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Concerns about Content←⤒🔗

This article is about television. It is not primarily concerned with the content, but rather with the nature of the medium. As far as content is concerned, much has already been written on that topic, in both the Christian and the secular press. Most of it consists of complaints about such things as television profanity, immorality and obscenity, the promotion of consumerism and materialism, and especially the effect the excessive amount of violence is bound to have on young viewers.

Concern is also expressed about the medium's addictiveness, its tendency to become a “plug-in drug.” Writing in the late 1970s, the well-known English journalist and television commentator Malcolm Muggeridge estimated that the average person in England spent about eight years of his or her life in front of the tube. I don't know what the statistics are for today, but there is no reason to suppose that the couch-potato syndrome is in decline. The opposite may well be true.

The area of major concern, however, continues to be the potential link between TV violence and criminal behaviour in children and adolescents (and even adults). For years civil libertarians (always afraid of censorship) and broadcast industries have said that there is no indication of such a link. The general public thinks differently, and governments are beginning to pay attention to the public's concerns. In Canada, for example, the Commons communications committee has been alerted and is apparently considering amendments to the Criminal Code to deal with the issue.

The chairman of the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, Keith Spicer, agrees that reforms are necessary. In a letter to the Globe and Mail of March 24, 1993, he writes that research proves “overwhelmingly” that excessive TV violence contributes to the “desensitization, aggression, impaired learning abilities, increased bullying and weapons use” among children. He adds that the CRTC is dealing with the issue and considers measures such as “media literacy programs, classification and technological tools to aid parental control, and self-regulatory industry codes.” These suggestions, he says, have the blessing of Canadian production and broadcast industries. So perhaps we may look forward to at least some improvements in TV content.

Is the Tube Neutral?←⤒🔗

The question that arises at this point (and the one that will have our attention in the rest of this article) is: if the broadcast industry is indeed persuaded or forced to clean up its act, would that be a first step on the road toward domesticating TV as a communication medium toward placing it on the same level as, let us say, a newspaper or a book? We do accept these written media as neutral in themselves: it is the content that makes them acceptable or unacceptable to us. Can we look at television in the same way? Or is there something in this medium that should prevent us from drawing that conclusion?

This question has the attention of an increasing number of media specialists. The majority of these, rather than spending their time analyzing TV content and its behaviourist effects, concentrate on the study of the medium itself. And generally speaking, they answer the question which concluded the previous paragraph in the affirmative. That is, they do not believe television to be a neutral medium, one that exerts no influence apart from its content.

Among these researchers is the American Neil Postman. In recent years he has become well-known, at least in North America, both because of the number of his publications and because of his outspokenness. Although occasionally a bit apocalyptic in his denunciations of TV and related technologies, he has an important message, and in what follows I will deal mainly with his work. At times, however, I will refer to other writers as well, for Postman builds on the work of several of his predecessors and colleagues in the rapidly expanding field of media studies.

The tradition includes the Canadian historian Harold Innis (d. 1952), who did pioneering work on the cultural influence which technology and communications media have exerted throughout history. It also includes the oracular Marshall McLuhan, another Canadian whose media studies earned him international acclaim. (McLuhan was the man who introduced new terminology such as hot and cool media, and coined the slogan “the medium is the message”). Postman has been influenced by the work of these men, and also by that of the French protestant scholar and social critic Jacques Ellul. I even noted parallels between some of Postman's conclusions and those of the Dutch engineer-philosopher Egbert Schuurman. Like Ellul, Schuurman, a member of a Reformed church in the Netherlands, has written at length about the corrosive effects that an increasingly dominant technicism has upon modern society. Some of his work has been translated into English.

Media Power←⤒🔗

Neil Postman – to get back to him is a professor of communications arts and sciences at New York University and has been writing on media affairs for some decades. We will concentrate on two of his studies. They are his 1985 publication Amusing Ourselves to Death; Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, and his latest book, Technopoly, subtitled The Surrender of Culture to Technology, published in 1992. I will begin by simply stating his ideas and findings; an evaluation will follow later.

Like most of his colleagues, Postman sees the electronics revolution as indeed a revolution, that is, as a turning point in our civilization. In agreement with other media specialists, he believes that this type of cultural change takes place whenever one communications technology is replaced by another. The medium, in other words, is, and always has been, the message.

Postman illustrates this by drawing attention to comparable situations in the past. One is the cultural transformation the West experienced at the end of the Middle Ages, when printing with movable type came to Europe. Another occurred some millennia earlier in Egypt, Mesopotamia, and elsewhere in the Middle East, with the invention of the art of writing and later of the alphabet. As has been well attested by a variety of historical studies, these media revolutions caused (or at least helped bring about) profound social changes, drastically affecting all manifestations of the cultures in question, from religion to politics to economics, and from education to theories of knowledge and even worldviews.

Word versus Image←⤒🔗

Postman's main concern is, of course, with the revolution in the midst of which we find ourselves, that is with the shift from word and printing to image and electronics. Some media specialists applaud that revolution. Postman does not. In his opinion we have very little to gain, and a whole lot to lose, by our switch from print to television and related media.

Among the authorities he quotes in support of this view is the Bible. Referring to the second commandment, “You shall not make for yourself any graven image…,” he suggests that already the Old Testament assumed a connection between forms of communication and the quality of a culture. He adds,

The God of the Jews was to exist in the Word and through the Word, an unprecedented conception requiring the highest order of abstract thinking. Iconography [image-making] thus became blasphemy …

Here we have one of the criteria according to which Postman establishes the superiority of word over image: the former, he says, demands abstract, analytical thinking, and the latter discourages it. And it is the written and printed, even more than the oral word that promotes this analytical type of thinking. In a culture dominated by print,

Postman writes, “public discourse tends to be characterized by a coherent, orderly arrangement of facts and ideas. The public for whom it is intended is generally competent to manage such discourse.”

These people, he explains, have learned to think, and to analyze what they read, to detect an author's lies and mistakes, and to notice his contradictions and his failures to support generalizations or provide logical connections. They also have developed the attention span necessary for such mental exertion.

Elsewhere he writes that in the world of the printed word the emphasis is on “logic, sequence, history, exposition, objectivity, detachment, and discipline.” The world of television, on the other hand, deals with “imagery, narrative, presentness, simultaneity, intimacy, immediate gratification, and quick emotional response.” It does not encourage careful, critical evaluation – it does not even allow for it. And one of the implications is that with the decreased emphasis on analytical thinking, the possibilities of the public's being manipulated by the media elites multiply.

“Amusing Ourselves to Death”←⤒🔗

Rather than being neutral, then, television, according to Postman, affects our mindset: our habits of thought and theories of knowledge, and it does so in an adverse manner. Nor is that the extent of TV's pernicious influence. Every aspect of our culture – law, politics, trade and advertising, sports, news, education, and even religion – is being affected and trivialized by the new medium. This is the inevitable result of the facts that television changes our way of thinking and that its major function (and also the thing it does best) is to amuse. Entertainment, Postman writes, is the supra-ideology of all discourse on television. It may not be impossible for television to provide serious programs, but being a visual medium it is its nature “to suppress the content of ideas in order to accommodate the requirements of visual interest; that is to say, to accommodate the values of show business.”

Because of his conviction that television tends to trivialize what it touches, Postman disagrees with the type of reforms contemplated by people like Keith Spicer. The best thing to be had on television, he says, is its junk entertainment. That fits the medium, and nobody is seriously threatened by it. Television becomes dangerous when it tries to engage in serious discourse and when it deals with important cultural matters, because it inevitably turns them too into entertainment. Postman devotes much space in his books to what he believes to be television's trivialization of news casting, education, and religion. He illustrates his point about the cheapening of the news broadcasts by quoting from a description of the television news business by Robert MacNeil of the well-known (and well-regarded) MacNeil-Lehrer News-hour. The idea is, according to MacNeil,

… to keep everything brief, not to strain the attention of anyone but instead to provide constant stimulation through variety, novelty, action, and movement. You are required … to pay attention to no concept, no character, and no problem for more than a few seconds at a time … [The assumptions controlling a news show are] that bite-sized is best, that complexity must be avoided, … that visual stimulation is a substitute for thought, and that verbal precision is an anachronism.

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Offering People what They want←⤒🔗

To give the reader an idea of his treatment on this topic, I quote (taken from Amusing Ourselves…) on the issue of televised religion.

The executive director of the National Religious Broadcasters Association sums up what he calls the unwritten law of all television preachers: “You can get your share of the audience only by offering people something they want.”

… This is an unusual credo. There is no great religious leader… who offered people what they want. Only what they need. But television is not well suited to offering people what they need. It is “user friendly.” It is too easy to turn off. It is at its most alluring when it speaks the language of dynamic visual imagery. It does not accommodate complex language and stringent demands. As a consequence, what is preached on television is not anything like the Sermon on the Mount. Religious programs are filled with good cheer. They celebrate affluence. Their featured players become celebrities. Though their messages are trivial, the shows have high ratings, or rather, because their messages are trivial, the shows have high ratings.

Readers may object that the executive director of the NRBA and Neil Postman himself are guilty of generalizing, of painting the guilty and the innocent with the same brush. The notorious “televangelist” may avoid the Sermon on the Mount and celebrate affluence on TV, they will say, but that is not necessarily so in the case of “evangelical” ministers who preach on television. This objection is to the point. But Postman provides additional arguments to support the contention that, the medium being the message, television and religion don't mix.