Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television (38 page)

In Favor of “Alienated” Viewing

The Technical Events Test is extremely subversive to television. This is one reason I have asked you to do it. As people become aware of the degree to which technique, rather than anything intrinsically interesting, keeps them fixed to the screen, withdrawal from addiction and immersion can begin. I have seen this happen with my own children. Once I had put them to the task of counting and timing these technical events, their absorption was never the same.

When viewers become alert to the technology being used upon them, they can separate technique from content. With the effects of technique stripped away, the true content of the program has to stand on its own. In the case of advertising, it falls apart. Regular programming also assumes its true worth and it is often even less than you may have imagined was possible.

As you become able to pull back out of the immersion in the TV set, you can widen your perceptual environment to again include the room you are in. Your feelings and personal awareness are rekindled. With self-awareness emerging you can perceive the quality of sensory deadness television induces, the one-dimensionality of its narrowed information field, and arrive at an awareness of boredom. This leads to channel switching at first and eventually to turning off the set.

Any act that breaks immersion in the fantastic world of television is subversive to the medium, because without the immersion and addiction, its power is gone. Brainwashing ceases. As you watch advertising, you become enraged.

The great German dramatist Bertolt Brecht used the term “alienation” to describe this process of breaking immersion. Writing during the early thirties, Brecht used the term to mean the shattering of theatrical illusion. By breaking immersion in the fantasy the theater-goer becomes
self-aware
and attains a mental attitude that allows discernment, criticism, thought and political understanding of the material on display. Without “alienation,” involvement is at an unconscious level, the theater-goer absorbing rather than reflecting and reacting. Brecht argued that becoming lost or immersed in the words, fantasies and entertainments of theater was preparation for similar immersion in words and fantasies of theatrical leadership: Hitler.

Brecht, like Walter Benjamin, felt that the entire development of art during the thirties furthered ways of mind suitable for autocracy.

Brecht developed his concept of “alienation” in order to break the
form
of the theatrical relationship. To accomplish this, he would interrupt the line of the theatrical action; or have the actors step out of their parts to speak directly to the audience personally or politically; or add such elements as placards. In films, he would put words on the screen to explain the meaning of a scene that might otherwise have been received as “entertainment,” thereby shattering unconscious absorption.

In Brechtian terms, if an actor developed a character in such a way that the audience became absorbed in the character rather than the
meaning
of the character, then the actor would have failed. The goal was that each member of the audience become aware that he or she is in a theater, that actors are performing, that the characters are created on purpose to convey a message, and that the message applies directly to each person in the audience. In this way, theater had the capacity to become educational in a revolutionary way, capable of moving people to action. Without this shattering of illusion, Brecht felt, theater remains an example of mindless immersion within an autocratic format. And yet, because theater involves a live public performance, the possibilities for technically created illusion are far fewer than in film or television.

It is this very quality of “alienation” from the illusion, the experience of self-awareness, that advertisers and program producers go to such lengths to avoid. They may not actually’ be thinking to themselves: “I have got to keep these viewers hyped and away from boredom or I’ll lose them.” Instead, they define some production values as “good television” and others as “bad television.” They will do anything they can to develop and keep your fixed gaze and total involvement. They’ve found that technical tricks do better than content because, as we have seen, the content loses too much in the translation through the medium to be engrossing on its own.

However, they
do
also choose content for its immersive and hyperactive value. In addition to shattering your normal perceptual patterns by artificially unusual imagery, dragging your mind and awareness forward, never allowing stasis or calm or a return to self-awareness, producers must also make program choices that fit the process.

The Bias to Highlighted Content: Toward
the Peaks, Away from the Troughs

At one end of what we might think of as the spectrum of personal experience, there is the occasional momentous event. Emotionally engulfing. Intellectually overpowering. These experiences happen to everyone, but they are relatively rare. Between these “highs,” life moves along from routine experience to routine experience, flowing one into the next, developing the overall pattern that is life’s true content.

When you sit down in a cafe with a friend, you don’t need to have an orgasm for the experience to be worthwhile. Perhaps nothing will happen in that hour or two. No exclamations of passion. No news of dire events. No shoot-outs at the next table or in the street. Perhaps you will merely converse or watch the passing parade. Perhaps you will explore some obscure detail in your friend’s feelings or personal history. Perhaps you will muse about fashion. Most coffeehouse conversations, like the rest of life, will go more or less that way.

Ordinary life contains peaks and valleys of experience, highs and lows, long periods of dormancy, many periods of quiet, indecision, ambiguity, resolution, failed resolution. All of these fit into a wide pattern that is the way life is actually lived. Included within this pattern are occasional highlighted events: great shocks, unexpected eruptions, sudden achievements. Life would be frustrating without such catharsis and excitement, but life would be bizarre and maddening if it had too many of these peak events.

Much of the nervousness in the world today in both individual and national life may be attributable to the density and power of the experiences that are prearranged for our consumption. Too much happens too fast to be absorbed and integrated into an overall pattern of experience.

It is no accident that the world outside television has concentrated increasingly on large and cathartic events. All artificial environments and the consumer life encourage focus on peak events. When nature is absent, so is natural subtlety. Personal attunement to slower, nature-based rhythms is obscured. We focus on the “hits” that are provided, and these reduce more and more to commodities. Every commodity is advertised as offering a bigger and better and more powerful experience than the one that preceded it. Since life’s experiences have been reduced to packaged commodities, like the chimpanzee in the lab, that is what we seek.

Television, in addition to being the prime exponent of the commodity life, makes a direct contribution to distorting life in the direction of highlighted experiences by choosing its contents to fit this pattern. It is a technological necessity that it do so.

Since television is such a vague and limited medium, so unlikely to produce much of any response in a viewer, producers must necessarily divide all content into two distinct categories: peaks and troughs, the highlighted and the routine, always choosing the former and not the latter. In this way, the choices in content match the technical bias toward artificial unusualness and also the tendencies of the wider commodity-based, artificial environment.

The programming bias is always toward the more vivid, more powerful, more cathartic, more definite, “clean” peaks of content. The result, not the process. The bizarre, rather than the usual.

In 1973, a wealthy young man leased a small suburban television station near San Francisco and tried the most curious experiment.

He presented only two programs every day. One occupied most of the day with images of ocean waves rolling to shore. One camera, no editing, no zooms. It just sat there and transmitted whatever the ocean did.

Then he switched to another single camera in an empty studio facing a blank wall. He invited everyone to do whatever he or she wished in front of the camera. Some people spoke into it; others tried more sensational behavior.

The first thing that was revealed by this experiment, which was practically an inversion of the usual television fare, was the extent to which the medium depends upon its technical events. A single stationary camera, picking up whatever passes through the frame, in real time, without alteration, will only bore people. If a professional producer-editor had gotten hold of that ocean footage, she or he could have created more interest in it. She or he could have zeroed in on details, shot from a helicopter following the waves forward, switched to a camera on the beach looking outward, and so on. With a little music, a nice little art piece might have been made out of it. But it would be engaging only for a short while.

No matter what technical tricks are used, ocean footage will
not
work for very long on television. It does not fit the test of highlighted moments. The experience of looking at oceans is beyond television’s ability to deliver. To enjoy an ocean, one must be in a timeless condition, contemplative yet alert to the small changes in the sea and the life it supports. If you are looking for action and catharsis, watching an ocean will only bore you. Watching it on TV is even worse. You lose the salt smell, the wind, the lazy detail of the foam and light on wet sand and the sense of vast time and space. Television would also lose the nuances of a commonplace visit to a coffeehouse. The mundane conversation and people moving around or reading the paper would be profoundly boring to viewers sitting at home in their living rooms,
unless,
of course, some clown appeared and started tripping over everyone’s feet while dropping trays, and then someone began to throw pastries around or spilled cappuccino on people’s heads, or a bakery truck loaded with lemon meringue pies came crashing through the glass window. Now we’re getting somewhere. Action.

In practice, no TV producer would ever seriously consider either oceans or coffeehouses as subject matter. They are intrinsically and obviously wrong subjects for the medium, “bad” television.

On the other hand, there are a lot of talking shows on television. Some people think this is odd since television is supposed to be a visual medium. Well, since television is so indistinct a medium, and since so little visual information can get through it, most of what we receive from television really comes in the words. This is especially true of news shows. We see some action—fires, wars, picketing—but we can’t really make much of it until a reporter tells us what is happening and orients our minds to perceive what we are actually not seeing at all. In many ways television is really radio. The only real effect of the imagery is to fixate us.

Another reason why there is so much talking on television is that you
can
see faces. Faces talk. So naturally there is a bias toward talking. Within the talking there is a bias toward a kind of highlighted conversation.

Television talking is very pointed. Subject oriented, rather than generalized. Focused, rather than free-ranging. This is particularly the result of time limitations and the need to be sure that something happens beyond the kind of talk that takes place in grocery stores.

On television people tend to skim along the highlights of the conversational material. Blank spaces, pauses, personal comments, asides, changes of mood, changes of attitude, changes of subject—all of the rhythms of ordinary conversation—are rarely allowed into television talk. To do otherwise would defy the medium’s demand for frequent catharsis, repeated highlight and achieved goals.

Therefore talk show dialogues take on the same rhythms and follow the same values as dramatic programs or situation comedies or quiz shows or news. The dialogue moves from loaded line to loaded line, headline to headline, important pronouncement to important pronouncement, punch line to punch line, like Bob Hope’s humor.

Verbal troughs are often written into dialogue shows. Many acting schools teach these. Talk show hosts and guests indulge briefly in “patter” which is pseudoaimless. But the process never advances very far. The goal remains a
laugh
or a
point
or a
contention
or an
outrage
or a
shock.
The conversation is never allowed to settle down to the rhythms of real life, because if it did, there’d be no point in having the television on at all. One could have aimless conversation with someone at the bus stop.

And so, as with the technically created artificial unusualness, content itself is usually chosen for its hyperactive effect. The survival of this dull, indistinct, inherently boring technological failure called television depends upon this effect.