Four Arguments for Elimination of Television

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At one point I heard my son Kai say: "I don't want to watch television as much as I do but I can't help it. It makes me watch it."

I don't mean to suggest that there weren't many favorable reports. Often the people who described themselves as "spaced out" liked that experience. They said it helped them forget about their otherwise too busy lives.

Many added the word "meditative"; others found it "relaxing," saying that it helped them "forget about the world." Some who used terms like "brainwashed" or "addicted" nonetheless felt that television provided them with good information or entertainment, although there was no one who felt television lived up to its "potential."

In all the time I collected responses, only eight people suggested they watched too little.

I also kept track of my own reactions. Though I now watch very little television—perhaps two or three hours per month, just to keep my hand in, as it were—I used to watch more. My reactions to the experience invariably reduced to one or two constants. Even if the program I'd been watching had been of some particular interest, the experience felt "antilife," as though I'd been drained in some way, or I'd been used. I came away feeling a kind of internal deadening, as if my whole physical being had gone dormant, the victim of a vague soft assault. The longer I watched, the worse I'd feel. Afterward, there was nearly always the desire to go outdoors or go to sleep, to recover my strength and my feelings. Another thing. After watching television, I'd always be aware of a kind of glowing inside my head: the images! They'd remain in there even after the set was off, like an aftertaste. Against my will, I'd find them returning to my awareness hours later.

My objective in keeping all these records was not so much to catalog how many people liked television and how many did not, or how many felt guilty about their habit, but rather to gather descriptions of the experience in the terms people chose to describe it.

After a while, I came to realize that people were describing concrete physical symptoms that neither they nor anyone else actually believed were real. The people who would tell me that television was controlling their minds would then laugh about it. Or they would say they were addicted to it, or felt like vegetables while watching, and then they'd laugh at that.

People were saying they were being hypnotized, controlled, drugged, deadened, but they would not assign validity to their own experience. Yet if there is any truth in these descriptions, we are dealing with a force that is far more powerful and subtle than Huxley's hypnopaedic machines. If television "hypnotizes," "brainwashes ... .. controls minds," "makes people stupid," "turns everyone into zombies," then you would think it would be an appropriate area of scientific inquiry. In fact, someone should call the police.

Science has a name for such collections of descriptions. They are called "anecdotal evidence" or "experiential reports." Such reports are not totally ignored by researchers, although they are not exactly taken seriously either. In the case of television, there is the problem that the symptoms are not fatal, they are subtle. Few people go to doctors complaining about them. They therefore remain below the threshold of visibility for scientific inquiry. Even when such reports are noticed, science does not accept them as valid unless they have been put through the grinder of scientific proof. Since it is beyond science to validate exactly what is meant by "zombie" or "brainwash" or even "addiction" or, as we will see, even "hypnosis," these symptoms inevitably remain unproved, leaving people who need external validation at a loss.

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