Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television

Article Tools

Image Gallery

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

For these technical reasons, among others we will get to later, there is an emphasis on sports and violence in television programming, and there is great viewer interest in them.

The popularity of such programming is not so much a sign that public tastes

The bias toward the coarse, the bold, and the obvious finds its way into all other categories of television programming, including even those that deal with so-called objective events in the world. News producers will always choose the easily communicable image are vulgar, as they are assumed to be in many quarters ("People want that kind of programming"), as it is a sign that these programs are the ones which manage to communicate something, at least, through television. Rather than illustrating the limits of the public mentality or taste, they illustrate the limits of the medium itself. The public wisely chooses programs which work best in a medium in which anything of a more subtle nature loses so much in translation as to be noncommunicative.

This is not to say that the businessmen who are the television powers that be aren't predisposed to further the values of competition and social Darwinism which they understand best and which are inherent in sports and violence programs. But no matter what their inclination, the fact exists that the kind of programming in which the least information is lost is the grosser forms: sports, violence, police action, as welI as quiz shows, game shows, soap opera, situation comedy and news about murder, conflict, war, power politics and charismatic leaders. All of these categories of programming communicate on television because they deliver clear, easily grasped visual and auditory signals, together with broadband emotional content, all of which make them highly efficient in a low-definition medium.

On the other hand, the kinds of feelings and behavior which the reformers like to call prosocial cannot be conveyed through television by obvious facial expression or physical movement.

While it may be possible to show friendship in a dramatic context, it cannot be explored very far visually, because expression of such feelings exists in an inward rather than outward realm of experience. Love A simply not as easy to demonstrate through coarse imagery as anger or competition. The heights of intimate feeling between—lovers, or parents and children, or among children are actually experienced in life's quietest moments. Ordinarily they do not involve any visually obvious action, unless it is the most subtle facial expression—peace, tranquility, satisfaction not easily captured in any photography, but damned near impossible in the coarse imagery of television.

How would you show caring on television? You could present images of people who presumably care about each other doing things which express that feeling. Yet, the things people usually do to express real caring are very small, intimate things. The inner feeling may be strong but, unlike rage, the acts which express it are rarely sweeping.

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print