Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television

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On television the depths are flattened, the spaces edited, the movements distorted and fuzzed-up, the music thinned, and the scale reduced. This would have to affect the level of understanding and limit the quality of the experience. probably assumed that most of the relevant data were in hand, that they had learned enough to make a judgment.

Images and words about a marsh do not convey what a marsh is. You must actually sense and feel what a strange, rich, unique and unhuman environment it is. The ground is very odd, soft, sticky, wet and smelly. It is not attractive to most humans. The odor emanates from an interaction between the sometimes—stagnant pools and the plants that live in the mud in varying stages of growth and decay. If the wind is hot and strong, there can be a nearly maddening mixture of sweet and rotting odors.

To grasp the logic and meaning of marsh life, the richest biological system on Earth, one needs to put one's hand into the mud, overturn it, discover the tiny life forms that abound. One needs to sit for long hours in it, feeling the ebbs and flows of the waters, the creatures and the winds.

Television cannot capture very much of this. The attempt to push the information through television goes flat. It doesn't work. The viewer is left to evaluate aspects of the experience that television can capture, and these reduce to objective facts like the arguments among opposing viewpoints as to the best use of this area. People need homes. The developer has a right to profit The tax base of the community is affected. Meanwhile, the ecologists speak of flyways and breeding grounds, of endangered plants and nearly extinct creatures.

A whole world of sensory information has been abandoned, and yet it is in this world that real understanding of marshes exists. And without the understanding who can care about the marsh? Taxes become more important. Birds can be seen elsewhere. Images of mud and reeds do not inspire the mind, especially compared with the hard facts of our world. People need jobs building the houses. Nobody ever "uses" swamps anyway.

It is possible that viewers of that program had a greater feeling for swamps when the swamps resided totally in their imaginations, where, at least, they had the richness that fantasy can create. On television, the fantasy is destroyed and the perspective is flattened.

What was true for this news report is true for all television programs that concern nature. Seeing Me Omsk of Borneo on television makes one believe that one knows something of these forests. What one knows. however A what television is capable of delivering, a minute portion of what Borneo forests are. It cannot make you care very much about them. When Georgia-Pacific proceeds to cut down hundreds of thousands of acres of Borneo forest, as it has so many other forests in the Pacific Basin, one remains unmoved. The wood is needed for homes. The objective data dominate when only objective data can be communicated.

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