the presence of an operating television to be extremely distracting and annoying. I find conversation difficult and the atmosphere uncomfortable.
Comfortable watching of TV is a learned activity and I have evidently unlearned it.
This was brought home to me with particular force at a Super Bowl party I attended this year. I was fortunate enough to be invited to a wonderful get-together, hosted by two of the warmest people I’ve met in my life, with incredibly good food and interesting guests and I had a fine time conversing and playing Scrabble while the game was on a wide screen in the next room.
Though I’m not a football fan, I am enough of a cultural creature to recognize that the game is important to many folks, and I followed its progress via the sound track amidst the exuberant shouts of those watching. After a couple of sessions of Scrabble, we gamers decided to be sociable and join the TV viewers. The rapid-fire shifting which comprises commercial video technique was overwhelming to me. It wasn’t five minutes before I had to leave the room, feeling a little awkward, as if I were passing judgment on others’ choices and failing to join in their fun.
I sat in the kitchen (closer to the food!) mulling the work of Jerry Mander and Bill McKibben.
McKibben’s seminal work, The Age of Missing Information, is a report on an amazing experiment. The author enlisted a team to tape everything broadcast on a cable news network over a 24 hour period—some 500 channels. Then he spent a year watching all of that material while taking notes.
While his helpers recorded, he spent 24 hours on a mountain, alone, camped by a pond, taking notes.
McKibben demonstrates very convincingly that he gleaned more information from the solo camping trip than from the 12,000 hours of “content” put out by the network over the same period. Hence the “Missing Information” in his title. I feel pretty confident that I’m not missing much by eschewing the tube.
Mander’s arguments go more directly to the heart of why I quit, and why I feel such discomfort watching today. In the Absence of the Sacred is just one of the author’s thoughtful dissections of technological life—he also wrote the widely acclaimed Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television. In both books he explains why TV is so engrossing, even addictive, but so damaging to human consciousness. There’s a combination of unnaturally fast shifts of perspective coupled with a kaleidescope of realities.
In Absence he wrote: “People who immerse themselves in the surrogate reality of television life deal on a daily basis with a reality totally unlike any that has preceded it. For example, when watching television news you are presumably taking in actual world events happening before you as they happen in real time. But actually, most of what you see happened earlier; you are viewing edited tapes of those events. Sometimes the events being described are not presented as images, but are verbal descriptions by the announcer. The news is interrupted by a commercial. The commercial is not happening in the same location that just preceded it, nor is the announcer in that place. Yet they are all somehow within this image stream.” He notes that fictional stories on TV tend to use highly accelerated time-frames, so we see high-speed life—interrupted by more commercials. In both, actors portray “real” characters who we may or may not assume to be telling the truth, then go to a talk show where the actors play themselves, or whatever version of themselves they are currently peddling. And this barely scratches the surface of the jumbled realities that cascade from the set.
It’s no wonder that 250,000 people wrote Marcus Welby, MD, over the years asking for medical advice.
That there is a downside is beyond question. Attention deficit problems are pandemic in modern television cultures. Mander reports that among indigenous populations who have had TV abruptly imposed, the same symptoms rapidly emerge in their children. More troubling still, TV viewers become disconnected from the actual reality that sustains them, seeing nature and the environment as “out there” instead of recognizing their own existence in nature. This effect is independent of content.
Even “nature” shows don’t present reality. Reality happens much too slowly to achieve the desired riveting of viewer attention to a screen. Many animals spend most of their time sleeping. Plant growth is excrutiating. Most of what happens in the ocean is microscopic. (Think of Warhol’s film “Empire” for which he aimed a stationary camera up the exterior of the Empire State Building, for twelve hours. Not many ticket buyers.) A constant diet of TV encourages the magical thinking that is a plague on rational thought and behavior.
Eliminating TV from our culture is unlikely— it’s a “free” country. Given that we are unlikely to suppress technological change, I find a glimmer of hope in the rapid expansion of computer networking. It seems that young adults who regularly use computers are returning to libraries—to check out books! Unlike television, much of what we receive via computers is text or audio based. Also, much of the video content on computers is user-generated, not composed with the seductive quick jumps used in commercial efforts, and is in discreet packages—say a five minute YouTube segment—rather than the choppy programming seen on TV.
The difference is critical. When we read or listen to information, the images are self-created, residing in our heads where they feed imagination and creativity. When we watch TV, our inner screens are blank. This is presumably why repeated studies have shown that students don’t learn much from televised lessons.
The user-generated content on a networked computer, even something as simple as e-mail, makes the medium constantly interactive. We are drawn into the creative process.
Fortunately, eliminating TV from a home is quick and painless. Just say no.
Cecil Bothwell’s recent book is The Prince of War: Billy Graham’s Crusade for a Wholly Christian Empire. For more info about it, click here.