Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television (36 page)

With information confined to the media, totally separated from the context of time and place, the creation of reality is as simple as feeding it directly into our heads. An earlier lie can become what Werner Erhard calls the “ground of reality” for the newer lie. We don’t need the CIA to prove the point. Any evening’s news is filled with information that we can’t possibly know is true. How could we know? The only way to know for sure if something happened is to be present at the time and in the place of the event. If not, you are taking the information on faith.

This problem of uncertainty, caused by disconnection from time and place, applies to all media. For example, some chapters ago, I described a correspondence I’d had with an anthropologist friend, Neal Daniels, concerning the importance of light in many cosmologies. I also described a trip to Micronesia and a conversation with a man I met there. I also told you about a woman at an environmental conference, using her words to support my arguments. How can you know if any of these things happened? How could you
possibly
know? Well, you could go to the American Anthropology Association, track down Neal Daniels, and ask him. If he exists. You could write the University of Michigan and ask for a roster of attendees at that environmental conference, seeking a woman who fit my description. You could do that only if the conference itself happened. But would you? What a lot of trouble that would be.

And yet, perhaps I made up those stories to fill out some points. Perhaps I made up one of them. How can you know?

Whenever you engage with the media, any media, you begin to take things on faith. With books you are at least able to stop and think about what you read, as you read. This gives you some chance to analyze. With television the images just come. They flow into you at their own speed, and you are hard pressed to know a true image from one which is manufactured. All of the images are equally disconnected from context, afloat in time and space.

Condensation of Time: The Bias against
Accuracy

With events separated from the time and place in which they occur, it becomes possible to condense them in time. It is not only possible but inevitable that this be done. Unlike print media, or even film, television information is inherently limited by time. It is impossible to present all of most events, so what is presented is always condensed. Most of the event is squeezed out. The result of this condensation is distortion.

If you have ever participated in a public event of any sort and then watched the news report of it, you are already aware that the news report barely resembles what you experienced. You are aware of this because you were there. Other viewers are not aware. When television describes events that happened at some other historical time, no one can know what is true.

The best article I ever read on the inevitable distortions resulting from television’s inherent need to condense time was written in
TV Guide
by Bill Davidson (March 20, 1976). Writing about the new spurt of “docudramas,” which represent themselves as true versions of historical events, he said, “Truth may be the first victim when television ‘docudramas’ rewrite history.”

Davidson analyzes some half-dozen docudramas for inaccuracy and distortion and then asks, “Does this mean that docudrarna is more drama than docu? Probably yes. Is the American public deliberately being misled by representations that these films are in fact true stories? Probably yes.”

In fact, however, the distortions are less deliberate than they are inevitable.

Davidson interviewed David Rintels, who wrote the docudrama
Fear on Trial,
which purported to be a true account of the blacklisting of John Henry Faulk in 1956. He quotes Rintels as saying:

“ ‘I had to tell a story condensing six or seven years into a little less than two hours, which means I could just barely hit the major highlights. I did what I think all writers should do— present the essence of the facts and capture the truth of the general story. . . . Attorney Louis Nizer’s summation to the jury took more than 12 hours. I had to do it in three minutes.’ “

Davidson also quotes Buzz Aldrin, the ex-astronaut whose life story was the subject of “Return to Earth” on ABC. “ ‘On the whole, I’m satisfied with the picture, but condensation sometimes alters the truth.’ “

The need to condense is inherent in a medium which is limited by time. The process of condensation, however, has the effect of eliminating the sort of nuance which is as important to historical accuracy as the action that
is
included.

Davidson points out that since television docudramas have condensed such complex subjects as the career of Joseph McCarthy, the Attica prison riots, and the life of Martin Luther King, Jr., the problem is virtually beyond control. Davidson quotes psychologist Dr. Victor B. Cline of the University of Utah, who says: “ ‘The very real danger of these docudrama films is that people take it for granted that they’re true and— unlike similar fictionalized history in movies and the theater —they are seen on a medium which also presents straight news. . . . I think they should carry a disclaimer to the effect that the story is not totally true but based on some of the elements of what actually occurred.’“

I think so too. But if there should be disclaimers for docudramas there should be many
more
for news. As prominent San Francisco journalist Susan Halas once put it: “There is no news, there’s only media.” Where docudramas reduce an event to an hour or two, distorting truth, the news may reduce the same event to thirty seconds, eliminating most of the information that a reasonable, thinking person would consider necessary to any understanding of events in process. What is left is the skeleton of events, making only scraps of knowledge available for people’s perception and understanding.

The inevitable need to condense information in time is the cause of this. The
way
the information is condensed—what is left in and what is deleted—will be described further at the end of the next chapter, where we discuss highlighted moments and their application to news.

XV
ARTIFICIAL UNUSUALNESS

T
HE
technical limitations already described conspire to create a far deeper and much more serious problem for television: It is inherently boring.

With information confined to only two sensory modes, with sensory synesthesia shifted, with low-definition imagery, with the total loss of context (aura and time), and with viewers whose thought processes are dulled, the producers of television programs begin with a difficult task. How to create interest through a medium that is predisposed to turn people off?

My friend Jack Edelson has put it this way: “It’s the most curious thing; when I watch television I’m bored and yet fixated at the same time. I hate what I’m watching and I feel deeply disinterested but I keep watching anyway.” His statement was echoed by dozens of letters I have received, and children describe their TV experience in similar terms.

The hypnotic-addictive quality of the medium goes a long way to keep the bored viewer fixated before the screen. So does the fact that our mediated environments don’t offer much by way of stimulation. TV is the only action. However, there is much more to this bored fixation than that. Television producers and directors, deeply aware of the inherent limitations of the medium, have developed a vast technology of tricks— a technology of attachment, actually—that can succeed in keeping a viewer engaged despite the lack of any real desire to be watching. Most of the techniques were originally developed by advertising people, who have always had vast amounts of money available for experiments and whose
raison d’etre
is to develop technologies to fixate the viewer.

Most of the techniques are rooted in an exploitation and inversion of a single emotionally based human tendency: interest in “highlighted moments.”

Instinct to the Extraordinary

I described the Amazon Indians’ means of discovering, understanding and interacting with their forest environment. The events that caused them the greatest alarm were the unique, the out of the ordinary: a broken twig that could not be explained, or a distant sound that had not been heard before. It is the unusual that stimulates heightened attention.

You can experience this yourself the next time you’re out walking. Whether in a city or in a country meadow, the field of images, sounds, smells proceeds into you without your particularly noticing them. Then, an extraordinary event will occur. A bird will dive nearby, a boulder will roll across the path, a car will screech to a halt. You snap into a more alert condition, a decision may be required. A thought results.

Obviously being alert to the unusual moment is useful for survival. But aside from survival, the sensory interest in the unusual is a means toward gaining knowledge and pleasure.

Knowledge is gained by discerning change, by noting the event that is different from all others, by making distinctions and establishing patterns. The fiftieth time you watch a field of daisies you can still learn something new about natural form since no two observations are alike. Then there is the clearly special event: the single ten-foot daisy or the hole appearing where none had been the day before.

In both cases, the extraordinary induces notation, study, and eventually knowledge. “Sometimes in a field of daisies,” one might say, “one daisy will grow abnormally large.” That is knowledge. “It is the same with bears and foxes.” This is a second level of knowledge. “Perhaps animals are like plants; I must watch for further examples of this.” A process of self-education about planetary patterns has begun. The observation of
differences
is at the heart of the knowledge.

The senses are just as attuned to differentiation as the mind. We notice water or someone else’s skin against our own because the moment of the touch is different from the moment before the touch. As the same touch is repeated over and over, we slowly sink back into automatic pilot. Although there can be comfort and security in the routine and the repetitive, the most stimulating event is the creative one, the new one.

Television is an exceedingly odd phenomenon. On the one hand it offers non-unique, totally repetitive experience. No matter what is on television, the viewer is sitting in a darkened room, almost all systems shut down, looking at light.

But within this deprived, repetitive, inherently boring environment, television producers create the fiction that something unusual is going on, thereby fixing attention. They do this in two ways: first, by outrageously fooling around with the imagery; second, by choosing content outside of ordinary life, thereby fitting the test of unusualness.

These two tactics combine to create a hierarchy of production standards that in the trade are lumped together as “good television.” As we shall see, the term applies more to a quality of manipulation than a quality of content. I shall take these one at a time.

The Bias toward Technique as Replacement
of Content

When you are watching television, you are seeing images that are utterly impossible in nature. This in itself qualifies the imagery for your attention, even when the content within the image is nothing you’d otherwise care about. For example, the camera can circle the subject. It can rise above it or go below it. It can zoom in or back away from it. The image can be changed in size or made to fade and reappear. Editors make it possible for a scene in one room to be followed instantly by a scene in another room, or at another time, or another place. Words appear over images. Music rises and falls in the background. Two images or three can appear simultaneously. One image can be superimposed on another on the screen. Motion can be slowed down or sped up.

None of these effects is possible in unmediated imagery. When you lift your eyes from this paper and look around your room, it doesn’t become some other room or some other time. It could not possibly do that. Nor does your room circle around you or zoom back away from you. If it did do that, you would certainly pay one hell of a lot of attention to it, just as you would to anything new and unexplained that appeared in your field of vision.

Through these technical events, television images alter the usual, natural imagery possibilities, taking on the quality of a naturally highlighted event. They make it seem that what you are looking at is unique, unusual and extraordinary.

Attention is stimulated as though something new or important was going on, such as landslides, gigantic boulders or ten-foot daisies. But nothing unusual is going on. All that’s happening is that the viewer is watching television, which is the same thing that happened an hour ago, or yesterday. A trick has been played. The viewer is fixated by a conspiracy of dimmed-out environments combined with artificial, impossible, fictitious unusualness.