Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television (20 page)

Television Is Sensory Deprivation

I have previously drawn a parallel between modern life and conditions of sensory deprivation. Artificial environments themselves reduce and narrow sensory experience to fit their own new confined reality. The effect and purpose of this narrowing is to increase awareness and focus upon the work, commodities, entertainments, spectacles and other drugs that society uses to keep us within its boundaries.

We can consider television to be an advance on that already prevalent condition. Sitting in darkened rooms, with the natural environment obscured, other humans dimmed out, only two senses operating, both within a very narrow range, the eyes and other body functions stilled, staring at light for hours and hours, the experience adds up to something nearer to sense deprivation than anything that has come before it.

Television isolates people from the environment, from each other, and from their own senses. In such a condition, the two semioperative senses cannot benefit from the usual mix of information that humans employ to deduce meaning from their surroundings. All meaning comes from this very narrowed information field.

We know that it is an accepted truth about sensory-deprivation conditions that subjects have no recourse but to focus on the images in their brain. And we know that in sensory-deprivation conditions, having no resources aside from mental images, the subject is unusually susceptible to suggestion.

When you are watching TV, you are experiencing mental images. As distinguished from most sense-deprivation experiments these mental images are not yours. They are someone else’s. Because the rest of your capacities have been subdued, and the rest of the world dimmed, these images are likely to have an extraordinary degree of influence. Am I saying this
is
brainwashing or hypnosis or mind-zapping or something like it? Well, there is no question but that someone is speaking into your mind and wants you to do something.

First, keep watching.

Second, carry the images around in your head. Third, buy something.

Fourth, tune in tomorrow.

IX
THE INGESTION OF ARTIFICIAL LIGHT

W
HEN you are watching television the major thing you are doing is looking at light. The philosopher John Brockman was the first person to put it that way to me, remarking that this in itself represents an enormous change in human experience. For four hours a day, human beings sit in dark rooms, their bodies stilled, gazing at light. Nothing like this has ever happened before.

Previous generations, millions of them, looked at starlight, firelight and moonlight, and there is no doubt that these experiences stir important feelings. There are cultures that spent time gazing at the sun, but there is no culture in all of history that has spent such enormous blocks of time, all of the people together, every day, sitting in dark rooms looking at artificial light.

Anne Waldman, the poet, has suggested that television might itself represent a surrogate moon; a substitute for the original experience for which we, somewhere, continue to long.

If true, this might be merely poignant if it weren’t for some important distinctions between looking at the moon or a fire and looking at television.

Television light is purposeful and directed rather than ambient. It is projected into our eyes from behind the screen by cathode-ray guns which are literally aimed at us. These guns are powered by 25,000 volts in the case of color television, and about 15,000 volts in black-and-white sets.

The guns shoot electron streams at phosphors on the screen. This makes the phosphors glow, and their light projects from the screen into our eyes. It is not quite accurate to say that when we watch television we are looking at light; it is more accurate to say that light is projected into us. We are
receiving
light through our eyes into our bodies, far enough in to affect our endocrine system, as we shall see. Some physicists say that the eye does not distinguish between ambient light, which has reflected off other surfaces, and directed light, which comes straight at the eye, undeterred, but others think the difference is important.

There is another hot debate in physics on the question of whether light is particulate matter or wave energy. For our purposes, however, what needs to be appreciated is that whether light is matter or energy it is a
thing
which is entering us. When you are watching television, you are experiencing something like lines of energy passing from cathode gun to phosphor through your eyes into your body. You are as connected to the television set as your arm would be to the electrical current in the wall—about which there is the same question of wave versus particle—if you had stuck a knife into the socket.

These are not metaphors. There is a concentrated passage of energy from machine to you, and none in the reverse. In this sense, the machine is literally dominant, and you are passive.

Health and Light

As I began to look around for an explanation to account for the physical symptoms people were describing, particularly those related to “deadness,” “zombielike feeling,” “irritation,” and so on—symptoms ordinarily explained as psychologically induced—Stewart Brand sent me a copy of a book called
Health and Light
by Dr. John Ott, a former banker who quit to become a time-lapse photographer and then founded the Environmental Health and Light Research Institute in Sarasota, Florida. Now in his seventies, Ott presides over a board of directors of doctors and medical researchers who do pioneering work on the effects of light on the human body.

I had heard of Ott as a major source for government agencies seeking evidence of the effects of X-radiation emanating from television sets. He had been instrumental in convincing lawmakers to reduce the allowable limits of TV X rays. Over the past twenty years these limits have been reduced more than twenty times. There was a time when fifty millirems per hour was permissible, but now the limit is one one-hundredth of that, one half a millirem per hour. Ott has argued that even that is too high. In one celebrated series of studies, the roots of bean plants he placed in front of color television sets grew
upward
out of the soil. Another set of plants became monstrously large and distorted. Mice which were similarly placed developed cancerous lesions. Ott argues that any amount of X ray emanation from television—most sets still produce some— is likely to be harmful to humans.

In
Health and Light,
Ott devotes himself less to discussing X rays than he does to discussing a more subtle danger in our environment, artificial light, particularly fluorescent. In this case, his research is not directed specifically at television light. But since television
is
fluorescent, the work is directly applicable.

While doing his time-lapse photographic work on plants, Ott made his first discoveries concerning interactions between the plants and the lights he was using for the photography. He noticed that when he changed from incandescent lighting to fluorescent, for example, plants would suddenly cease to grow in one pattern and grew in another. His time-lapse photography was able to record the change.

Also, as he changed from one fluorescent to another, similar peculiarities would appear on the film. Differences also occurred when the plants were moved from all artificial light sources into natural light.

Ott became interested less in the photography than in these changes. He began to change the lights deliberately to see what would happen. Then he undertook microscopic photography of the plant cells, to learn if it was possible to
see
the changes in cellular activity.

The cellular action of plants is called “the streaming of the chloroplasts.” Through a microscope one can see the millions of cells moving about in an orderly pattern, resembling in some ways a traffic flow.

Ott discovered that when plants were kept in sunlight, the chloroplasts would continue in their regular pattern. When the light had to pass through ordinary window glass, groups of chloroplasts would begin to “fall off the streaming pattern.” Under artificial lighting, the behavior of the chloroplasts altered markedly. As Ott changed the light from incandescent to fluorescent, or from one color of fluorescent to another, the chloroplasts might move faster or more slowly, group sluggishly, or they might leap about crazily, completely out of synchrony with the prior pattern.

The results were so marked that Ott began to wonder if similar cell changes could be found among laboratory animals when they were switched from one light source to another. The new science of photobiology has begun to discover that humans and animals, which are made up of virtually the same chemical mixture as plants (save for chlorophyll),
also
react to light in various ways. We receive light through the cells of our skin, but more remarkably, we receive light through our eyes and absorb it into our cell structure. Ott was interested in determining what effect changes in light might have on a particular strain of cancer-sensitive laboratory rat; he wanted to know if differences in cancer rates resulted from differences in light sources.

They did. Pink fluorescent produced the highest rates of cancer in rats; natural daylight the lowest. In one experiment involving three hundred cancer-sensitive mice, these were the results:

In another experiment involving two thousand mice, he found that those kept under pink fluorescent developed tumors and died, on the average, within seven and a half months. Those kept under other light sources had an average life span double that of the first group.

Cancer wasn’t the only reaction to artificial light. When mice were kept under one particular pink fluorescent for long periods of time, their tails would literally wither and fall off.

Under a certain dark blue fluorescent, the cholesterol level in the blood of the mice rose sharply; male mice became obese, although the females did not.

Ott worked with other animals as well.

A red filter placed over ordinary incandescent light was found to weaken and rupture the heart cells of chick embryos. A blue incandescent light placed over the cages of chinchillas increased the number of females in the litter; a similar light increased the female population of some fish in a tank.

Other light changes caused aggressiveness, hyperactive behavior, aimlessness and disorientation, as well as changes in sexual patterns among mice, rats and other animals.

In his book, and in a later three-part article in the medical journal
Eye, Ear, Nose and Throat Monthly
(July 1974), Ott spelled out how he believes light affects us.

He first explains the connection between the light we receive in our eyes and our cell structure. This is the chain of events: Light passes through the eye to contact the retina. The retina has what Ott calls a “dual function.” The first is the obvious one: translating the light into images by way of channels to the brain. The second, equally important function is for the light rays,
aside
from their role as image creators, to pass via neurochemical channels into and through the pineal and pituitary glands and therefore into the animal
and
human endocrine systems.

Identifying this series of connections is not original with Ott. Many researchers, some of whom I shall cite later, have found that this interaction affects hormonal structures, sexuality, fertility, growth and many other aspects of animal and human cell structure.

Ott says the
kind
of light that passes through the eyes determines the reactions of human cells. His experiments on plants and animals were attempts to demonstrate that even minute changes in
wavelength spectra
(what we call “color”)—say, between one kind of artificial light and another, or between natural light and artificial light—cause important biochemical alterations.

Critical to understanding all of this is the term “light,” which does not apply to a single, monolithic element. When we speak of “light” we ordinarily do not make distinctions between natural light or artificial light; nor do we make the distinction between kinds of artificial light. We tend to lump all of them together. One flips the switch to “on” and what one gets is “light.” When it is “on” one can see. But there is where the similarity ends.

Natural sunlight is made up of all the radiant wavelengths of energy (spectra) that fit within what we call “light.” What’s more, it contains them in a specific mixture. So much of this and so much of that.

Artificial light from any source—whether incandescent or fluorescent—leaves out many segments of the spectral range contained in natural light, and it delivers an entirely different mix of spectral ingredients. Incandescent light, for example, emphasizes the portion of the spectrum near the infrared while minimizing or leaving out others. Artificial light is quite literally
not
the same element as natural light. To use the same term for both is to destroy understanding.