Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television (37 page)

To get an idea of the extent to which television is dependent upon technical tricks to maintain your interest, I suggest you try the following experiment, which I call the Technical Events Test.

Put on your television set and simply count the number of times there is a cut, a zoom, a superimposition, a voice-over, the appearance of words on the screen—a technical event of some kind.

You will find it goes something like this.

You are looking at a face speaking. Just as you are becoming accustomed to it, there’s a cut to another face.
(technical event)
Then there might be an edit back to the first face.
(technical event)
Then the camera might slowly draw back to take in some aspect of a wider scene.
(technical event)
Then the action suddenly shifts outdoors to the street.
(technical event)
Intercut with these scenes might be some other parallel line of the story. It may be a series of images of someone in a car racing to meet the people on that street we have just visited.
(technical event)
The music rises.
(technical event)
And so on.

Each technical event—each alteration of what would be natural imagery—is intended to keep your attention from waning as it might otherwise. The effect is to lure your attention forward like a mechanical rabbit teasing a greyhound. Each time you are about to relax your attention, another technical event keeps you attached.

The luring forward never ceases for very long. If it did, you might become aware of the vacuousness of the content that can get through the inherent limitations of the medium. Then you would be aware of the boredom. If, for example, the camera made no movements and there was no cutting in time and place; if one camera merely sat in one place and recorded the entire length of a conversation, including all the pauses, redundancies, diversions, inaction—the way conversations happen in real life and real time—you would be disinclined to watch for very long. The program would have to be hours long before much of anything happened. Television can’t wait for this, so it stimulates your interest technically.

Once you actually try the Technical Events Test you will probably find that in the average commercial television program, there are eight or ten technical events for every sixty-second period. That is, the flow of natural imagery is interrupted eight or ten times every minute, sometimes much more often than that.

You may also find that there is rarely a period of twenty seconds without any sort of technical event at all. That may give you an idea of the extent to which producers worry about whether the content itself can carry your interest.

One can only guess at the effect upon viewers of these hyperactive images, aside from fixating attention on the television set. Dr. Matthew Dumont, mentioned earlier, says these technical effects help cause hyperactivity among children. They must surely also contribute to the decline of attention span and the inability to absorb information that comes muddling along at natural, real-life speed.

To be constantly buffeted by bizarre and impossible imagery cannot help but produce stress in viewers. To have one’s attention interrupted every ten seconds must jar mental processes that were otherwise attuned to natural, personal informational rhythms in which such interruptions would be literally maddening.

Leaving the television set to go outdoors, or to have an ordinary conversation, becomes unsatisfying. One wants action! Life becomes boring, and television interesting, all as a result of a system of technical hypes.

Meanwhile, the speed and activity of commercial programming are further exaggerated in advertising.

When you try the Technical Events Test on a few thirty-or sixty-second television commercials you will find that advertising has roughly twice the technical action of the already hyped-up programs that the ads interrupt. On the average, a thirty-second commercial will have from ten to fifteen technical events. There is almost never a six-second period without a technical event. What’s more, the technical events in advertising have much more dimension than those in the programming. In addition to the camera zooms, pans, rolls and cuts, they are far more likely to have words flashing on and off the screen, songs going on and off, cartoon characters doing bizarre things, voice-overs, shots from helicopters and so on.

If regular television programming is hard-pressed to maintain your attention without tricks, advertisers have the problem many times over. In regular programming at least there are stories or news,
something
of interest. Within television’s limits, regular programming has the option to present relevant content. Advertising content has no inherent interest at all. The content is always the same. The image may be a seascape and the product is beer. Or it may be a landscape and the product is cars. Or it may be a home and the product is coffee. Whatever the setting, the content of advertising is always a sales pitch. There is nothing inherently interesting in this. It is worse than boring; it is annoying. So tricks
must
be used in every advertisement. Maxwell Arnold, a San Francisco advertising man who is one of the industry’s few outspoken critics, once told a radio interviewer: “Who the hell would choose to watch ads if there wasn’t something going on aside from the content?” In the absence of interesting content, technical style is the name of the game.

Advertisers spend staggering amounts of money to achieve their technical successes. The average production budget for a minute of advertising is roughly ten times the cost of the average minute of programming. It is not at all unusual for a thirty-second commercial to have a production budget of fifty thousand to one hundred thousand dollars, enough to cover the total costs of many half-hour programs. This money is spent in techniques, and research upon techniques, to obtain your interest where there would otherwise be none. The frequently heard comment, “You know, I sometimes think advertising is the most interesting thing on television,” is a testament to the success of these expenditures.

Advertisers are the high artists of the medium. They have gone further in the technologies of fixation than anyone else. But the lesson has also been learned by producers of the programs, and finally, by politicians.

During the Ford-Carter presidential campaign, at the point that Ford was gaining on Carter with incredible rapidity, the technical-events ratio between the commercials of the two was about four to one in favor of Ford. If Ford had spent a little more advertising money, and if the campaign had gone on another few days, I believe he would have passed Carter, no matter what the messages within their commercials. Because of the central role television now plays in campaigning, advertising technique has become more important than content in the American political arena.

The fact that advertising contains many more technical events per minute than commercial programming is significant from another, more subtle perspective. Advertising starts with a disadvantage with respect to the programming. It must be
more
technically interesting than the program or it will fail. That is, advertising must itself become a highlighted moment compared with what surrounds it.

If advertising failed to work on television, then advertisers would cease to sponsor the programs, leading, at least as things are presently structured, to the immediate collapse of television’s economic base. If the programs ever become too interesting, that will be the end of television. The ideal relationship between program and commercial is that the program should be just interesting enough to keep you interested but not so interesting as to actually dominate the ads.

This applies to technique as well as content. On the rare occasion when something real or gripping appears on television—the SLA shootout, President Kennedy’s funeral, an emergency presidential address—and the viewer is awakened from lethargy by the emergence of
real
highlighted content, as opposed to technique, advertisers make every attempt to cancel their spots. They will say they are doing this because it is in “bad taste” to advertise in such moments.

But when is advertising
not
in bad taste? Do they mean that interrupting people’s lives to start hawking products is not rude and offensive behavior at any time? If someone came to your door every night to do that, you would soon call the police. Advertising is always in bad taste. What advertisers mean when they use the “bad taste” excuse is that when something really real happens on television, it may affect how well the ad works. In the context of concrete reality, advertising can be understood as vacuous, absurd, rude, outrageous. Advertising can succeed only in an environment in which the real merges with the fictional, and all become semireal with equal tone and undifferentiated meaning. In that context advertising can use its technical tricks to jump forward out of the medium, creating its artificial unusualness. The best environment for advertising is a dull and even one, where
it
can become the highlighted event.

This explains the tendency to sponsor programs that have that quality of even tone, from Walter Cronkite to Archie Bunker to Kojak. They all merge with each other, making an appropriate backdrop for the advertising. In probably the most brilliant article that has ever been written on television (“Sixteen Notes on Television,” reprinted in
Literature in Revolution),
Todd Gitlin said: “The commercial is the purpose, the essence; the program is the package.”

The program is only the excuse to get you to watch the advertising. Without the ads there would be no programs. Advertising is the true content of television and if it does not remain so, then advertisers will cease to support the medium, and television will cease to exist as the popular entertainment it presently is.

What about noncommercial television? Is this an exception to the rules of artificial unusualness?

Popular wisdom holds that noncommercial public television competes so ineffectively, in terms of audience ratings, because of the “low tastes” of the viewing public. I have heard many a liberal put it that “we need to educate people to appreciate better sorts of programming.” I can barely restrain my anger at the arrogance, cynicism, and ignorance of this position.

If you will go back to your television set and apply the Technical Events Test to your noncommercial channel, you will find that except for documentary footage there are usually only two or three technical events in every minute of programming and that these are more likely to be of the simpler sort: camera switching, panning and zooms. Because they are not as well funded as their commercial competitors, noncommercial television producers can afford only about 25 percent as much technical gimmickry as the commercial stations. In the end, the ratio works out about this way:

Advertising:
20-30 technical events per minute.

Commercial program:
8-10 technical events per minute.

Public television:
2-3 technical events per minute.

The technical events are surely not the sole determinants of viewer interest and appeal, but they are far more logical an explanation for the popularity of certain programming than the assertion that people demand violent programs. What people desire is involvement and interest. In a world where real involvement and unique events are more and more remote from direct personal experience, and in a medium that is inherently dulling, it’s a wonder that any people at all are able to make their way through
any
noncommercial programs with their small degree of technical effects. In fact, I find it a rather moving testimony to the vitality of people that they continue to seek content that has not been jazzed up and packaged.

This is all aside from the question of whether public television programs
are
any better than commercial programs. In fact most public television producers have the same system of values as their commercial counterparts and for the same reasons. Recognizing that hype is needed for ratings in such an intrinsically turned-off medium, and that the ratings are just as much a determinant for funding in public television as commercial television, they put as much money as possible into technique. They operate out of the same standards of “good television.” They even gain support from the same corporations that dominate commercial television: oil companies and chemical companies.

It is sometimes considered a mitigating factor that the commercial message in public television is limited to a low-key acknowledgment at the beginning and the end of the program. But these companies are not attempting to achieve exactly the same effect on public television as they do on commercial TV. There is a different level of benefit to corporations who insinuate themselves into this so-called noncommercial environment. The benefit is company identification rather than product identification. This has long-run value in public relations terms rather than short-run gains in sales. In addition, having the name repeated in a noncommercial format can still set off the neuronal billboard that has been previously implanted in the brain by commercial programs. Finally, the cost of these low-key acknowledgments is negligible. To have its name appear on the screen before and after a half-hour program may cost a corporation only a few thousand dollars. Underwriting an entire half-hour program on public television usually costs less than one sixty-second spot in commercial television.

Aside from these differences, public television is similar to the rest of television. Competing for many of the same dollars, the same ratings, the same markets and operating in the same medium with the same technical limitations, the noncommercial producer must make very similar choices.

The best proof can be found in the most successful public television shows.
Sesame Street,
for example, the most popular program in public television history, has a technical events ratio equal to and sometimes larger than its commercial competition.

It is not well enough appreciated, I think, that
Sesame Street
was conceived, designed and executed from its inception by ex-advertising people. Using every technique they learned in advertising—rapid cutting, interspersing of songs and cartoons, very short time spans—their show has been found more “interesting” than any public TV program that preceded it. This “interest” is based on
technique
and these are the same techniques used in advertising.