Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television (32 page)

Bias against the Excluded

If the telescope has selected a shooting from an entire planet’s worth of activities, in the next moment it may choose a Super Bowl game, or a threatening remark by a Middle Eastern leader, or a program of people trying to win prizes, or a movie about the Old West. All other subjects were not selected, at least in this moment. The telescope did not select views of the ocean as the tide comes in, or people sitting on front porches, or young people knocking on doors to tell a neighborhood about a zoning hearing.

The question to ask is if there is a logic in this selection. Are there reasons why the telescope selects one thing and not another?

There certainly are. Dozens of them.

The first and most obvious of these reasons is the one that most critics of television devote themselves to. The people who control television, businessmen, operate strictly out of considerations of budget and profit, in addition to bringing along their own political, perceptual, and social biases. It was to allay their influence that so many thousands of media reformers devoted years of effort to democratizing access to the medium and its content. And yet at present there are still no poor people running television, no Indians, no ecologists, no political radicals, no Zen Buddhists, no factory workers, no revolutionaries, no artists, no Communists, no Luddites, no hippies, no botanists, to name only a few excluded groups.

To have only businessmen in charge of the most powerful mind-implanting instrument in history naturally creates a boundary to what is selected for dissemination to nearly 250 million people. There can be little disagreement with the point that if other categories of people had control, then the choices would be different. If television is a medium of brainwash, then a more diverse brainwash would surely be an improvement over the sort we get at present.

The overriding bias of television, then, the bias which contains all the other biases, is that it offers preselected material, which excludes whatever is not selected.

Now, of course, this is utterly obvious. And, yes, it is true of all experiences. When you are doing one thing, you exclude everything else that you might be doing.

This only becomes significant concerning television when we forget that: 1) someone has
selected
our experience for us, and 2) we have given up awareness, information and experience that is not part of television.

In the years I was researching and working on this book, I only ran into one person who works
in
television and was speaking publicly on points similar to this one. He was Robert Keeshan, the actor who plays Captain Kangaroo. At the 1974 Communications Seminar at San Francisco State College he said:

“When you are spending time in front of the television, you are not doing other things. The young child of three or four years old is in the stage of the greatest emotional development that human beings undergo. And we only develop when we experience things, real-life things: a conversation with Mother, touching Father, going places, doing things, relating to others. This kind of experience is critical to a young child, and when the child spends thirty-five hours per week in front of the TV set, it is impossible to have the full range of real-life experience that a young child must have. Even if we had an overabundance of good television programs, it wouldn’t solve the problem.”

The act of sitting in front of television is itself a replacement of other modes of experience and the awareness these would bring. In this way, television is an acceleration of a condition that began with our artificial environments. We are already separated from most experiences with an unmediated planet. We have given up our personal sensory informational systems. The artificial forms around us already limit our experience and awareness. Our knowledge of the outside world was confined to a narrower field even before television was invented.

With television, however, the artificial information-field is brought inside our darkened rooms, inside our stilled minds, and shot by cathode guns through our unmoving eyes into our brains, and recorded. We have no participatory role in gathering data. Our information is narrowed to only what the telescope provides. If we don’t experience a wider information field, we lose knowledge of that field’s existence. We become the hermit in the cave who knows only what the TV offers. We experience what is, not knowing what isn’t.

The people who control television become the choreographers of our internal awareness. We give way to their process of choosing information. We live within their conceptual frameworks. We travel to places on the planet which they choose and to situations which they decide we should see. What we can know is narrowed to what they know, and then narrowed further to what they select to send us through this instrument of theirs.

The kind of people who control television is certainly a problem. But this is only the beginning. While our field of knowledge is constrained by their venality and arrogance, the people who run television are constrained by the instrument itself.

Television is no open window through which all perception may pass. Quite the opposite. There are many technological factors that conspire to limit what the medium can transmit. Some information fits and some doesn’t. Some information can pass through, but only after being reshaped, redefined, packaged, and made duller and coarser than before. Some ways of mind can be conveyed and some cannot.

The wrinkle in the story is that what
can
be conveyed through television are the ways of thinking and the kinds of information that suit the people who are in control. This is why they like it so much. It is obviously efficient for them to concentrate their communications within a medium that is good at conveying their forms of mind, just as a person with a drive for power is more apt to express that in politics than in gardening. Conversely, it is logical that the medium will not respond well to people or attitudes that defy its limits. It will throw them off, or distort their messages, as a computer would shun anyone who wishes to use it to express feelings of loving tenderness. It might program such a message, but only the words will come out on the tape; not the loving tenderness.

So we have a chicken-egg problem. It’s difficult to tell which came first, the technology or its controllers. It may not be that the corporate mentality won the war to control television. As the rest of Argument Four will suggest, the technology itself picked its master, through the inexorable technological factors that confine its use.

Fuzzy Images: The Bias against Subtlety

As has been mentioned, the television screen produces its image by way of a grid of dots located along five hundred lines. This might seem to be sufficient for fairly detailed images, but it is not. Roughly speaking, the experience of looking at a TV picture is like looking at the world through a tea strainer. The picture is located along the grids. You fill in the blanks.

Compare the image of your television screen with any other image in your television room: the bookcase, the table, the rug. Obviously the actual object is vivid in comparison with the television image.

Television production people are exquisitely aware of this. There is an electronics term to describe it: “signal-to-noise ratio.” Ordinarily applied to sound, the term can be applied to images as well.

The “signal” is the primary image that they are attempting to convey. The “noise” is the background, the fuzz, from which the signal has to stand out to be seen properly. A “clear” picture is one in which the signal and noise are well differentiated. In television, however, since the differentiation is difficult to achieve, program decisions and production styles have to be chosen to maximize what is possible. As a result, there is a tendency to concentrate on images which offer a large signal-to-noise distinction.

An enormous percentage of television images are close-ups of faces. This is not accidental. Faces in close-up are about the sharpest signal that television can produce while still conveying content. Even so, if the background behind the face is complex, filled with varieties of objects and color tones, the face merges with the background and it all becomes a confusing jumble. So even while showing faces, television producers must keep the background “clean,” stark, unencumbered. Dramatic programs are constructed so that there are very few adornments and props. This avoids a cluttered image and increases the potential for the primary image to communicate something.

This limitation does not exist to the same extent with movies, where the signal-to-noise ratio is much greater, allowing for images filled with detail. However, when a movie is played on television, much detail is lost. If you will think back to a time when you first saw a film in a theater and then saw it on television, you will realize how much richness is lost in the translation from one medium to the other.

There is also a low signal-to-noise ratio in television sound. It is very low fidelity, although it
could
be greatly improved. High-fidelity sound, equal to recording sound, is possible with television speaker technology but too costly for mass markets.

An additional factor fuzzing up the sound is the high-pitched whistle that emanates from all television sets. Caused by the interaction of the audio and visual electron fields, this whistle is unavoidable with television technology, at least in marketable price ranges. And so both television picture and sound remain fuzzy.

This problem of indistinctness, rarely noted or discussed by critics of television, cannot be overestimated. It is a major factor influencing all decisions made by television producers. It skews all programming—both choices of subject and treatment of the choices—toward those that offer the highest possible contrast between foreground and background, signal and noise, color and tone. This leads to images which tend to the larger as opposed to the smaller, to the broad as opposed to the detailed, to the simple as opposed to the complex, to the obvious rather than the subtle. Because of these tendencies, inexorably imposed by the technology itself, the communicable content of all programs is affected. Beyond confining the visual image and the choices of sound, these tendencies affect the emotional content. Because the images are indistinct, subtle feelings are more difficult to transmit through television than the larger emotions—the foreground emotions, as it were—that can be depicted efficiently by larger facial expressions, or even by noncloseup body movements.

Even with a reliance on facial close-ups, what television can convey is a reduced version of what is possible in real life or even in still photography or film. The human relationships which are shown on television, therefore, tend to be those that
can
be shown on television. These dwell on the grosser end of the human emotional spectrum. The more subtle expressions, those which express intimate, deeply personal feelings, are lost in the blur.

In recent years there has emerged a very vocal group of outraged psychologists, educators and parents who speak of the urgent need to show positive behavior, such as loving, caring, sharing, and warmth, in television programs. They deplore the emphasis on “antisocial” behavior that is common on TV. Unfortunately these reformers are doomed to fail in their efforts because the medium is far better suited technically to expressing hate, fear, jealousy, winning, wanting and violence. These emotions suffer very little information loss when pushed through the coarse imagery of television. Like other gross personal expressions—hysteria, or ebullience, or the kind of one-dimensional joyfulness usually associated with some objective victory—the facial expressions and bodily movements of antisocial behavior are highly visible. Hate, anger, competitiveness are obvious broad-band feelings with broad-band expressions. Most of them can be well communicated solely through body movement. No detail is needed to get the point, and neither is any special talent on the part of actor or director. They come through the filter of television with a minimum of information loss. The signal-to-noise ratio is relatively high.

For these technical reasons, among others we will get to later, there is an emphasis on sports and violence in television programming, and there is great viewer interest in them.

The popularity of such programming is not so much a sign that public tastes are vulgar, as they are assumed to be in many quarters (“People want that kind of programming”), as it is a sign that these programs are the ones which manage to communicate
something,
at least, through television. Rather than illustrating the limits of the public mentality or taste, they illustrate the limits of the medium itself. The public wisely chooses programs which work best in a medium in which anything of a more subtle nature loses so much in translation as to be noncommunicative.

This is not to say that the businessmen who are the television powers that be aren’t predisposed to further the values of competition and social Darwinism which
they
understand best and which are inherent in sports and violence programs. But no matter what their inclination, the fact exists that the kind of programming in which the least information is lost is the grosser forms: sports, violence, police action, as well as quiz shows, game shows, soap opera, situation comedy and news about murder, conflict, war, power politics and charismatic leaders. All of these categories of programming communicate on television because they deliver clear, easily grasped visual and auditory signals, together with broad-band emotional content, all of which make them highly efficient in a low-definition medium.

On the other hand, the kinds of feelings and behavior which the reformers like to call prosocial cannot be conveyed through television by obvious facial expression or physical movement.

While it may be possible to show friendship in a dramatic context, it cannot be explored very far visually, because expression of such feelings exists in an inward rather than outward realm of experience. Love is simply not as easy to demonstrate through coarse imagery as anger or competition. The heights of intimate feeling—between lovers, or parents and children, or among children—are actually experienced in life’s quietest moments. Ordinarily they do not involve any visually obvious action, unless it is the most subtle facial expression—peace, tranquility, satisfaction—not easily captured in any photography, but damned near impossible in the coarse imagery of television.