Lesson 14 - The Un-TV Experiments

1
Lesson 14 - The Un-TV Experiments

• Robert Wonser

2
TV and the Social Construction of Reality

• What is the purpose of TV? To entertain or to
  sell us stuff? Does the content depend on what
  you answer is?
• Who is in charge of what is on TV?
• The Technical Events Test (T.E.T.) dramatically
  reveals the functions of the political
  institution of television (far seeing or seeing
  far).

3
Technical Events Test

• The T.E.T. reveals TVs purpose
• A) training us to shorten our attention span
• B) making ordinary life appear dull
• C) injecting a hypnotic quality into our ordinary
  awareness
• D) coercing us into its reality.

4
Shorten Our Attention Span

• What were we talking about? Or right
• The creation of the jumpy, volatile, scattered
  and hyper, monkey-mind is reinforced because it
  is believed to be optimal in generating the
  consuming type of lifestyle
• people use the consumption levels and patterns
  portrayed in TV advertising to elevate their
  levels of personal well-being while those same
  consumption patterns are simultaneously
  devastating the environmental and resource base
  on which our future depends. (Elgin 199010)

5
Ordinary Life is Made Dull

• When you watch TV you are seeing images that are
  utterly impossible in nature.
• TV changes the way we experience reality.
• We become so conditioned into believing what is
  shown on TV as real, we become skeptical of that
  which we only personally experience.
• TVs power lies in disguising its true purpose in
  our lives
• People on TV become our reference groups.
• Most important message from TV? That you need
  TV.
• TV is saturated with what our lives are not sex,
  violence
• TV never gives us an opportunity to be bored like
  real life does.

6
Hypnosis Unlimited

• Hypnosis turning off thought
• How many of you noted the hypnotic quality of TV?

7
Coercing us into reality

• Our culture conditions us to need reassurance
  from the media to reinforce our actions and
  feelings, our self-perceptions.
• When we do this we both acknowledge and assume
  that our personal experiences are not qualified
  as reality any longer.
• We no longer do, we watch, and reality is someone
  elses creation. Not ours.
• Have you noticed its not until an event flashes
  across the TV that it becomes reality?

8
TV without Sound

• TV programs us not to notice the technical
  events.
• Not to notice the details, not to pay attention
• To watch TV is to become programmed.
• The TV is an object not a communicator.
• It is not communicating, but programming.
• We do not perceive/experience the TV as a device,
  which it is, but as a reality, which it is not.

9
The Nature of News Why No News is Good News

• Newscasters are no more real than characters on
  other entertainment shows.
• Only unusually tragic or triumphant is shown not
  the mundane (i.e. newsworthy), ordinary
  routines of our daily lives.
• The news has fewer technical eventsfor good
  reason.
• Fewer technical events makes the news show appear
  more realistic relative to other TV shows.
• It appears super-realistic compared to
  commercials
• In TV, technical events weave a narrative, in the
  news we witness the reduction of worldly news
  events into a narrative. Whose narrative?

10
So what?

• The problem not that TV presents us with
  entertaining subject matter, but that TV presents
  all subject matter as entertaining.
• Spills over into post-TV life.
• In any event or person we seek the entertainment
  in them, not the social significance, beauty,
  etc.
• In the absence of entertainment we usually
  entertain ourselves with plans for future
  entertainment.
• What do you do in class? Why do you get bored?
  Are you seeking entertainment while ignoring
  learning?
• While watching the TV while off how many of you
  thought about what TV you were missing or how
  boring it all was?
• As a result, do we devalue the ordinary? Real
  life?

11
TV and the Illusion of Knowing

• We love TV because it brings us a world in which
  television does not exist (Ehrenreich 1992).
  Have you ever noticed how little you see people
  watching TV on TV?
• Overall and cumulative effect of TV heighten our
  insensitivity to reality.
• Instead of actually leaving the Platonic cave and
  going up into the sunlit reality, we merely watch
  an image of ourselves doing thisand think that
  that is the same as doing it.

12
Watching TV with the TV off

• We have been trained to be bored if we dont have
  something entertaining us.
• TV creates the fantasy of intimacy. Youre
  there while always also being in your familiar
  surroundings.
• We identify with the persons in the show not our
  co-viewers.
• We each lock into what TV creates, not each
  other. We are an audience of one.
• We are, as a community and as a mass audience,
  individualized.
• We do not experience ourselves as a member of an
  audience, or as a member of a community. We have
  no sense that millions of us are simultaneously
  engaged ?
• Our relationship to the TV replaces our
  relationship with other spectators.