television…
the drug of a nation
[A totally informal and half-baked response to The Suburban Home Companion: Television and the Neighborhood Ideal in Postwar America by Lynn Spigel, which I will try to get permission to put up for reference.]
Television provides a simulated world to fill in for the deficiencies of the real world. Well, what's wrong with that? There's plenty wrong with it, but as with most everything, it is not purely evil just as it is not wholly good. The worst of TV seems to be that the sim world placates people about things that they are unhappy with in the real world. Once placated they are much less likely to act to change things in the real world. This is troubling… I think this is what we call hegemony.
However, there are many things in the real world that we cannot change. Perhaps TV provides a much needed escape from the overwhelming things in life, helping us to maintain some kind of balance… I think this is what we call sanity. But whose sanity is it anyway? Lynn Spigel makes a very relevant point in the last sentence of her essay: “The global village, after all, is the fantasy of the colonizer, not the colonized.” Are we being mentally colonized by dominant forces in our society? Perhaps. Can we do anything about it? Perhaps. I'll think about it later, I have a program to catch on channel 4.
We need to ask, “Who is the colonizer and who is the colonized?” (And who does not figure into the equation at all?)
The paradox of sim life is that it provides an avenue for social activity while it isolates. People watch TV together, but they interact with the sim world more than with each other. A person may even watch a program alone and feel they are socializing. What's wrong with this picture? Once again, there is a limited perspective being pushed. One could hope for more diversity within true human interaction, however as cultures change over time, there may be a growing conformity encouraged and reinforced by TV media. But what came first, the conformity or the TV? Some claimed radio promoted conformity, as suggested by Spigel: “Popular critics praised radio's ability to join the nation together into a homogenous community where class divisions were blurred by a unifying voice.” Purveyors of this view saw TV as an instrument of “social sanitation.”
We should ask many questions of TV and apply many of the same questions to new media, such as the internet. There are many cross-over issues such as, public space vs. private space and sociological impact. However, the internet has so much more potential as a democratic medium than television ever had, since the viewer can easily become the publisher. With the internet, we're still just looking at a toddler and wondering what it will be when it grows up.
© zero9
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