Four Arguments for Elimination of Television

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This dimming out is also true of the internal organs. The heartbeat slows to idle, the pulse rate tends to even out, the brainwave patterns go into a smooth and steady rhythm. The consequences of all this will be examined a little later. For now, let's just say that thinking processes also dim.

Overall, while we are watching television, our bodies are in a quieter condition over a longer period of time than in any other of life's nonsleeping experiences. This is true even for the eyes, which are widely presumed to be active during television viewing. In fact, the eyes move less while watching television than in any other experience of daily life. This is particularly so if you sit at a distance from the set or if your set is small. In such cases you take in the entire image without scanning. Even with huge television screens, the eyes do not move as much as they do when seeing a movie, where the very size of the theater screen requires eye and even head movement.

Even when you are working in an office, or reading a book, the eyes move more than they do while watching television. In offices there are always interruptions. While reading, you vary the speed at which you read, go over material and raise your eyes off the page from time to time.

In the wider world outside of the media, the eyes almost never stop moving, searching and scanning. For humans, the eyes are "feelers"; ' they are one of our major contacts with the world and are forever reaching and studying.

While you are watching television, in addition to the nonmovement of the eyeball, there is a parallel freezing of the focusing mechanism. The eye remains at a fixed distance from the object observed for a longer period of time than in any other human experience.

There are cultures' that spent time gazing at the sun, but there is no culture in all of history that has spent such enormous blocks 0 time ... in dark of time rooms looking at artificial light.

Ordinarily, the process of focusing, defocusing and refocusing engages the eye nonstop all day long, even during sleeping and dreaming. But while you are watching television, no matter what is happening on the screen, however far away the action of the story is supposed to be inside the set, the set itself remains at a fixed distance and requires only an infinitesimal change in focus. As we shall see, the result is to flatten all information into one dimension and to put the viewer in a condition akin to unconscious staring.

However idle the eyes are during television watching, they are positively lively compared to the other senses. Sound is reduced to the extremely narrow ranges of television audio, while smell, taste and touch are eliminated altogether.

Artificial Touch and Hyperactivity

McLuhan made the case that television stimulates the sense of touch. He calls TV "tactile." I don't know if he intended that as one of his personal jokes, which got taken too seriously, or if he actually meant it, but it is one of the most dangerous of the many misleading statements he made.

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