Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television (30 page)

This is the case with all sensory information. Whatever information the senses produce the brain trusts as
inherently
believable. If the sense could not be relied upon, then the world would have been an utterly confusing place. Humans would have been unable to make any sensible choices leading to survival. If there were no concretely true information, there could have been no sane functioning; the species could not have survived. This belief in sense perception is the foundation, the given, for human functioning.

This is not to say there is no illusion.

In a desert environment, as we know, mirage can cause some to believe they are seeing things that are not there. But the humans who are fooled in this way are the humans who are new to that environment. It’s a problem of experience and interpretation. Their senses are not yet attuned to the new informational context. People who live for generations in such places learn to allow for illusions and don’t actually “see” them in the way that visitors do. They learn to look at the edges of images, like the shadow spaces of Castaneda’s Don Juan, and to perceive a reality which is different from the visitor’s.

In jungle environments, and among certain creatures, there is camouflage. Animals use it to fool each other, including humans. Humans also use it, or devise image tricks, to fool animals and other humans. In this way images become processed images, deliberately altered, and may serve to fool an observer whose senses and interpretations are not sufficiently sharp.

These are the classical exceptions which prove the point, because the basis of success for camouflage and illusion is that humans
will
believe what they see. In this sense, camouflage is a kind of sensory jujitsu that only confirms the original point; the senses are inherently believable.

In the modern world, information from the senses cannot be relied upon as before. We attempt to process artificial smells, tastes, sights and sounds as though they could reveal planetary reality, but we cannot make anything of them because we are no longer dealing directly with the planet. The environment itself has been reconstructed into an already abstracted, arbitrary form. Our senses are no longer reacting to information that comes directly from the source. They are reacting to processed information, the manifestation of human minds. Our information is confined in advance to the forms that other humans provide.

Now, with electronic media, our senses are removed a step further from the source. The very images that we see can be altered and are. They are framed, ripped out of context, edited, re-created, sped up, slowed down and interrupted by other images. They arrive from a variety of places on the planet where we are not and were filmed at times which are not the present. What’s more, many of the images are totally fictional. The things that we see are not happening and never happened. That is, they happened, but it is only the acting that happened, not the event.

Obviously, in the present age, we ought not rely on images to the same degree that our ancestors relied on the image of flying birds.

Meanwhile, the images proceed inward as though they were the same as natural, unprocessed imagery. They move, walk, talk, and seem real. We assume they are real in the way images have always been real. We are unaware of any alteration. The change is difficult to absorb.

What is required is a doubting process, a sensory cynicism that would have been profoundly inappropriate, even dangerous, for all previous human history. To assume that some sensory data could be eliminated totally and other sense information made unreliable would have left humans totally confused, lost in space, without knowledge of how to do anything, as though the sensory environment itself had somehow gone mad
(Solaris).
The synapse would be broken. Contact lost. That is the present situation.

We are only the second generation that has had to face the fact that huge proportions of the images we carry in our heads are not natural images which arrived as though they were connected to the planet. Like the Eskimo transplanted to the city, or the Indian from the jungle who must suddenly deal with metallic birds, we do not have the ability to cope. Evolution has not arranged for us to allow for varying degrees of absorption and reliance on visual and aural information. There is nothing in the history of the species which aids our basic senses in understanding that imagery can be altered in time, speed or sequence, or that an image can arrive from a distance. Without training in sensory cynicism, we cannot possibly learn to deal with this. It will take generations to let go of our genetically coded tendency to soak up all images as though they are 100 percent real. And think if we do manage to do that, what will we have? Creatures who cannot believe in their senses and who take everything as it comes, since nothing can be directly experienced
(1984).

Without the human bias toward belief, the media could not exist. What’s more, because the bias is so automatic and unnoticed, the media,
all
media, are in a position to exploit the belief, to encourage you to believe in their questionable sensory information. This bias to believe has commercial value for the media since it allows them to keep your attention, as though it were south-flying birds you were seeing. The media, all media but particularly moving-image media, which present data so nearly natural, effectively convert our naive and automatic trust in the reliability of images into their own authority.

All Television Is Real

There is a widespread belief that some things on television are “real” and some things are not real. We believe the news is real. Fictional programs are not real. Sports events are real; when we see them happening on television, we can count on the fact that they happen as we see them. Talk shows are real, although it is true that they happen only for television and they sometimes happen some days before we see them. Situation comedies are not real; neither are police dramas, although they may be based on real events from time to time.

Are historical programs real? Well, no, not exactly. Most are re-created versions of events that happened a long time ago when cameras didn’t even exist. The people we see in them are actors, playing real people, or at least people who used to be real but are now dead. The actors are speaking for them, but they are usually not saying the exact words that the real people said. Also, some of the events in the historical treatment are dropped out—for reasons of time, or because they don’t fit the line of the story—and some others are left in. So is it real? Or is it semireal? Or not real?

Advertising is, of course, definitely not real. Well, on the other hand, those are real people in those ads—we see them walking and talking—but the situations they are portraying are not real, although of course they may be true to life. Does this make them more real? How about Captain Kangaroo? Sesame Street? Are they real? Again, they are real people dealing with real subjects: animals, kids, math, jokes . . . but what does “real” mean in that context?

Our society assumes that human beings
can
make the distinction between what is real and what is not real, even when the real and not-real are served up in the same way, intercut with one another, sent to us from many distant places and times and arriving one behind the other in our houses, shooting out of a box in our living rooms straight into our heads.

What we see in our heads are real-looking human beings, walking and talking as though they were real, even though much of the time they are not, or, that is, the parts they are playing are not, or the people they are playing are no longer alive.

As I write these lines, my son Kai is seven years old. He still asks me if the Bionic Man, a definitely fictional character in a fictional story, is real or not. I remind him that the week before, he asked me the same question and I told him that the Bionic Man was not real, that he is an actor, that the story is made up, and so on.

“Isn’t that a person on the screen?” he asks.

“Well, yes, but he leaps around, throws cars, and so on; humans can’t do that.”

“But couldn’t somebody do that? Couldn’t they invent something so people could do that?”

The line of inquiry goes like that. He asks me questions about other programs as well.

“Are the quiz shows real?”

“Yes.”

“Are they happening now?”

“No.”

“When did they happen?”

“I don’t know, maybe a week ago.”

“Do they really win those prizes?”

“Yes, I think so.”

“Is Kotter real? Is that a real school?”

“No, Kotter is an actor. The kids are actors.”

“You mean those kids don’t go to that school?”

“There is no school. That’s television. That’s a studio.”

“What’s a studio?”

“It’s a place where they make up scenes to look like they’re real, but they’re not really real. They’re all playing parts.”

There are loose ends in my explanations because these are images of real people on the screen, and they are often doing logical, amusing and interesting things. It is difficult to get at exactly what I’m talking about. After all, there it is. Those are real people. It’s happening. It is real. When Kai is watching television, he is watching people doing things, and they
are
doing them. It is the same as the south-flying birds. He is right. The things that he sees are real. It’s just that they are made-up real. That is what I am trying to tell him. But that is pretty subtle.

The question of what is real and unreal is itself a new one, abstract and impossible to understand. The natural evolutionary design is for humans to see
all
things as real, since the things that we see have always been real.
Seeing things on television as false and unreal is learned.
It goes against nature. Yet how is a child to understand that? When the child is watching a television program, he or she has no innate ability to make any distinction between real and not-real. Once an image is inside the box and then inside the child’s mind, having never existed in any concrete form, there is no operable distinction. All such images are equally real and the child is correct to see it that way. Only after the image is ingested can it be noted as unreal, and by then it’s too late. It doesn’t work. The images are already stored in the brain, with all the other images. Whatever I as parent can say about the images being in a separate category called “unreal” has only superficial meaning. Images are images. They run through Kai’s dreams the same way whether they’re real or not. They occupy his mind, whether real or not. The Bionic Man’s movements, his way of speaking, his attitudes, his way of relating to people, are in Kai’s mind no matter what I tell him about reality and unreality.

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.”