Television
Television is a growing virtual reality often paid for by advertising.
Advertising has become a flood of control messages that saturate the media experience.
The internet has become a video extravaganza that competes with television
for the control messages that make web dominating companies rich. Now every
viewer can access the internet through their television and television
programs can be accessed through the internet. The controllers access the viewers and treat them as obedient customers.A.O. Scott, film reviewer for the New York Times summarized his view of
television programming in the 20th century:" …much of what's on television,
whatever its scale or country of origin is garbage…even as disparate cultures
can sample and appreciate each other’s stupidity, each one remains stupid in its
own way, and no one's stupidity is inherently superior to anybody else's… in the
global village, we are all idiots watching our reflections in a box."
You might argue that television programming ranges from the sublime to the
psychotic. The sublime presentation includes intelligent exploration of the
planet earth, its animals, plants and people. Science can be accessible to
everyone and even the most abstruse concepts, when creatively presented, can be
understood by most viewers. The daily presence of familiar programs provides a sense of continuity,
an image of a society that wakes up every morning and carries on regardless. You
could argue that sports on TV are a healthy expression of otherwise
destructive human tendencies.
The most insane programs and movies show homicides and
other crimes, vampires, ghosts, horror movies, alien invasions, war and actions involving fast
cars, fighting, guns and bombs. News reports and much TV journalism wobble
between intelligently informative reporting and misleading commentary. Since TV
is a mass media, there is implicit understanding that half the population has an
IQ below 100 and has limited knowledge and limited ability to understand complex
issues. Too many programs assume that viewer is semi-literate, uneducated and 9
years old. The whole point of commercial television is to make your mind
available to be programmed by the sponsor and to implant key messages in the
viewer. Sponsors track the audience’s behavior in their sales figures and they
buy more TV time when viewers obediently buy their goods. The most watched
television program in the world is a football game, the US Superbowl. An
estimated 111 million people watched the game in 2014; advertisers paid $4
million for a 30 second commercial.
TV journalism is inherently deceptive since many programs appear to be
informative but only provide brief introductions to subjects and inadequate
information to properly understand any subject. Bias is common, if not
inevitable. Big money corporations and lobby groups effectively manipulate TV
journalism. In the worst case, there is an intention to control consensus using
the blunt tools of propaganda. News reports contain enough bad news to make any
viewer despair but not enough information to understand what has really happened
and what relevance events have to the viewer's own life. News reporting assumes
that the audience has an endless capacity for moral outrage, one of the innate
features of the human mind. Real progress begins when we drop the moral outrage
and get on with fixing whatever is broken, knowing that the job is ongoing and
endless. Clearly, more discrimination and restraint are needed before viewing
news reports.
Some TV programming is frankly demented and I worry that less discriminating
viewers will take the weird stuff too seriously. If you examine network TV
programming closely, you find short clips lasting seconds rather than minutes.
Scenes shift recklessly in a most unnatural manner. Video story telling is
remarkably convincing even though the image selection is biased, brief and
always incomplete. Television storytelling and gossip is one of its more
important features. With multi-channels and 24 hours of potential programming on
each channel, the format of people talking spontaneously or answering questions
has emerged as time fillers. Talk and interview shows express a range of
interests, attitudes and beliefs. The desirable result is that any viewer will
recognize a diversity of human expression and may, hopefully, develop more
tolerance. Even when you dislike someone on TV and oppose their point of view,
there can be a shift toward more tolerance, especially when other people model
for you polite and rational ways of expressing disagreement. Gossip, however, is
seldom informative.
Stanely described the psychotic content in proliferating apocalyptic movies
and TV Shows:" Dystopian parables like “The Walking Dead,” where zombies rule
the earth, are an increasingly fashionable genre of entertainment, but the
degree of apocalyptic pessimism is very different depending on the size of the
screen. The dividing line between television and movies seems to be class
conflict. Television shows posit a hideous future with a silver lining;
survivors, good or bad, are more or less equals. Movies like “Divergent,”
“Snowpiercer” and “Elysium” foresee societal divisions that last into Armageddon
and beyond and that define a new, inevitably Orwellian world order that emerges
from the ruins of civilization. There is something perversely positive about the end of the
world on shows like “The Walking Dead,” and “Z Nation” on Syfy and “The Last
Ship,” on TNT. True, civilization as we know it is gone, but so is social
stratification. Survivors don’t group into castes according to birth, race,
income or religion. People of all kinds bond with whomever seems friendly, or at
least unthreatening. In the third season of “The Walking Dead,” a charismatic
leader known as the Governor did establish a totalitarian community, Woodbury,
but even there, people weren’t divided into social subgroups. And happily, his
cult like dictatorship was eventually destroyed. The world is all but destroyed
and almost unspeakably grim in movies like “Snowpiercer” and “Elysium” and “The
Zero Theorem,” but that’s not even the half of it. There isn’t much left except
the enmity of haves and have-nots: A tyrannical ruling class — or Big Brother —
hoards precious resources and enslaves the mob."
The most important decision a thoughtful citizen must make is to turn off the
TV news and dystopian fantasies. If the news broadcaster claims first coverage
of breaking news, never watch their display of misleading misinformation. If you
must know what is going on look elsewhere. Read thoughtful journalists in reputable
publications who report of events, in context, weeks or months after they
happened.
