Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television

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As I write these lines, my son Kai is seven years old. He still asks me if the Bionic Man, a definitely fictional character in a fictional story, is real or not. I remind him that the week before, he asked me the same question and I told him that the Bionic Man was not real, that he is an actor, that the story is made up, and so on.

"Isn't that a person on the screen?" he asks.

"Well, yes, but he leaps around, throws cars, and so on; humans can't do that."

"But couldn't somebody do that? Couldn't they invent something so people could do that?"

The line of inquiry goes like that. He asks me questions about other programs as well.

"Are the quiz shows real?"

"Yes."

"Are they happening now? "

'No."

"When did they happen?"

"I don't know, maybe a week ago."

"Do they really win those prizes?"

"Yes, I think so."

"Is Kotter real? Is that a real school?"

"No, Kotter is an actor. The kids are actors."

"You mean those kids don't go to that school? "

"There is no school. That's television.

That's a studio."

"What's a studio?"

"It's a place where they make up scenes to look like they're real, but they're not really real. They're ail playing parts."

There are loose ends in my explanations because these are images of real people on the screen, and they are often doing logical, amusing and interesting things. It is difficult to get at exactly what I'm talking about. After all, there it is. Those are real people. It's happening. It is real. When Kai is watching television, he is watching people doing things, and they are doing them. It is the same as the south-flying birds. He is right. The things that he sees are real. It's just that they are made-up real. That is what I am trying to tell him. But that is pretty subtle.

The question of what is real and unreal is itself a new one, abstract and impossible to understand. The natural evolutionary design is for humans to see all things as real, since the things that we see have always been real. Seeing things on television as false and unreal is learned. It goes against nature. Yet how is a child to understand that? When the child is watching a television program, he or she has no innate ability to make any distinction between real and not-real. Once an image is inside the box and then inside the child's mind, having never existed in any concrete form, there is no operable distinction. All such images are equally real and the child is correct to see it that way. Only after the image is ingested can it be noted as unreal, and by then it's too late. It doesn't work. The images are already stored in the brain, with all the other images. Whatever I as parent can say about the images being in a separate category called "unreal" has only superficial meaning. Images are images. They run through Kai's dreams the same way whether they're real or not. They occupy his mind, whether real or not. The Bionic Man's movements, his way of speaking, his attitudes, his way of relating to people, are in Kai's mind no matter what I tell him about reality and unreality.

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