Four Arguments for Elimination of Television

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I have previously drawn a parallel between modern life and conditions of sensory deprivation. Artificial environments themselves reduce and narrow sensory experience to fit their own new confined reality. The effect and purpose of this narrowing is to increase awareness and focus upon the work, commodities, entertainments, spectacles and other drugs that society uses to keep us within its boundaries.

We can consider television to be an advance on that already prevalent condition. Sitting in darkened rooms, with the natural environment obscured, other humans dimmed out, only two senses operating, both within a very narrow range, the eyes and other body functions stilled, staring at light for hours and hours, the experience adds up to something nearer to sense deprivation than anything that has come before it.

Television isolates people from the environment, from each other, and from their own senses. In such a condition, the two semi-operative senses cannot benefit from the usual mix of information that humans employ to deduce meaning from their surroundings. All meaning comes from this very narrowed information field,

We know that it is an accepted truth about sensory- deprivation conditions that subjects have no recourse but to focus on the images in their brain. And we know that in sensorydeprivation conditions, having no resources aside from mental images, the subject is unusually susceptible to suggestion.

When you are watching TV, you are experiencing mental images. As distinguished from most sense-deprivation experiments these mental images are not yours. They are someone else's. Because the rest of your capacities have been subdued, and the rest of the world dimmed, these images are likely to have an extraordinary degree of influence. Am I saying this is brainwashing or hypnosis or mind-zapping or something like it? Well, there is no question but that someone is speaking into your mind and wants you to do something.

First, keep watching.

Second, carry the images around in your head.

Third, buy something.

Fourth, tune in tomorrow.

THE INGESTION OF ARTIFICIAL LIGHT

When you are watching television the major thing you are doing is looking at light. The philosopher John Brockman was the first person to put it that way to me, remarking that this in itself represents an enormous change in human experience. For four hours a day, human beings sit in dark rooms, their bodies stilled, gazing at light. Nothing like this has ever happened before.

Previous generations, millions of them, looked at starlight, firelight and moonlight, and there is no doubt that these experiences stir important feelings. 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 of time, all of the people together, every day, sitting in dark rooms looking at artificial light.

Anne Waldman, the poet, has suggested that television might itself represent a surrogate moon; a substitute for the original experience for which we, somewhere, continue to long.

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