Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television (34 page)

A whole world of sensory information has been abandoned, and yet it is in this world that real understanding of marshes exists. And without the understanding who can care about the marsh? Taxes become more important. Birds can be seen elsewhere. Images of mud and reeds do not inspire the mind, especially compared with the hard facts of our world. People need jobs building the houses. Nobody ever “uses” swamps anyway.

It is possible that viewers of that program had a greater feeling for swamps when the swamps resided totally in their imaginations, where, at least, they had the richness that fantasy can create. On television, the fantasy is destroyed and the perspective is flattened.

What was true for this news report is true for all television programs that concern nature. Seeing the forests of Borneo on television makes one believe that one knows something of these forests. What one knows, however, is what television is capable of delivering, a minute portion of what Borneo forests are. It cannot make you care very much about them. When Georgia-Pacific proceeds to cut down hundreds of thousands of acres of Borneo forest, as it has so many other forests in the Pacific Basin, one remains unmoved. The wood is needed for homes. The objective data dominate when only objective data can be communicated.

Meanwhile, sitting in our dark rooms ingesting images of Borneo forests, we lose feeling even for the forests near our homes. While we watch Borneo forests, we are not experiencing neighborhood forests,
local
wilderness or even
local
parks. As forest experience reduces to television forest, our caring about forests,
any
forest, goes into dormancy for lack of direct experience. And so the lumber company succeeds in cutting down the Borneo forest, and then, near to home, it also succeeds in building a new tract of condominiums where a local park had been.

In my opinion, the more the natural environment is conveyed on TV, the less people will understand about it or care about it, and the more likely its destruction becomes. Ecologists would be wise to abandon all attempts to put nature on television.

Programs concerned with the arts, programs concerned with many religions and all programs concerned with non-Western cultures are similarly distorted by television’s inability to convey their sensual aspects.

Theater, music, dance, if they are to be fully understood and appreciated, require exquisitely fine visual and aural reproduction as well as exquisitely tuned sense reception in the viewer. The experience of them on television is only the barest approximation of the direct experience of the performance. The information loss is enormous, and it is the most critical and subtle information that is lost.

Some people argue that television delivers a new world of art to people in, say, Omaha, who might otherwise never see the Stuttgart Ballet or the New York Philharmonic. They say this stimulates interest in the arts. I find this very unlikely. Information received with only two senses, especially in the limited range of television, and considering the other dulling aspects of the medium, is simply not the same at the receiving end as it would have been in the theater or concert hall.

On television the depths are flattened, the spaces edited, the movements distorted and fuzzed-up, the music thinned and the scale reduced. This would have to affect the level of understanding and limit the quality of the experience. The human senses cannot experience what is not there. If television delivers a drastically reduced version of an art experience, then this is what the senses must deal with, and if one has never directly experienced the real thing, how is one to know that the reality is richer than the television version? Reading
Moby Dick
as a comic book does not inspire one to read
Moby Dick
in the original. Quite the opposite. And so seeing the Stuttgart Ballet performing on television leaves one with such a reduced notion of ballet as to reduce the appeal of ballet itself. The result is likely to be boredom and switched channels. To say that such a program stimulates new interest in arts is to believe, as Howard Gossage put it, “that it’s possible to convince an eight-year-old that making love is more fun than ice cream cones.”

And so it goes in all areas. The religions of the world, from Tibetan Buddhism to many forms of Catholicism, are deeply rooted in the rich interplay of the human mind and senses. On television they must be understood through fixed cerebral channels, leaving description, but no feeling. The same can be said for most cultures of the world, still immersed in the sensory relationships between human and environment. There is no way to effectively convey African cultures, as was mentioned, through images disconnected from the other senses, and certainly not through logical analysis. More often than not these cultures and others are sensually or mystically based and can be deeply understood only in those terms. Unfortunately, television makes the effort to explain them anyway, just as it claims to convey nature, the arts, the news and the details of human feeling.

Human beings who view these attempts are led to believe that these fuzzy little pellets of information about our rich, subtle, complex and varied world constitute something close to reality. What they really do is make the world as fuzzy, coarse, and turned-off as the medium itself.

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IMAGES DISCONNECTED FROM SOURCE

I
N
his novel
Being There,
Polish writer Jerzy Kosinski describes a man who is born and raised in a house that he never leaves. His only contacts with humans are occasional encounters with a half-crazy maid, a crippled, senile old man confined in a room upstairs, and a television set. He watches television constantly.

In middle age the hero is suddenly thrown out of the house into the city. Attempting to deal with a world which he has seen only as reproduced on television, he tries to apply what he has learned from the set. He adopts television behavior. He tries to imitate the behavior of the people he has seen on the screen. He speaks like them, moves as they do, imitates their facial expressions. However, because these people were only images to him, and he has never experienced
real
people, save for the crazies in his house, he does not know anything beyond the images. He does not know about feelings, for example. He adopts the movements of the images but can’t connect this with anything deeper inside himself. Because he has not exchanged feeling with a live human, his ability to feel has atrophied. He is a mechanical person, a humanoid. He is there physically, but like the television images, he is also not there.

I wonder if you would be willing to try another little experiment. Please go look into a mirror. As you gaze at yourself, try to get a sense of what is lost between the mirror image of you, and
you.

You might ask someone to join you facing the mirror. If so, you will surely feel that other person’s presence as you stand there. But in the reflection, this feeling will be lost. You will be left with only the image, possibly an expressive one, but only an image. What is missing from the reflection is life, or essence.

Finally, place an object in front of the mirror: a hair dryer, a chair, a vacuum cleaner, a comb. What is lost? I won’t say nothing is lost in the reflection, a mirror image does slightly alter the dimension and the color of an object. But life has not dropped out, because the object did not have any life in it. Nothing emanates from it.

More information is lost in the reflection of a living thing than of an object. In the living creature, there is something which can be experienced only in person, no matter how vivid the attempt at visual reproduction. The inanimate object, on the other hand, has only its form. This can be reflected, if not perfectly, at least very well in the mirror image.

What applies to a mirror applies even more to a photograph or a film, and still more to a television reproduction.

Because television cannot convey the essence of life, it makes sense for television producers to concentrate on information in which life essence is not required for the message to be communicated. You don’t need to “feel” the essence of a football player or a bomber pilot or a police attack squad to follow the action. And you surely don’t need to feel the life in the product that is advertised, since the product has no life to begin with. And so football games, action dramas and product commercials, in which the image can carry the story, obtain a degree of communications efficiency that is not possible with humans, animals and plants.

The Elimination of “Aura”

Thirty years before McLuhan, a German critic, Walter Benjamin, wrote what is still the classic essay on the way the media affects what it attempts to convey: “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (reprinted in
Illuminations,
a collection of his essays).

Benjamin’s central argument is that
all
technical reproduction of art, nature, and the human image deletes what he calls “aura.” (At the time he wrote, photographic reproduction, including film, was the main topic under discussion. But the argument applies to television as well.) Benjamin:

“One might subsume the eliminated element in the term ‘aura’ and go on to say: that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art.”

Benjamin reminds us that before the age of mechanical reproduction, art objects did not exist in a context outside of their original use. If a religious object were carved in bronze, this piece of bronze gained its meaning from its context, that is, the place and time of its use. When it is dug up by archeologists two thousand years later, it may have intellectual meaning and be informative or beautiful, but it will not have retained the quality of its original power. This depended upon its connection to time and place. When it is then put behind glass in a museum, it has still less power. When it is photographed and reproduced ten thousand times on postcards, although it can then be found in ten thousand homes, it is so many times removed from its original shell that it conveys nothing. At this point, it could be used by anyone for any purpose, including advertisement. Meaning must be invested into it, as it no longer has any of its own.

Benjamin notes that what is true for art objects is even more true for natural, living beings. The art object, once separated from its source in time and place, loses the powers invested in it. The human being loses humanness itself.

Benjamin describes the plight of the performer in a film, for example, who has the job of conveying him or herself through machinery which is predisposed not to allow such a conveyance.

“This situation might be characterized as follows: for the first time—and this is the effect of the film—man [the actor] has to operate with his whole living person, yet foregoing [his] aura. For aura is tied to his presence; there can be no replica of it.

“The feeling of strangeness that overcomes the actor before the camera . . . is basically of the same kind as the estrangement felt before one’s image in the mirror. But now [with photography and film] the reflected image has become separable, transportable. . . . The film responds to the shriveling of the aura with an artificial build-up of the ‘personality’ outside the studio. The cult of the movie star, fostered by the money of the film industry, preserves not the unique aura of the person but the ‘spell of the personality,’ the phony spell of a commodity.”

Mechanical reproduction of images is the great equalizer. When you reproduce any image of anything that formerly had aura (or life), the effect is to dislocate the image from the aura, leaving only the image. At this point, the image is neutral, it has no greater inherent power than commodities.

Products have no life to begin with, neither did they have any aura that attached to some original artistic or religious use at a certain place or time. There is no original car or vacuum cleaner, at least not among those that are advertised. They are all duplications of each other, like the fiftieth copy of a photograph. So products lose virtually nothing when their images are reproduced mechanically or electronically, while original art objects lose their contextual meaning, and human beings and other living creatures lose virtually everything that qualifies as meaningful. Humans become image shells, containing nothing inside, no better or worse, more or less meaningful than the product images that interrupt them every few minutes.