Friday, January 16, 1998
Boob tube has strong hold over viewers’ minds
False sense of security, materialism promoted by medium
I was in the Bay Area for part of winter break. While I was
there, I read a front-page article in the San Francisco Chronicle
about Jerry Seinfeld. Mainly it was about all of the public outrage
over the announcement that the show would be canceled. The
reactions ranged from sad to angry.
One disgruntled viewer went so far as to say something to the
effect of, "How can he do this to us? How can he take our friends
away from us?
Whoa! It’s a television show, people! I have news for you: these
are fictional characters, not your friends. Have you ever had a
conversation with these people? Taken a walk with them? Gone out
for coffee? Sat down and played a board game? Geez, have you ever
even shook hands? It seems like these are some minimal requirements
to base a friendship on and none of these things are ever going to
happen with Elaine or Kramer. They are actually fictional personae
portrayed by real people who are paid (a large-ass amount of money)
to pretend to be someone else. These actors are then recorded
reciting a script which someone else has written, and fake laughter
is inserted into the soundtrack. (I might be wrong on this
particular point, I just assume Seinfeld is like all the other
cheesy sitcoms that don’t even trust you to laugh on your own.) The
entire thing is then beamed to your house at a pre-set time where
it is projected as a series of pixels and colored dots.
At no point in this process do you come into contact with
another human being. How does anyone get the idea that this series
of dots is their friend? And yet this idea is very common. A friend
of mine pointed out to me that television gives people the illusion
that they are being social, and I tend to agree. It’s as though
watching people interact on television somehow substitutes for
actual interaction on your part.
How do I personally feel about television? Well, Karl Marx said,
"Religion is the opiate of the masses." But that was 150 years ago.
I don’t think any mere religion could possibly compete with this
technological god TV. It seems to me that nothing is more geared
toward making people more complacent and unimaginative than
television. (As I write this, actually many other things come to
mind, such as the school system in this country, the electoral
system, the way work is handled in this country, and the two-party
system, amongst others, but these are for other columns).
How many hours are sucked up by television? Hours that may have
been spent getting involved with the society around you, maybe even
making some positive contribution are instead spent watching
mindless talk shows and numbing sitcoms.
In addition, although you cannot affect television, it can
definitely have an effect on you. In a medium obsessed with the
visual, only that which is considered beautiful by our society is
portrayed as desirable. Hence, anyone not meeting the nearly
impossible criteria setup by television and magazines cannot be a
truly good person.
Advertisers have taken advantage of this by creating artificial
needs for products which supposedly enhance beauty by preying on
peopleis insecurities. How many commercials basically say that
without this product you will be ugly? It seems like most of them.
In fact, how many commercials are for things you really need? I’d
imagine it’s a very small percentage. Television is perfect for
creating these artificial needs. It’s perfect for an economic
system that needs ever-expanding markets in order to survive.
Television is also viewed as this great information source, but
as anyone who has taken Communications 10 knows, this is true in
some ways but overall is false. Television is a mass medium which
can reach large amounts of people very quickly and thus has the
potential to spread information from anywhere on the planet to
anywhere else virtually instantaneously. The problem is that the
medium itself has built-in biases which do not allow this potential
to be reached. Television is visual, therefore television news will
always focus on the visual. Otherwise newsworthy stories which do
not have an exciting picture to go along with them may well be
underrepresented or ignored entirely.
The way television works in this country (that is, as a system
of networks almost completely financed by advertisers) is also
detrimental to the reporting of information. First off, a network
is not likely to report something bad about one of their primary
financiers. For this you only need look at the story on the harmful
affects of nicotine which was supposed to air last year or the year
before. It was not shown due to the fact that CBS was supported by
many companies which produced cigarettes.
There is also the fact that commercials appear on television
every eight minutes or so. This means that any ideas you want to
get across are limited to this small span of time. For this reason,
it is extremely difficult to put forth new ideas that challenge
conventional thinking because you simply cannot explain your
viewpoint before the next commercial interrupts you. Because of
this, people necessarily must speak to viewers with cliches and in
terms of things they already know. It is extremely difficult for
any real learning to take place through television.
For this same reason it is very difficult to portray compelling
and complex characters on television. It is much easier to present
stereotypes which the audience will understand without having to
actually think about anything. I believe this is why so much of the
fiction on television is so infuriatingly boring. It is rare to
find real creativity.
I fear I may be sounding like one of those people who advocates
the censorship of all sorts of things because people need to be
protected from them. This is definitely not the case; I think every
person has the ability and the right to choose how they are going
to run their life, including whether and how much television they
are going to watch. I do believe that everyone does need some form
of mind-numbing time killer from time to time. I just fear that
television can easily take up too much of people’s time and block
out other possibly rewarding activities.
I think that television, like most other artistic media, has the
potential to be extremely beautiful. It is just unfortunate that
television was co-opted by crass commercialism so early in its
existence. There is the rare television program which, despite the
conventions working against it, still manages to be truly great.
They just seem very rare to me. Most of what’s on seems to mainly
foster materialism and complacency.