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- Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television
- Jerry Mander
This review is part of the Every Book Shii Reads project.
Contents |
Review
I got this book for free at the Traveler Restaurant on Highway 84 in Connecticut. This is the same place where I picked up Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud for the crazy price of $8. What hooked me was the simple floral design on the cover, as well as the 19th century style table of contents.
This is a period piece and a work of primitivism. On the bright side, the author is not only interested in explaining his image of the cognitive style of television but also wants to give you most all of the background information which leads him to this conclusion. I appreciate his honesty, but what he reveals is that he is wholly on the side of anything which happened in the past and wholly against anything going on in the present, which is quite detrimental to his argument. Nevertheless this is a fascinating book. Mander is quite aware of the difference between his own experience and stuff he has read in books, and provides himself plenty of space to think that out. It contains a lot of stuff to chew on.
Chapter summaries and things to look out for
Chapter 1
Mander provides a relevant and well-written biography of his life as an ad man, which winds up with him looking at a beautiful scene and thinking, "Nature is boring." This thought shocks him and he starts to rethink the way television works on the mind.
He begins to develop on one of his themes: the replacement of firsthand knowledge with "information", facts and figures piped through media channels.
Chapter 2
The way in which powerful people and groups learned to control television is described somewhat naively. Mander had to work with smaller political groups who had seen these examples and wanted to use television to advertise their own causes. He tells the heartbreaking story (p. 39) of a Hopi tribe which was trying to fight off a U.S. government attempt to install strip mining on its land, and the way television necessarily distorted people's understanding of this issue by framing it as a question of responsible-looking, quick-talking executives versus primitive-looking tribesmen.
As Paul Gray points out in a review for TIME, Mander bemoans that the dispute could have been better conveyed to the people of the world through a book, whereas the reality is that the U.S. government carried out a genocide of Native Americans back in those "good old days" when people discussed things at length through books and newspapers. Television is actually a step up from books-only, but neither thing is the same as driving out to the Hopi reservation and learning the real story. Mander discusses this at the end of Chapter 11.
Chapter 3
Now we arrive at the first argument, which comes from the mouths of babes. The switch-off of direct experience for indirect stories is explained and its consequences outlined. A child today asks strange questions like, "Do vegetables grow in the store?" or "Who built that mountain?" It is difficult for them to accept the land as an organism that once existed without human intervention. And while we can correct them, we are not acting on our own knowledge, but merely on what we have read in books and found out. It is no surprise that religion wanes as we emphasize human control of our environment.
An interesting example is made of walking.
Chapter 4
Mander delves into anthropology. This is where his primitivism comes to full light, since he seems to be of the opinion that pre-civilized tribes could do no wrong, even in setting up arbitrary taboos. This chapter is kind of silly and there's nothing worth commenting on.
Chapter 5
How our lack of direct experience, and our acceptance of the artificial and secondhand in its place, is used to manipulate us. Scientology and est, for example, take the stuff we have already set up for ourselves-- the disconnection from natural ways, sensory deprivation, setting up of societal rules-- and simply create their own system on top of that. Living within the cult keeps you inside an office building at all times. People struggle even harder to achieve success within the cult system. Everything is part of the artificial. The natural is completely obscured.
The craziness caused by sensory deprivation, listening only to one's own mind and blocking out all outside input, can cause hallucinations, injury, or death. Mander cited studies for this in an earlier chapter, and if you've heard the ex-Scientology stories you know it's also true here. Yet some people voluntarily accept the cult treatment. And all of us voluntarily accept society, which to some extent bottles us up in our own heads and prevents us from experiencing the world. 1984 and Solaris are also dragged out as examples.
Chapter 6
This chapter is about advertising. Amidst all the talk about adapting people to rely on systems and things, there is one paragraph that stands out brilliantly:
- Advertising exists only to purvey what people don't need. Whatever people do need they will find without advertising if it is available. This is so obvious and simple that it continues to stagger my mind that the ad industry has succeeded in muddying the point.
Of course, ad guys will argue, there are things people need but couldn't find for themselves in our society. For example, in the 1890s women would purchase abortifacients through mail-order because they had no other means of access to it. But the fact that they needed such things from afar links into the fact that our culture in general is dependent on information and products, and not on pulling good things out of the dirt.
And Mander pulls away the curtain to reveal that 98% of the time, the advertising and labeling on a product is not meant to assist our happiness, but wrench open our emptiness! What advertising does is take away some satisfaction that we had before, and make us go to the store to buy it back. We thought we were eating well? Advertising will tell us about the new yogurt with 12 vitamins. We thought we smelled nice? Advertising will tell us about our dirty armpits.
This is an excellent point. Advertising is part of the cognitive style of television, which is to excite your emotions and keep you watching long enough to see more ads. Television is monolithic: the culture it projects is American culture because you wouldn't want to see them blast someone else's culture at you. Genuinity is completely ignored-- the point is making you comfortable sitting there and watching as long as you can.
The Internet is not monolithic. You can learn about both sides. Thanks to cheap hosting, anyone from anywhere in the world can add anything they like. The quality of the information is judged quite differently-- yes, you can watch Hulu videos and pretend it's just another interface for the teevee, but if you're reading Wikipedia or your favorite blog you are in pursuit of the truth, or at least the genuine. So for the Internet, advertising ought to be anathema. Advertising is the opposite of conveying a genuine message; the message it conveys is precisely what people do not need to hear or act on.
Thus the absurdity of SEO. The dying breath of the Internet will be when people stop contributing simply because they want to tell people something, and just make up whatever crap they can to sell ads. The fakeness of advertising will finally conquer the last frontier of media. Let us hope that day never comes.
Chapter 7
The centralization of television. The cleanliness of the 50's nuclear family is a plot to sell soap, etc. This chapter is fairly conspiratorial and does not provide evidence. That makes it kind of boring.
Chapter 8
How a person acts while watching television. When summed up in that way it's easy to understand why this chapter is so short. People do not act when watching television; they are sucked in. Surrounding inputs are blocked out, the lights lowered and sound raised, and the eye of the camera becomes the human eye. So, your eyes will bounce around a lot reading a book or a webpage, looking for the interesting words or even just proceeding through the story and jumping back to reread a good line-- but watching TV your eyes don't move at all.
Chapter 9
Mander's grandmother-in-law once warned him about the attractive power of the moon (as he discusses in another chapter). He compares the television to something with many times the power of a moon or fireplace. For some reason he doesn't make the connection, though.
Artificial light is bad for you, sunlight is life. I don't know whether this is scientific, it certainly sounds silly, but it's a nice thing to think about.
Chapter 10
The effects of CRT displays on the brain. LCDs are not anticipated-- oops.
Mander mixes up pure laziness with flow. But he does make the important point that television is not relaxing. Television puts you constantly on edge-- whether consciously waiting for the next cliffhanger, or on a far deeper level, being constantly surprised and mesmerized by the constant changes of camera and the exciting events attacking all levels of the brain. I am reminded of the babies watching Baby Einstein, which the parents think must be downloading shit to their brains because it appears to be intensely boring but the babies can't take their eyes off it. Really it's a form of child abuse. The babies are probably quite bored with this screen that presents them with no actual interaction, but is constantly changing on them, threatening to burst out of the screen and attack them. And really that instinct is still in us somewhere-- it never leaves.
Different kinds of relaxation are compared to television. Mander thinks that when we watch television to "relax" because we are "exhausted", it is not because our minds are overused, but because our minds are overly constrained. Working long hours doing paperwork in an office chair, or listening from a tiny school desk, or screwing on toothpaste caps in an assembly line, are tasks designed to reward narrow focus, and punish people whose minds tend to wander. They are literally mind-numbing. Alternate avenues of experience-- leaving the office to visit customers, leaving the school to play in the fields, leaving the assembly line for any reason-- are cut off.
When you escape from these chores your mind is bursting to the brim with energy. You do not want to work anymore, but you find you cannot "quiet your mind". You have trained yourself to become "compulsive and obsessive". Mander describes two avenues people have taken for escape, the first being centering Indian religious practices such as yoga, chanting, and meditation, and the second being temporary and damaging forms of escape, such as alcohol, pot, heroin, and television. Of course, there are other thing one can do after work, but Mander rightly dismisses things like sports and gym exercise as undesirable by people who are mentally stressed. In any case, he compares television with cults such as Scientology and est which aim to empty your mind temporarily with the purpose of filling it up with whatever nonsense they can think of. Like drugs and cults, television does not renew, refresh, or stimulate a tired mind. Instead, it fills it up with foreign images, prolonging your weariness and driving you to sleep.
Chapter 11
We naturally produce and experience a wide variety of images (and sounds, smells, etc.) Visualizations can spark much power; Mander gives examples of a young neurotic freed from an awful asylum by the power of visualization, his own image of a special rock when he was a child, and the yogic powers of controlling one's heartrate and temperature (also known as tummo meditation) which he says stems from visualization.
When they are playing make-believe children imitate whatever they see, be it from real life, television, movies, or YouTube. Is that a bad thing? This is still a difficult question.
Chapter 12
When television places images in your head, especially when you see them repeated many times, you can't get rid of them. This is one of the main reasons I don't watch television.
Additionally, television replaces images of things you know about. Mander gives the example of baseball. I rarely watch baseball, but I haven't been to a game in 5 or 6 years; my image of baseball is the faraway camera image of the field that you see when you watch a game on TV. This can be used to subvert reality: you know McDonald's is crappy food from real experience, but constant advertising reinforces the image of a rich and juicy burger in your head.
"Seeing things on television as false and unreal is learned. It goes against nature." Our natural explanation is to think that the stories are real. Thus: FOX News. A more comfortable universe for those who can't deal with reality.
Chapter 13
We now get into the bias of television, starting with how images on television are chosen. Boring reality is ignored: the most shocking, most exciting images are picked. These images are chosen not by those awful biased TV men, but most frequently by us, the viewers, because we watch television to escape from boring reality. This is the reason why when I do watch television it is usually PBS or C-SPAN, much to the dismay of the people in the room with me who think I am simply being a pretentious nerd with no taste. Although, even the images in Antiques Roadshow are chosen for the excitement value!
"In my opinion, the more the natural environment is conveyed on TV, the less people will understand about it or care about it, and the more likely its destruction becomes." Richness, the real combination of the boring and interesting, the true balance of nature cannot be conveyed through this medium.
Chapter 14
If you're used to images that don't interact with you, you don't feel.
The media reports on itself. All media distort.
Chapter 15
Mander finally gets to the point I was thinking of in Chapter 10, which is that despite focusing on interesting images, it is not an interesting activity to watch television: it is boring. Television must fight a constant war to keep your interest from wandering.
The experience of watching television is dull, as described above. Darkened room, totally disengaged from the senses, staring straight without moving. Your actions have no impact on the screen. Television creates the illusion that despite the fact that you are doing nothing, something unusual is somehow going on.
One of the most memorable passages in this book-- in fact, the only thing I remember from when I first read it at the age of 12 or 13-- occurs in this chapter on page 303. In order to ensure your attention, television changes the image constantly. You cannot simply stick with a person talking. I would love it if television did this, but that is boring. After reading this passage, I kept track of how often technical events (scene changes, sound effects, starting of music, any interruption of the direct image) occurred in things I was watching for the next eight years. Here are my results: Long shots were abandoned in television in the 1950s and are even as we speak being abandoned in film. It's quite disappointing actually. But even more, if you pay attention to scene changes while watching today's television, you will start to feel like your intelligence is being insulted! News shows change the camera multiple times a minute; dramas will change the camera many times a minute; and advertisements, the worst offenders of all, sometimes have multiple technical events in a single second. Once you pick up the habit of noticing technical events, it is difficult to drop it! Compare it to something like NPR which people sometimes yawn at the sound of. They will go for minutes at a time without any technical events at all. It is quite satisfying to listen to.
Mander gives this chart, current as of the book's publication in 1978:
- Advertising: 20-30 technical events per minute.
- Commercial program: 8-10 technical events per minute.
- Public television: 2-3 technical events per minute.
Check this against modern television and tell me what you learn.
I am kind of writing as I read here. On page 310 Mander addresses exactly what I experienced after reading this passage: "As people become aware of the degree to which technique, rather than anything intrinsically interesting, keeps them fixed to the screen, withdrawal from addiction and immersion can begin. I have seen this happen with my own children. Once I had put them to the task of counting and timing these technical events, their absorption was never the same." (It sounds like he is putting his kids through drudgery but it really is important.)
On page 314 an obvious experiment is described. Nobody watched a video of ocean waves on TV in San Francisco, even though people go to the beach and do just that every day in California.
Chapter 16
Some final notes about how people make choices when watching television.
- Death is more interesting than life.
- War is more interesting than peace.
- Leaders are more interesting than complicated, leaderless movements, whether they are religious or political. Billy Graham is easier than a ragtag bunch of Hopi Indians.
- Commodities are more interesting than natural environments.
- Material things are more interesting than the immaterial.
- Hierarchy is more interesting than democracy.
- Lust is more interesting than satisfaction.
- Quantity is more interesting than quality. (Oprah gives her whole audience free cars.)
And so forth.
Finally he relates a phone conversation he had with a television producer which confirms everything in the entire book.
- JERRY: It looks like it takes me about a hundred thousand words to tell it.
- PRODUCER: Well, I know, but what are the main points?
- JERRY: One of the main points is that television can only deal with main points so only certain kinds of things can get through.
It is too much of a treat for me to quote the whole thing here. Read the book yourself if you're interested.
Chapter 17
Some final words about why Mander wants to get rid of the whole medium and not just "reform" it. But the points he has made are really about any media whatsoever! They are quite amazing when they are understood, but we can't suppress the fast-paced, content-free medium that people demand. Instead we need to increase understanding, using other mediums to spread that knowledge.