Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television

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All of the information is narrowed to fit the sensory transmission limits of the medium and distorted by the sensory disconnections in the human. Any messages that are dependent upon sensory understanding and interaction are not going to work on television course, cover only one range of phenomena, and thus tend to limit the power of networks to explain complex events."

The Bias Away From The Sensory

Television cannot transmit information that comes in the form of smell, touch or taste.

Furthermore, as we have discussed, the information it can transmit through the visual and auditory senses is extremely narrow. The ranges of color, brightness, depth are confined by the technology. The aural range is confined within narrow amplitudes, pitches and tones, dictated by low-cost speaker sys tems. The sounds we hear are flattened by the speakers. Smaller or distant sounds are blotted out by the whistle of the electron fields.

Unfortunately, given the human tendency to accept the information of our senses as total and reliable, we are not aware of the aspects of the visual and aural information that are dropped out of this new information package. We assume that when we see and hear something, we are seeing and hearing everything that is being transmitted, as though we were actually observing the event directly. Or else we assume that what is lost is too minor to matter we are inclined to believe the information as though it had not been processed, reduced and reshaped before we experienced it.

In addition to the elimination of three sensory systems and the narrowing of two others, there is another sensory oddity in the television experience. Television disconnects the two operative sense modes-visual and aural.

You are sitting in a room watching an image from miles away. You see the place, but the image you see and the sounds which reportedly connect to the image are not really connected. The sounds are "nearer" to you than the images are.

Let's say you are watching two people walking on a faraway hillside. In real life, you could not make out what the characters are saying, but on television you can. The voices are amplified or dubbed in, so you can hear a conversation that would otherwise be inaudible. The natural informational balance between aural and visual has been shattered. Now, information that you take in with the visual sense cannot be used to modify or help process the information from the aural sense because they have each been isolated from each other and reconstructed.

Furthermore, while you are watching and listening with your disconnected aural and visual senses, you are smelling some chicken roasting in the kitchen and you are drinking a beer.

So television has attached two of your sensory modes to a distant spot allered their natural arrangement to each other, but left other aspects of your sensory apparatus at home in present time. This is a very peculiar arrangement and in a way it's sort of funny, like playing a perceptual game in a technology museum . It takes on importance when we understand Mat the average person submits to this condition for four hours every day, and while in this state is receiving important information about life. All of the information is narrowed to fit the sensory transmission limits of the medium and distorted by the sensory disconnections in the human.

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