Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television (19 page)

In this country, where intervention between humans and their inner selves is so very advanced, the mystification is virtually total.

If the National Institutes of Health funded a $5 million study over a three-year period which gathered together all the “experts” to determine the effects of television on the body and mind, and then reported its findings to the president of the United States, who, frightened by the results, then appointed a commission of scholars and other experts to do it over again, one of whom smuggled a copy of the original “findings” to
The New York Times,
which then carried it on page one: SUPPRESSED STUDY SUGGESTS TELEVISION IS ADDICTIVE, HYPNOTIC, STOP S THOUGHT : SIMILA R T O BRAINWASHING : OTHE R PHYSICAL EFFECTS NOTED,
then
people would say, “You know, I always thought that might be true.”

In my opinion, if people are watching television for four hours every day and they say they can’t stop it, and also say that it seems to be programming them in some way, and they are seeing their kids go dead, then really, I deeply feel there is no need to study television. This evidence is what lawyers call “prima facie” proof. The only question is how to deal with it. I am satisfied that most people are already perfectly aware of what television is doing to them, but they remain tranquilized by the general wisdom that: the programming is the problem, and it is useless to attempt to change it anyway. Television is here to stay.

In the end, however, perhaps because this mystification also lurks in me, I decided to ask around in the scientific community to see who, if anyone, was concerned about the nature of the television experience.

Invisible Phenomenon

I contacted the Brain Information Service of the BioMedical Library of UCLA and spoke with Dr. Doris Dunn there. I asked her if that was an appropriate place to seek any published materials, including doctoral dissertations, which could relate television to a variety of medical and physiological syndromes.

She told me that the computer there could scan as many as a half million items covering the neuroscience literature published since 1969. She said it was probably as thorough a scanning service as existed for this kind of material.

I told her that I was interested in anything that made any relationship between television and the following: Hypnosis, addiction, hyperactivity, the neurophysiology of light reception, brainwashing, dreaming, thinking, brainwave activity.

I told her that I was also interested in anything that could be uncovered concerning
any
neurophysiological responses to television and that I’d appreciate her adding her own creative good judgment.

I asked her if she thought much would turn up; she said she doubted it.

Later I called her back to tell her that, thinking it over, I realized she’d probably turn up quite a lot on X-radiation from television sets and that I didn’t need it. A lot had already been published on that.

To get a sense of comparison, I asked her how many items she would expect to turn up in some
other
area of inquiry. I anticipated being able to make the point that science has failed to look at television as an instrument that produces biological reactions and that this in itself reveals an almost blind acceptance of the medium.

Two weeks later, I received a bibliography of seventy-eight items, covering the period 1969-1975. Dr. Dunn’s covering letter said I could get a sense of comparison from the fact that for a subject like sleep and dreaming about one thousand items would be filed every year. On EEG brainwave activity “several thousand” are filed every year. However, not one of the dreaming articles contained significant reference to television, and only one article on brainwave activity referred to a relationship with television.

Of the seventy-eight references, there were twenty articles concerning a condition called “television epilepsy”—in which otherwise nonepileptic people go into fits while watching television—and several on eye damage, heart rate changes according to the program content, and some on X-radiation, which I’d anticipated.

Of the half million articles scanned by the computer, only two spoke of any relationship between television and hypnosis. There was one about television causing headaches, several on the effects of television on perceptions of scale and distance, and about a dozen on the effects of television on young people. (These latter articles turned out to be “behavioral,” not physiological, articles which slipped through the gates.)

It is clear that the neurophysiological effect of television is no hot subject for scientific research.

To augment and also double-check the Brain Information Service, I asked San Francisco journalist and researcher Mickey Friedman if she would do some digging through the
Psychological Abstracts,
which contain virtually the same listings as the computer, but carry the subject categories back for several more decades. Friedman went all the way back to 1940 and found only nine additional references, including one on addiction, the first one, and one on hypnosis.

Then, in the spring of 1977, an extremely interesting book appeared, the first to argue that the experience of television— the act of watching it—is more significant than the content of the programs being watched.
The Plug-In Drug
by Marie Winn caused a sensation among worried parents, psychologists and educators. It asserted that television viewing by children was addictive, that it was turning a generation of children into passive, incommunicative “zombies” who couldn’t play, couldn’t create, and couldn’t even think very clearly.

I read through the book seeking the sources of Marie Winn’s research only to discover that she had run up against the same dearth of research that was already apparent to me. This did not stop her, to her credit, as she strung together long interviews of parents, children, and educators. She gave validity to a series of experiential reports that were parallel to those I’d collected. She combined these with whatever could be gathered from non-television-related research on cognition, on reading patterns, on verbal and nonverbal thinking, and on the observations of other writers, and what she could gather from her own observance of the television experience.

She drew a horrifying picture of a generation of children who were growing up without the basic skills that most earlier generations had used to get through life, children who could not even solve the problem of dealing with free time. She also described the disassembling effects television has upon family life, in which communication and even direct affection and participation in each other’s lives were being processed through television experience, to the extreme detriment of everyone.

Having gone as far as she went, however, Marie Winn didn’t apply her findings to adults and didn’t relate any of the effects of television to the power drives of the wider society.

I decided to continue digging and soon found myself creating my own horrifying picture of television’s effect and how it fits the needs of the juggernaut. The nature of the viewing experience itself, the technology of fixation (which I already knew from advertising), new research on biological effects, together with discoveries about the power of implanted imagery, combine to create a pattern in which the newly diminished role of the human being is more and more apparent.

Dimming Out the Human

Television is watched in darkened rooms. Some people leave on small lights, or daylight filters in, but it is a requirement of television viewing that the set be the brightest image in the environment or it cannot be seen well.

To increase the effect, background sounds are dimmed out just as the light is. An effort is made to eliminate household noises. The point, of course, is to further the focus on the television set. Awareness of the outer environment gets in the way.

Many people watch television alone a substantial amount of the time. This eliminates yet another aspect of outer awareness. Even while watching with others, a premium is placed upon quiet. Talking interferes with attention to the set. If you like to look at people while talking, turning your head actually breaks attention. So other people are dimmed out like the light, the sounds, and the rest of the world.

Dimming out your own body is another part of the process. People choose a position for viewing that allows the maximum comfort and least motion, that is, the least awareness of the body because like awareness of external light, sound or other stimuli, awareness of your own body can detract from the focus on the television. Positions are chosen in which arms and legs will not have to be moved. One may shift weight from time to time, or go for a snack, but for most of the experience, the body is quiet.

This dimming out is also true of the internal organs. The heartbeat slows to idle, the pulse rate tends to even out, the brainwave patterns go into a smooth and steady rhythm. The consequences of all this will be examined a little later. For now, let’s just say that thinking processes also dim.

Overall, while we are watching television, our bodies are in a quieter condition over a longer period of time than in any other of life’s nonsleeping experiences. This is true even for the eyes, which are widely presumed to be active during television viewing. In fact, the eyes move
less
while watching television than in any other experience of daily life. This is particularly so if you sit at a distance from the set or if your set is small. In such cases you take in the entire image without scanning. Even with huge television screens, the eyes do not move as much as they do when seeing a movie, where the very size of the theater screen requires eye and even head movement.

Even when you are working in an office, or reading a book, the eyes move more than they do while watching television. In offices there are always interruptions. While reading, you vary the speed at which you read, go over material and raise your eyes off the page from time to time.

In the wider world outside of the media, the eyes almost never stop moving, searching and scanning. For humans, the eyes are “feelers”; they are one of our major contacts with the world and are forever reaching and studying.

While you are watching television, in addition to the non-movement of the eyeball, there is a parallel freezing of the focusing mechanism. The eye remains at a fixed distance from the object observed for a longer period of time than in any other human experience.

Ordinarily, the process of focusing, defocusing and refocusing engages the eye nonstop all day long, even during sleeping and dreaming. But while you are watching television, no matter what is happening on the screen, however far away the action of the story is supposed to be inside the set, the set itself remains at a fixed distance and requires only an infinitesimal change in focus. As we shall see, the result is to flatten all information into one dimension and to put the viewer in a condition akin to unconscious staring.

However idle the eyes are during television watching, they are positively lively compared to the other senses. Sound is reduced to the extremely narrow ranges of television audio, while smell, taste and touch are eliminated altogether.

Artificial Touch and Hyperactivity

McLuhan made the case that television stimulates the sense of touch. He calls TV “tactile.” I don’t know if he intended that as one of his personal jokes, which got taken too seriously, or if he actually meant it, but it is one of the most dangerous of the many misleading statements he made.

He suggests that light playing against the skin is itself stimulating. The silliness of that statement can be gathered by merely comparing
that
low-level stimulation with the sort of stimulation the skin would receive from just about any minor body movement. Reaching for a grape involves more body-wide skin stimulation: clothes against skin, stretching, cool grapes bursting sour in the mouth.

Worse, McLuhan implies that in seeing images on a screen, the human is inclined to act on them, thereby inciting the sense of touch for action. This is a really irresponsible remark.

Images on television are not real. They are not events taking place where the person who views them is sitting. The images are taking place in the television set, which then projects them into the brain of the viewer. Direct response to them would therefore be more than absurd. So whatever stimulation is felt is instantly repressed. While McLuhan may be correct that seeing the images stimulates the impulse to move, the impulse is cut off. The effect is a kind of sensory tease, to put the case generously. The human starts a process and then stops it, then starts it again, then stops it, vibrating back and forth between those two poles of action and repression, all of it without a purpose in real life.

There is mounting evidence that this back-and-forth action is a major casue of hyperactivity; fast movement without purpose, as though stimulated by electricity. The physical energy which is created by the images, but not used, is physically stored. Then when the set is off, it comes bursting outward in aimless, random, speedy activity. I have seen it over and over again with children. They are quiet while watching. Then afterwards they become overactive, irritable and frustrated.

Marie Winn quotes Dr. Matthew Dumont, who says that television causes hyperactive response. But Australian psychologists Merrelyn and Fred Emery, in their study of television, from which I will be quoting at length later on, have gone so far as to absolutely predict that as television advances in Australia there will be a directly proportionate increase in hyper-activity. I believe that in extreme cases the frustration inherent in the TV experience can lead to violent activity, whatever the content of the program. Artificially teased senses require resolution. It is bizarre and frightening, therefore, that many parents use television as a means of calming hyperactive children. It would be far better to calm them with physical exercise, sports, wrestling, hugging, bathing and a lot of direct attention that gives them wide-ranging sensory and intellectual stimulation. Changes in diet would also help. The worst thing one can do for a hyperactive child is to put him or her in front of a television set. Television activates the child at the same time that it cuts the child (or adult) off from real sensory stimulation and the opportunity for resolution.