Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television (29 page)

But whichever is most important, the result is the same. We evolve into the images we carry in our minds. We become what we see. And in today’s America, what most of us see is one hell of a lot of television.

XII
THE REPLACEMENT OF HUMAN IMAGES BY TELEVISION

T
ELEVISION
is the most important single source of images in the world today. If people are ingesting television images at the rate of four hours a day, then it is clear that whatever uses people have for the images they carry in their heads, television is now the source.

When you are watching television all categories of your own image-making capacities go dormant, submerged in the television image. TV effectively intervenes between you and your personal images, substituting itself.

When you are watching TV, you are not daydreaming, or reading, or looking out the window at the world. You have opened your mind, and someone else’s daydreams have entered. The images come from distant places you have never been, depict events you can never experience, and are sent by people you don’t know and have never met. Your mind is the screen for their microwave pictures. Once their images are inside you, they imprint upon your memory. They become yours. What’s more, the images remain in you permanently. I can easily prove this to you.

Please bring to mind any of the following: John F. Kennedy, Milton Berle, Howdy Doody, the Bionic Man, Captain Kangaroo, Archie Bunker, Johnny Carson, Captain Kirk, Henry Kissinger.

Did any of these images appear in your mind? Were you able to make a picture of them in your head? If so, that is proof that once they have entered your brain they remain in there. They live in there together with all the memories of your life. Yet you don’t know these people. And many of them are fictional characters.

Now would you make the effort, please, to erase these TV people from your mind? Make them go away. Erase Johnny Carson or Henry Kissinger. Can you do that? If so, you are a most unusual person. Once television places an image inside your head, it is yours forever.

Suppression

Try to remember a time when you
first
read a book or heard a radio show and then
later
saw a film or a television program of the same work.

If you read, say,
Gone With the Wind, Roots, Marjorie Morningstar
or
From Here to Eternity,
or heard any radio show such as “The Lone Ranger” first, you created your own internal image of the events described while you read or listened. You imagined the characters, the events and the ambience. You made pictures in your mind. These pictures were yours. Of course they were influenced by the author—what he or she told you—but the creation of the actual image was up to you.

Marjorie Morningstar was an image in your mind
before
you saw the film. Then you saw the film with Natalie Wood playing Marjorie. Once you had seen Natalie Wood in the role, could you recover the image you had made up?

Marjorie became Natalie Wood from that point on. So we can say that when your self-produced image was made concrete for you, your own image disappeared.

When you listened to the Lone Ranger on radio, you created a picture of him and Tonto. When you saw them later on television, could you retain your new image, or did you get stuck with the actors? It was almost certainly the latter. If you then heard the radio program again, what image of the characters were you left with?

In any competition between an internally generated image and one that is later solidified for you via moving-image media, your own image is superseded. Moses is Charlton Heston. The Sundance Kid is Robert Redford. Isis is a Saturday morning cartoon. Woodward and Bernstein are Redford and Hoffman. Buffalo Bill is Paul Newman. McMurphy is Jack Nicholson. (When Carlos Castaneda was offered an enormous sum of money to sell the screen rights to the Don Juan series, he refused saying, “I don’t want to see Don Juan turn into Anthony Quinn.”)

Let me ask the question in reverse. If you saw the movie version of
Gone With the Wind
before you read the book, could you develop your
own
image of Rhett Butler? Or did he remain Clark Gable? Did you see Natalie Wood in the part
before
you read
Marjorie Morningstar?
If so, could you erase Natalie and come up with your own Marjorie? I doubt it very much. Once the concrete image is in you, it stays.

The power that television images have to replace imaginary images that you created yourself operates in all realms of external-image information. All of our minds are filled with images of places and times and people and stories with which we’ve never had personal contact. In fact, when you receive information from any source that does not have pictures attached to it, you make up pictures to go with it. They are your images. You create the movie to go with the story. You hear the word “Africa” and a picture comes to mind.

These internal movies can be of historical events and periods, such as the signing of the Declaration of Independence or the age of dinosaurs. They may be of happenings to which we have no direct access, such as life in a primitive village, or of exotic places we have never been—Borneo, China, the moon.

The question is this: Once television provides an image of these places and times, what happens to your own image? Does it give way to the TV image or do you retain it?

Here is a list to check with. Please attempt to bring these to mind:

I have already mentioned China, Africa, Borneo and the moon. How about life under the sea? Life in an Eskimo village? A police shoot-out. An argument among homosexuals. A mugging. Dope smugglers. A Russian village. A preoperation conference of doctors. An American farm family. The war room of the Pentagon. Ben Franklin. The Battle of Little Big Horn. The FBI. The Old South. The Crusades. The landing of the Pilgrims. The flight of Amelia Earhart. An emergency ambulance crew. A Stone Age tribe. The raid on Entebbe Airport. Ancient Greece. Ancient Rome. The Old West.

Were you able to come up with images for any or all of these? It is extremely unlikely that you have experienced more than one or two of them personally. Obviously the images were either out of your own imagination or else they were from the media.

Can you identify which was which?

Most of the people in America right now would probably say that the images they carry in their minds of the Old South are from one of two television presentations:
Gone With the Wind
and
Roots.
These were, after all, the two most popular television shows in history, witnessed by more than 130 million people each. And none of the 130 million was actually in the Old South.

Historical periods like the Crusades or the Old West are frequently pictured on television and in films. I have little doubt that most people would call upon their film or TV images if I asked them to bring those periods to mind. How could it be otherwise?

The same applies to the depictions of life-styles. What images do you use to understand the quality of life for lesbians? Or artists? Or farm laborers? Or members of the American Nazi Party? What images do you carry of Eskimo villagers or nomads in the Sahara or Indians in the Amazon?

Like historical periods, or groups of people with whom you are not in personal contact, most current events are also removed from your direct participation. You watch news reports in which Harry Reasoner tells you what is happening politically in China. You watch a congressman explain events in Chile, and then you see a street in Santiago. You see pictures of grounded oil tankers or fighting in Angola or elections in Sweden or scientific testimony on nuclear power.

You don’t participate in these things and you can’t see them for yourself. The images you have of them are derived from the media, and this becomes the totality of your image bank.

Now let’s go a step further.

Please bring to mind a baseball game or a football game. Have you got one? Hold it for a moment.

If you are like most Americans, you
have
actually been to a game. You have seen one directly and probably participated in one personally. You have probably also watched at least one of them on television. Here’s the question: Which one did you bring to mind? The television version or the one you experienced directly?

The answers vary on this point, but many people I have asked will report that the television image is the one which springs to mind first, if only because it was the most recent. Most will say the images rotate.

Once images are inside your head, the mind doesn’t really distinguish between the image that was gathered directly and the one that derived from television.

Of course you
can
distinguish. When I asked you whether it was a television image or a firsthand image, you were certainly able to identify which was which. But until I asked you, you may not have thought to do that.

Have you ever met movie stars or famous television personalities? Whenever I have met them I have always remarked to myself upon the difference in the personal image they presented and the television or film image. I could recognize them when I saw them in person, I am only saying that it was different. The main point is this: When I think about them now, in retrospect, their television images are just as likely to spring into my mind as their real-life images. I can
decide
to bring up their
real
images if I wish to, but if their names are mentioned in passing conversation, or I read a review of a production they’ve been in, I am actually more likely to bring up a media image than one of the real person I have met.

Have you ever visited McDonald’s? Which images dominate in your mind, those from your actual visit or those from television? They rotate, don’t they? They take on a certain equality in your memory banks. You can make the distinction between the direct image and the advertising image, but do you? If for some reason the subject of McDonald’s comes up in conversation, which image comes into your mind as you talk? Do you make the distinction? If you are like most people to whom I’ve asked this question, it is only with great effort that you are able to distinguish which one is the personal experience and which is the television experience. It takes a certain amount of effort to do so; one doesn’t ordinarily bother. The television image can be as real in effect as the personally experienced image.

The mind doesn’t automatically distinguish which image is from direct experience and which has been imposed by the media. If I should now ask you to erase the television image of McDonald’s, leaving only the reality—the personally experienced direct contact—can you do that? Please make the effort and see if you can.

We are left with a very bizarre phenomenon. Television is capable of dominating personally derived imagery—from books or imagination—and it is also capable, at least some of the time, of causing confusion as to what is real experience and what is television experience. The mind is very democratic about its image banks, all are equally available for our recall and use. And so when we call on our images for whatever purposes we may have for them, we are as likely to produce an implanted image as one which was originally our own.

The root of this unfortunate problem lies with the fact that until very recently, human beings had no need to make distinctions between artificial images of distant events and life directly lived.

The Inherent Believability of All Images

Seeing is believing.

Like many an axiom, this one is literally true. Only since the ascendancy of the media has this been opened to question.

Throughout the hundreds of thousands of generations of human existence, whatever we saw with our eyes was concrete and reliable. Experience was directly between us and the natural environment. Nonmediated. Nonprocessed. Not altered by other humans.

If we saw a flock of birds flying southward, then these birds were definitely doing that. We could believe in it. We might interpret this concrete information in various ways, perhaps misinterpret it, but there could never have been a question as to whether it was happening. The information itself, the birds and their flight, could not be doubted.