The tyranny of television

By Vasile Dâncu

When over that last two decades you’ve talked in front of your

students about television and its social influence it isn’t easy to stop and

write a short text which would comprise everything that you’ve discovered,

that you’ve read, and what the subjects of your field research have told you

explicitly or implicitly. The way you choose your arguments will be influenced

right on the spot and it may have a high degree of hazard.

Television is an altar

Following the act of sleeping, watching television is the second activity

also preferred by the Romanian people, aside from the ones who work eight

hours a day, in which case sleeping is their third activity. The screen fills the

central place in the domestic space, but it already follows us everywhere,

invading public spaces (squares, means of transportation, airports, railway

stations, shops etc.). Social time organizes itself around the TV and family

rituals take place also around the TV. We aren’t aware of the tyranny (a

sweet one?) not even when we answer the sociologists’ questions that the

TV, not the refrigerator, not the cupboard or the computer is the object we

couldn’t live without in case it would suffer some damage (30% of the

Romaniansi). Without the TV, we enter into an actual withdrawal as 23% of

the Romanians admit that they couldn’t live not even a single day without

television. A Romanian who lives beyond the age of 80 has the chance to

spend over ten years of his life in front of the TV.

The television is watching us!

The television is not an open window to the world, as we’ve been

taught by its operators and ideologists. It empties us from our own Self, it

liberates us form the pressure and the palpitation of our Ego, and while we

watch, we liberate ourselves from our thoughts, from our individuality. The

great message of television is the television, it becomes an ideal in itself,

independent from what we watch, and it is a drug which calls for permanent

ingestion and which keeps us in perplexity. The real becomes more real than

the real itself, it creates a hyper-objectivity, one without referees from the

outside, but an objectivity which grows from the invasion of our subjectivity.

It gives us the impression of participation, of living, but it creates a

generalized confusion, a confusion where the news get mingled with movies

or political debates and all of it with our life, a life in which we are the

audience, but we consider ourselves actors. The magic of the screen is a

one-way communication. Humans who are conditioned by the television, act

in life as they act towards the characters they see on the screen. The TV

means suppressed lifeii.

Television is a river

We daily swim in the river of images, because television scatters a

continuous flow of images. Edmund Husserl iii once said that any video flow

(as any musical piece) is a temporal object. I am not myself anymore when I

watch television, my conscience is diluted on the flow of images: I become

what I watch! Hence television’s capacity to empty the mind: while I’m

watching TV, my conscience becomes that of the successive moments which

unroll on the screeniv. Same as a Jordan River, swimming in the water of the

image washes us from all of our existence, and it also comes into discussion

i Romanians perceptions regarding manipulation, carried out by the Romanian Institute for Evaluation and Strategy (IRES), in 9-11 of June, 2015, on a representative sample of 820 adult individuals from Romania. Margin of error ±3,5%

ii Cedric Biagini, Divertir pour dominer. La culture de masse contre les peuples. Offensive, Cassez vos ecrans, la spectacularisation du monde, Éditions L'Échappée, 2010, p. 41, apud. Jean-Jacques Wunenburger, L’homme à l’âge de la télévision, PUF, 2000

iii Edmund Husserl, Leçons pour une phénoménologie de la conscience intime du temps, PUF, 1964

iv Idem

the brainwashing. In the ‘60s, Herbert Krugman explained that in case of

brainwashing, when the brain is deprived of sensorial perception, it

accelerates and it goes off the rails. In front of a television, we choose a

channel, we laugh, we cry. The viewer’s brain enters in an almost hypnotic

receptive state. The presentation of the programs is named today by some

experts as being monoform to the central language, used by the television to

present its message, a torrent of images and sounds, with uptight staging, a

composite structure where the elements are being assembled without

apparent sutures, it seems coherent, but it is of maximal fragmentation and

ambiguity of sense. There are several monoform variants: the main one, the

dominant one, is the narrative, unilinear, traditional and classical structure of

soap operas, of police television dramas and more than 98% of the films

which derive from the structure used during the newscast; the one which we

find in televised games and talk shows. The flow seems coherent, but

everything happens at high speed, the montage creates effects of shock and

the idea is not giving the audience the chance to reflect.

The lord of the rings

Television masters time, space, geography and history. A transnational

study carried out by UNESCO shows that more than 99% of the American

households have at least one television. A similar figure is present in France

and in Romania. Even Africa, which is a disadvantaged continent has an

entering rate of 85%. Jo Groebel underlines that the TV screen has become a

major factor in socialization and rules children’s life in urban and rural

regions worldwidev.

Television has colonized our domestic space and has taken over our

agendas. TV channels are now capable to follow us everywhere through our

portable computers, mobile phones and through other specific terminals.

Television, unrestrained by time and space, is a perspective which should

v Michael Desmurget, TV LOBOTOMIE, La vérité scientifique sur les effets de la télévision, Max Milo Editions, Paris, 2011, p. 50

intoxicate the brain sellers. The drama, definitely, is similar to the toughest

drugs: the more we suffer the attack of its flavors, the more we get our life

used with its anesthetic presence and it becomes difficult to extract our mind

from its powervi.

Video-cracy

The world ruled through images is not only a dystopia, the television is

already The Big Brother. After television accomplished the tele-revolution in

1989, a long time people addressed to television instead addressing to the

state or to parties in order to bring optimizations to their daily life. Today,

when the justice process is being followed step by step in what the media

calls more and more often a tele-justice, people still don’t see an earthly

justice, with real people, but an unearthly one, kind of unreal, descended

directly from the TV.

The ones who own the information and who are broadcasting it on

television have a great power and they are able, through images and words,

to send messages and therefore to control the world. The newscast is a good

example for the insecure limit between influence and manipulation. Firstly it

has the tendency to underline the emotional and to occult the rational, by

dramatizing for example, each detail of the damages happened throughout

catastrophes, even if they are insignificant.

If we read over the work of M. McLuhan we will notice that many of

those who use television with political purposes, they are able to do it even

by enforcing a deafening silence towards the important problems of the day:

“In spite of the official absence of censorship, the major networks are

enforcing a silence which lets them in total silence in front of the important

daily debates”vii. The society of generalized communication presents itself as

a world where the communication is not between real people, but between

vi Ibidem, p. 92

vii Marshall Mc Luhan, Pour comprendre les médias, 1986

the images of the people which have been created with special purposes: the

building of these images creates a social activity which has the purpose to

shape an image which has the power to convince and manipulate. By

producing stereotypes, television severely forges people’s encounter in

social space. Bourdieu explains how television, which animates the

journalism world, has profoundly altered the functioning of our universe,

different from art, literature, and philosophy and even from justice and

politics.

Information is manipulated by television, is immediately broadcasted

on large scale, monopolized and reduced to what is shown on the screen and

its power stays in what Jacques Ellus calls as being creative and deformative

power of information: television does not convey any information, the

information is the one which conveys television. But Jean Baudrillard is the

doctor who lays the finger on the wound: the TV is, through its presence, the

control itself. Television has reached its goal, it lobotomized most of this

world’s population because this instrument has spread with the speed of

light in very few years and now it affects almost the entire surface of the

Earth. The French philosopher is right: “in the 20th century we’ve witnessed

the perfect robbery: the reality was stolen”viii.

Jean Leon de Beauvois reminds us some of the manipulative methods

used by television: by means of stimulus, which we tend to ignore, but which

are processed by our cognitive apparatus. The conscience and the psychic of

one person usually aren’t the exclusive result of the socializing process

which has at the bottom a pre-existent theoretical structure, such as

language, education, information, but they are the result of everything that

combines the collective subconscious from semantical, etymological,

epistemological and semiotic stimuli, in which case television has the most

persuasive message among all means of mass communication.

viii Jean Baudrillard, The perfect crime, London: Verso, 1995

The force of the small screen becomes greater as it rests on the

credibility offered by the image (everything that man saw on television with

his own eyes is considered trustworthy). Only some of the operations of

manipulation: manipulation through image, through filming, through

montage, through off commentary, through pagination, through omission,

through media rumors, through censorship, through the practice “hiding by

showing”, through charisma, through journalists, through non-verbal means

of communication.

The talk-show is not an arena for democracy

Manipulation of the public in a talk-show, debate, documentary,

investigation for the purpose of favoring one of the sides involved may take

place by granting the right to talk most of the time to the representatives of

one of the sides, giving them the right to intervene with longer arguments

and offering them a larger space to express, underlining their positive

actions and minimizing the benefic acts of the adverse side etc.

The host’s interventions are often compelling because he sets the topic

of the debate, he offers the right to talk, and he gives the guests different

attention which may be noticed through non-verbal elements of

communication (tonality: respectful, depreciative, polite or irritated tone

etc.). Studies carried out by sociologist have demonstrated that very often,

the host, self-proclaimed as the audience‘spokesman asks questions only to

satisfy his own curiosity or his own interests, most of the issues in question

being uninteresting for most of the viewers. The structure of the TV set is

another level where manipulation can take place as concerns the television

productions. The way in which the group of guests is formed influences in a

subliminal way the perception in the eyes of the viewers, the absence of one

representative of some of the sides invited on the set constitutes an

essential part in the perception of the viewer. The structure of the TV set

should, theoretically, offer the image of a democratic equilibrium between

sides. Ultimately, the scenario which forms the basis of the debate may be

settled before the recording (in which case the quality of the discussion may

suffer, or may be restricted by the hardness of the script). However, neither

the other option is kept out from risks; if the host lays-out his script, on the

whole, following the preparatory discussions with presumptive participants,

and that way leaving enough room for improvisation and free verbalization

during the show, the discussion may divert in a dangerous way.

Television cultivates fear and violenceix

Globally, it has been proved that there are three major effects of the

audiovisual contents: desensitization- the viewer learns progressively to

tolerate the more and more marked levels of violence; the big bad world

syndrome – the viewer gradually imprints the confidence that the outside

world is hostile and dangerous; aggression – the viewer acts more violent

and aggressive. Certainly, not only television is responsible for all the

violence which characterizes our society, but the perception of uncertainty

and distrust is mostly caused by the mediation of the social reality achieved

through the small screen.

The optimistic unsatisfiedx ones whom we’ve discovered in our surveys

reveal a curiosity: people sense that things are going in a bad direction in

ix George Gerbner; Larry Gross; Michael Morgan; Nancy Signorelli, Living with Television: The Dynamics of the Cultivation Process în Jennings Bryant, Dolf Zillman (dirs publ.), Perspectives on Media Effects, New Jersey, Lawrence Erlbaum Assoc., Inc., 198Gb

x Neil Weinstein, Unrealistic optimism about future life events în Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, vol. 39, 1980, p. 806-820Neil Weinstein, Unrealistic optimism about future life events în Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, vol. 5, 1982, p. 441-460

Leo Barille, Television and attitudes about crime în R. Surette, Justice and the Media, Springfield, C. Thomas, 1984

Bernard Stiegler, La technique et le temps, Ed. Galilée, 2001

Pierre Bourdieu, Despre televiziune, Ed. Meridiane, Bucureşti, 1998

Jean-Jacques Wunenburger, L’homme à l’âge de la télévision, PUF, 2000

Peter Watkins, La face cachée de la lune, Homnisphere, 2007

Romania, but they are optimistic with regard to the future as if a miracle is

about to happen like in happy ending movies. Nothing rational sustains this

optimism, maybe only a magical belief in Hollywood movies where the hero

saves the day at the end. However, the theories show also the backward

process where television is also an agent of social control and public order.

Television cultivates mistrust, fear for action in case of protests, mostly

among women, old people or minorities, but in regard with other categories

too. Shaping social perceptions and ritualizing violence, the television also

has an ideological function: it preserves the status-quo and the relations of

power, keeping up the sense of the hierarchy and potentiating the effects of

domination.

Even if it was associated with revolutions, television does not offer

liberty. But it has the potential to shape slaves, alienated and anomic people.

Bibliographic references: