The Blue Glowing Baby

I don't own a television. I haven't had one since about 1990, when the old one my parents gave me finally died. It wasn't a big decision at the time. I just failed to replace it. In a very definitive way it makes me an odd man out in American society, given the 98% of U.S. households with televisions. It also makes people uncomfortable.

Occasionally it becomes necessary in a conversation for me to note that I lack a television. Usually it is when someone tells me about an upcoming program that I should see. When I reveal my social deformity, people often get very specific about the small number of carefully selected programs or channels that they watch, usually educational. One friend of mine, upon being told, blurted out “You self-righteous prick!” (He was joking. Sort of. He's a Deadwood/Sopranos fan.) Nobody seems totally comfortable with their viewing habits. Nobody has ever said to me, “How can you stand it? I love television! I watch it all the time, especially the reality shows.”

Living without a television necessarily gives one a different perspective from most other people. Much of our cultural experience is mediated through the medium. Many aspects of television have become a background to our collective existence.

Consider silence, and its absence. Many people spend time in their homes with the television on in the background. (U.S. average: about 7 hours a day) To me it is like a squalling baby, incessantly, tirelessly demanding attention. It dominates a room, paying no attention to the social norms of conversation, the back and forth, the acknowledgment of our presence. It interrupts its own stories every few minutes with loud non-sequiturs about consumer goods. It just won't shut the fuck up. If an adult human being came into your living room and behaved that way you would never invite that person back. Yet, because it is a machine, the off switch under our control and the humans responsible for its behavior well hidden on the other end of the wire, people don't boot it out.

To me, the television news appears bizarre. The stories are written like some kind of stylized theater. There is a form for each kind of story, with predictable video footage, symbols, rhythm, and text. All newscasts seem to follow the same narrative arc, from what are deemed major stories to minor ones, with a human interest piece to leave the viewers laughing or sniffling at the end. In political stories they try to main a binary balance between two selected positions, ignoring any third or fourth.

I don't see how anyone could get anything but a distorted view of the world through television news. I'm not even talking about Fox “News.” That kind of blatant slant is easy to detect and mostly ignore. It's the background that counts, the seemingly extraneous details.

I grew up watching Walter Cronkite, the most trusted man in America, sign off every night with the world's biggest lie: “...and that's the way it is...” The CBS News wasn't even a ten-thousandth of the way it was, and not even a thousandth of the situations it actually mentioned. Uncle Walter should have said, “...and that was 45 minutes of stories hurriedly selected by our editorial staff out of dozens of stories covered by our reporters out of the billions of things happening in the world today, filtered through the worldviews of our reporters, editors, and managers and edited down to fit in between the commercials...” It was presented as if this was what we actually needed to know. The voice of authority had spoken. That was perhaps the worst distortion – the dual implication that these were the most important things to know and that we were learning all we needed to know.

The news aside, the stories told to us by television are highly ritualized parables of the status quo. Sure, there a few weird things going on after midnight on local access channels, but when is the last time you were really, truly surprised by something you saw on the tube? Prime time programming makes kabuki theater look spontaneous. The plot points fall with near-audible thuds at timed intervals. The storyline wraps up neatly by the denouement, and the characters have a little joke or a somber philosophical moment. All of it, whatever the variety of program, leaves us with one overarching message: Our fundamental assumptions about the way we live, the right way to live, are correct.

But it's not the way we live. Stories don't always have happy endings. There are loose ends. Our population is not mostly cops, lawyers, doctors, and private investigators. Taxi drivers in big cities can't afford apartments that large or well furnished. Sometimes the hero loses and dies. This is all obvious, but don't think that the constant repetition of even obvious falsehoods doesn't affect you.

In a fascinating psychological study, a researcher named Serge Moscovici found that some individuals would see a blue square as green if people around them kept insisting that it was green. More significantly, even those individuals who were not swayed at that moment later perceived greenish-blue slides as more green than randomly chosen subjects. Those who resisted influence the most during the initial experiment were most likely to be influenced in the second. Repetition and consistency (and 90% entertainment content) are the keys to successful propaganda. Just because you consciously know television is phoney doesn't mean you are immune.

We pay money for a television, sometimes a lot of money, we place it in a prominent place in our home, we bring it to life, and it lectures us and tells us stories . It is a slave, an entertainer, a member of the family, an oracle, a companion, and a teacher. That combination of choice and lack of choice – we choose to watch it, but we don't control the content – gives it that strange oracular quality. It never, ever listens. It answers the questions of its own choosing, or, to be entirely accurate, the questions approved by its corporate management. It is a dysfunctional, one way relationship that takes up, for the average American, four hours a day.

I'm not saying, “Never watch TV.” I watch TV sometimes, at other people's houses or in hotels. (But, y'know, just a couple of programs on Public Television...) I'm asking you to understand the nature of your relationship with television. Watch TV with the awareness that it is continuously lying to you, and to some extent, lying successfully.

Comments

[Cathy Resmer]

Interesting post.

I haven't had a TV in about 10 years, and haven't missed it at all, especially now that I can get anything I really want to watch on DVD or YouTube.

I have to say, there have been some really great, entertaining series in the past few years. Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the Sopranos, Six Feet Under, Freaks and Geeks. But I've watched them all on DVD on my laptop, usually one or two episodes at a time.

It's weird, I watched probably 7-8 hours of TV a day when I was a kid. And I just don't miss it at all. I don't know how I'd find the time to watch that much now.

I, too, have witnessed the "I only watch such and such programs" reaction. So true!

I've also noticed that the farther I get from my tv-watching self, the harder it is to visit other people who need to have the tv on all the time. I have a hard time ignoring it when it's on.

[Cassandra]

Hi, I came here by way of BurlingtonPol. Anyway, at one point in my life, I too lived without a TV and the funniest reponse to that was: Do you have a flush toilet? According to Nielsens, TVs have more penetration that flush toilets.