Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television

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We are left with a very bizarre phenomenon. Television is capable of dominating personally derived imagery-from books or imagination-and it is also capable, at least some of the time, of causing confusion as to what is real experience and what is television experience. The mind is very democratic about its image banks, all are equally available for our recall and use. And so when we call on our images for whatever purposes we may have for them, we are as likely to produce an implanted image as one which was originally our own.

The root of this unfortunate problem lies with the fact that until very recently, human beings had no need to make distinctions between artificial images of distant events and life directly lived.

The Inherent Believability of All Images

Seeing is believing.

Like many an axiom, this one is literally true. Only since the ascendancy of the media has this been opened to question.

Throughout the hundreds of thousands of generations of human existence, whatever we saw with our eyes was concrete and reliable. Experience was directly between us and the natural environment. Nonmediated. Nonprocessed. Not altered by other humans.

If we saw a flock of birds flying southward, then these birds were definitely doing that. We could believe in it. We might interpret this concrete information in various ways, perhaps misinterpret it, but there could never have been a question as to whether it was happening. The information itself, the birds and their flight, could not be doubted.

This is the case with all sensory information. Whatever information the senses produce the brain trusts as in herently believable. If the sense could not be relied upon, then the world would have been an utterly confusing place. Humans would have been unable to make any sensible choices leading to survival. If there were no concretely true information, there could have been no sane functioning; the species could not have survived. This belief in sense perception is the foundation, the given, for human functioning.

This is not to say there is no illusion.

In a desert environment, as we know, mirage can cause some to believe they are seeing things that are not there. But the humans who are fooled in this way are the humans who are new to that environment. It's a problem of experience and interpretation. Their senses are not yet attuned to the new informational context. People who live for generations in such places learn to allow for illusions and don't actually "see" them in the way that visitors do. They learn to look at the edges of images, like the shadow spaces of Castaneda's Don Juan, and to perceive a reality which is different from the visitor's.

In jungle environments, and among certain creatures, there is camouflage. Animals use it to fool each other, including humans. Humans also use it, or devise image tricks, to fool animals and other humans. In this way images become processed images, deliberately altered, and may serve to fool an observer whose senses and interpretations are not sufficiently sharp.

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