Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television

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So we have a chicken-egg problem. It's difficult to tell which came first, the technology or its controllers. It may not be that the corporate mentality won the war to control television. As the rest of Argument Four will suggest, the technology itself picked its master, through the inexorable technological factors that confine its use.

Fuzzy Images: The Bias Against Subtlety

As has been mentioned, the television screen produces its image by way of a grid of dots located along five hundred lines. This might seem to be sufficient for fairly detailed images, but it is not. Roughly speaking, the experience of looking at a TV picture is like looking at the world through a tea strainer. The picture is located along the grids. You fill in the blanks.

Compare the image of your television screen with any other image in your television room: the bookcase, the table, the rug. Obviously the actual object is vivid in comparison with the television image.

Television production people are exquisitely aware of this. There is an electronics term to describe it: "signal-to-noise ratio." Ordinarily applied to sound, the term can be applied to images as well.

The "signal" is the primary image that they are attempting to convey. The "noise" is the background, the fuzz, from which the signal has to stand out to be seen properly. A "clear" picture is one in which the signal and noise are well differentiated. In television, however, since the differentiation is difficult to achieve, program decisions and production styles have to be chosen to maximize what is possible. An a result, there is a tendency to concentrate on images which offer a large signal-to-noise distinction.

An enormous percentage of television images are close-ups of faces. This is not accidental. Faces in close-up are about the sharpest signal that television can produce while still conveying content. Even so, if the background behind the face is complex, filled with varieties of objects and color tones, the face merges with the background and it all becomes a confusing jumble. So even while showing faces, television producers must keep the background "clean" stark, unencumbered. Dramatic programs are constructed so that there are very few adornments and props. This avoids a cluttered image and increases the potential for the primary image to communicate something

This limitation does not exist to the same extent with movies, where the By signal-to-noise ratio is much greater, allowing for images filled with detail. However, when a movie is played on television, much detail is lost. If you will think back to a time when you first saw a film in a theater and then saw it on television, you will realize how much richness is lost in the translation from one medium to the other.

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