Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television

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By now, Kai has learned that although he still has questions on all this, he'd better not ask too many of them. Even parents get annoyed with them, and other adults may actually laugh. Slowly, as he gets older, he is becoming educated. He finally knows how to discern what adults in our modern world mean by real and not real and can remind himself of that as he watches. He is learning to repress millions of years of genetic programming to accept all images as real, and to interfere with his own instincts, substituting interpretation. In this way he becomes more adult, which is to say, alienated from himself. He learns, as we all have, that images from television cannot be relied upon automatically as true and believable and that they have to be evaluated in some way: separated, categorized, dealt with differently from other images. He is developing sensory cynicism.

He does this, as we all do, by placing his intellect above his senses, as a kind of judge, reporter, observer upon his own experience. He says to himself, "This is real to me but I have learned that there are things in this world which are not real, even though they look perfectly real; many of these things are on television. Somebody wrote this program and those are actors playing the parts so it isn't real, so I don't believe it."

But he does believe it.

Of course you and I can tell the difference between real and not real on television. Correct? Well, friend, maybe we can, but there is sure as hell a lot of evidence that everyone else is pretty confused.

Scientific Evidence

Now, this is an area that has been studied. There have been hundreds of reports showing that adults are having only a slightly less-hard time than children separating what is television from what is life.

Volume IV of Television and Social Behavior, prepared by the National Institute of Mental Health for the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, reports that a majority of adults, nearly as high a percentage as children, use television to learn how to handle specific life problems: family routines; relationships with fellow workers; hierarchical values; how to deal with rebellious children; how to understand deviations from the social norm, sexually, politically, socially and interpersonally. The overall fare of television situation-comedies and dramatic programs is taken as valid, useful, informative, and, in the words of the report, "true to life."

Most viewers of television programming give the programming concrete validity, as though it were not fictional. When solving subsequent, similar problems in their own families, people report recalling how the problem was solved in a television version of that situation. They often make similar choices.

The report states:

". . . practical knowledge and methods of problem-solving lead the list of knowledge reported acquired through these programs. Furthermore, these dramatic programs are most often seen as realistic .... Many viewers then seem to be seeing the shows they value as directly relevant to their own lives . . . [they] evidently take the fictionalized content of dramatic programs more seriously and literally than most social thinkers and behavioral scientists have recognized."

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