Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television, Part 4

The last installment: the inherent biases, more than meet the eye

This essay is Part 4 of a series devoted to Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television by Jerry Mander. Part 1, is here; Part 2, is here; Part 3, last week’s essay, is here. Any quotes are Mander’s unless otherwise indicated.

If you’ve stayed with me throughout these arguments, congratulations. It’s not a pretty picture Jerry Mander paints. His call to eliminate the technology finds a welcome home in my worldview, which is why we kicked ours to the curb when our children were growing up, and delayed our kids’ smartphone acquisitions until 9th grade.

There are other parents joining that crusade, as I mentioned in the very first essay, and there are kids themselves dumping their cell phones, which gives me hope.

There are other reasons for hope, too, though it’s been a weird ping-pong of hopeful circumstances I’ve encountered as I’ve written this series. This last essay will look at Mander’s final argument, and offer my own observations about the topic as a whole.

ARGUMENT 4: There are inherent biases in television.

It would seem that this is completely obvious. Of course it’s biased; the lens can only point at one thing at a time:

“A good way to think about television—in fact all the media—is as a kind of telescope in the sky, flying around, constantly looking. Then from its perch in the sky, it zooms down to a single spot on the planet…”

Mander says that there are clear reasons why the telescope selects one thing over another, which also feels obvious, but is something I didn’t fully appreciate until later in life. As a kid, I just consumed The Munsters and American Bandstand without a single thought about the programs that didn’t get chosen. As a young adult, I watched the news without considering: why this story? Why this angle? Why this expert?

I follow

Slowdown Farmstead

, a simply beautiful, heart-centered Substack, for its calm, wise observations about life from the perspective of a homesteading writer-mother named Tara who has removed her family from the frenzied mainstream digital world.

She said this: “It’s just this simple, folks, what you see is what you get. But it’s not true. Not at all. What we see is what they give us to see.”

Exactly. And historically, “they” have been those who can afford to dominate the airwaves.

However… this is where Mander’s book, written in 1977 and focused entirely on television, shows its age. Yes, everything I wrote about in Part 2 about half a quadrillion in advertising budgets over 68 years creating a stranglehold on messaging is true, and yes, six companies control all the mainstream media, and therefore broadcast news is just one leviathan with a thousand mouths, all speaking the same “truth.”

But something hopeful happened in 2005 that rocked the television world: YouTube posted its first video, a modern pioneering first in the form of a bland nothing of an 18 seconds. (In comparison, “Mr. Watson come here, I want you” seems monumental.)

Yet that bland nothing was monumental too, because it might have been the exact moment at which “they,” the airwaves dominators, stopped breathing. For the first time in human history, an individual — and not a particularly eloquent one — paid for no ticket, bypassed all of the entry gates, stepped out onto the stage of an arena as large as the world itself, and effectively burped into the mic.

No longer were there barriers to entry. Any boob with a computer and access to the internet could upload anything, and anyone, anywhere, could watch it. The middleman — or rather, middlemen, because there were so very many of them — was gone. YouTube took off. The gatekeepers lost control of the gates.

Now, no one needs a sound studio to broadcast news, which probably both disgusts and terrifies huge media conglomerates. OMG! Now the unwashed, un-pedigreed, unsanctioned masses can communicate their own versions of the truth directly to anyone who wants to listen.

Technology has spawned a billion town criers, and now the creators and purveyors of those technologies want to regulate it. We are told, incessantly, that “disinformation” is dangerous. They’re right. Remember the compendium I excerpted in the first essay, of “truth” that’s been handed down to us over the decades from various experts? Here it is again, in case you missed it:

“Mother’s milk is unsanitary… Mars has life on it. Technology will cure cancer… Nuclear power is safe. Nuclear power is not safe. Mars has no life on it. Food dyes are safe. Saccharin is safe. Technology causes cancer… A little X ray is okay… We will have an epidemic of swine flu. Mother’s milk is healthy… Red food dyes are not safe. Swine flu vaccine is safe… Saccharin is not safe. Swine flu vaccine causes paralysis… And so it goes.”

By the government’s own definition of “disinformation,” what they’ve allowed to be peddled to us — and what they’ve peddled themselves — is exactly that.

• “Disinformation is deliberately created to mislead, harm, or manipulate a person, social group, organization, or country.”

I’ll add a few more recents to the list: “Oxycodone is safe. Aspartame is safe. RoundUp is safe.” Are those statements not dangerous? Deliberately created to mislead and manipulate?

“There is truth and there are lies. Lies told for power and for profit. And each of us has a duty and responsibility, as citizens, as Americans, and especially as leaders – leaders who have pledged to honor our Constitution and protect our nation — to defend the truth and to defeat the lies.” — President Biden

But what do we do with lies that come straight from government — weapons of mass destruction, for example? That was a lie told for power AND profit… yet what were the ramifications of telling that lie?

I mean, other than deploying it for the appreciation of all those media journalists “in on the joke” at the black-tie Radio & Television Correspondents Association Dinner:

That video makes me queasy, every time I see it. I know of no better barometer of collusion among elite policymakers and their elite newsmaker buddies than the shared hilarity of that “joke.”

So I’m sorry, but disinformation’s true danger is not the information itself; it’s the people who have crowned themselves with the authority to decide, and now tell us what is or isn’t disinformation. Information is… just information. It’s not the self-coronated’s job, it’s our job to decide whom and what we believe.

But in the eyes of massive corporations and their advertisers, as well as governments, that kind of independent thought is dangerous. Unmediated reality? Self-sufficient individuals? Citizens who decide a) what we’re being told is a lie; or b) we don’t actually need all of the shit we’re told we need? That’s dangerous.

China was the first country to recognize the “danger” of all that free speech, and in 2007, banned YouTube temporarily, only to ban it permanently in 2009.

Other countries have followed suit, finding it useful to quash opinions that criticize rulers or government officials, religion, or religious leaders. Lately in the U.S., the threat of de-platforming and/or demonetization (advertising of course muscled its way into the game) has been the whip to keep unwelcome animals in their cages, preventing them from sullying the public square.

To be fair, there are some notion, images, and actions that don’t belong in a medium that can be accessed by anyone, including children. The topic of YouTube’s censorship is vast, as is the whole topic of “the public square,” but my point is this: other alternatives always arise. Now there are dozens of other video sites, all jostling to serve YouTube’s rejects. Russell Brand seems to have found a far freer environment for his commentary on Rumble; Joe Rogan jumped to Spotify.

Individuals all over the planet can video uprisings, demonstrations, unfair police practices, interactions with hostile pharmacists, you name it… and make that footage available to the anyone, anywhere.

The owners of those new platforms sometimes do cave to influence, enacting the same kinds of shadow banning and “content moderation” (aka censorship) that YouTube and Twitter and FaceBook have instituted on behalf of the alphabet agencies here in the U.S. Maybe Substack will cave, too. I hope not.

People in China still find a way to access YouTube, from certain limited locations or by using VPNs, even though it’s banned. They’re finding work-arounds, just like the 13-year-old hacker who breaks into the “unhackable” digital fortress designed by a team of cybersecurity experts.

My larger point is that these advancements in technology may actually have succeeded in breaking the decades-long spell that television was casting, and that’s why there seem to be greater and greater efforts to scare us back into submission. Silence! The Great and Powerful Oz has spoken! Pay no attention to those money-grubbing, disinforming “independent” journalists! Listen to Oz, who has nothing but your best interests at heart!

Is it too Pollyanna to believe that some plucky entrepreneur will always come up with another option? To believe that the nature of the human spirit is to seek freedom, and its infinite creativity will always triumph?

Perhaps.

Self-described foul-mouth preacher Nadia Bolz-Weber said, “It would be amazing if every tech company had an ethicist and a theologian as part of their board, as part of the conversation in terms of what they do or don’t do.”

She’s right. It would be amazing. I’m not holding my breath.

In 1977, television WAS the only game in town, and I doubt anyone could have ever imagined the wide-open free-for-all that exists now. Maybe we are similarly limited; maybe our bracketed minds can’t imagine what is possible beyond our current reality.

Or maybe what others argue — that technology is slowly enslaving us, as individuals and as societies — is true. Maybe, like Star Trek’s cybernetic hive called “The Borg,” it must be dismantled for humanity to return to its roots in freedom.

Here’s Mander’s take on that:

“…the medium is not reformable. Its problems are inherent in the technology itself and are so dangerous -- to personal health and sanity, to the environment, and to democratic processes -- that TV ought to be eliminated forever.”

Let’s return to Mander’s fourth argument to help decide.

There is more to the “bias argument” than I’ve described above. Mander believes that television’s medium is limited to allow some kinds of information, but not others. It’s selective by its very nature, and “what can be conveyed through television are the ways of thinking and the kinds of information that suit the people who are in control.”

Some of this is true still; some isn’t. The “fuzziness” of images is no longer an issue — and much of his argument rests on the idea that the more subtle facial expressions of friendship, love, peace, intimacy, or warmth can’t be conveyed. High-definition and 4K video have solved that.

His corollary, that nuance is being sacrificed to the larger and more visible elements of stories, is questionable. I would agree that much of programming is fast-paced and violent, broadly comedic, or titillating — but isn’t that what human beings lean toward naturally? Or have decades of television-watching “evolved” us into beings that can’t sit still to absorb a calm, slowly building scene? I know plenty of young people who find older movies and tv shows utterly boring for that very reason.

Mander claims:

“the bias toward the coarse, the bold, and the obvious finds its way into all other categories of television programming, including even those that deal with so-called objective events in the world. Public affairs programs are seriously biased away from coverage of highly detailed, complex, and subtle information, and so are news shows.”

Beyond my silly interjection that “The Coarse, the Bold, and the Obvious” would make an excellent title for a soap opera, Mander’s assertion still holds true.

Programs do gravitate toward visually identifiable opponents clashing violently, and simplified conflicts with easily siloed “good” versus “bad” guys. Government-sponsored public messages, politics, and those who report on politics adhere to the same playbook, seemingly borrowed from the World Wide Wrestling Federation. (Matt Taibbi writes convincingly about this concept in his book Hate, Inc.: Why Today’s Media Makes Us Despise One Another which draws from Eric Bischoff’s book Controversy Creates Cash.)

But here we go again. Is that inherent to the medium or to its watchers? Or has the evolution of the two braided together so tightly as to make it impossible to tease that question apart?

Somehow Joe Rogan is attracting millions to his podcast, which consists of two people just sitting and talking, sometimes for as long as five hours. It could be an anomaly, but I’d like to believe that it’s the human need for something more real, substantial, and thoughtful, that is tired of being manipulated by quick-cuts and a maniacal pace. I hope it’s a trend, not an exception.

Mander moves into the territory of the senses left behind by television’s limited technology — smell, touch, taste — as well as the extrasensory energies of life itself — the essences (and auras) of human beings, animals, and plants, and this is where he makes his strongest case, I think.

Because tv cannot hope to convey those senses and energies, the very foundation of life and living itself, certain subject matters are irredeemably lost in coverage. Some of this I discussed (as did Mander) in the first essay.

Here, he adds that portraying nature, the arts, or religions on screen actually diminishes the public’s concern for those things, because people think they’ve “experienced” them, when all they’ve really done is taken in flattened, incomplete representations of them.

The exception to that is death. Once photos of dead soldiers were published, suddenly public approval for the Vietnam War plummeted. He experienced the same phenomenon, working for the Sierra Club. Pictures of majestic, live, mysterious old growth redwood forests did nothing to mobilize support to save them; pictures of acres of cut redwood stumps — “a horrific sight, not unlike a battlefield” — did the opposite.

We can probably all agree that television’s unique suitability for selling aura-less, inanimate objects has birthed an unholy alliance between capitalism and television advertising. But it’s this last argument, television’s stripping away of spirit, that troubles me the most.

He bolsters his argument by quoting Walter Benjamin, a German Jewish philosopher, cultural critic, and essayist who argued that all mechanically reproduced artwork loses its aura, and therefore its grounding, its “meaning in time and place.”

It’s a statement that requires faith, of course, as there’s no officially accepted way to measure the aura of artwork, but in keeping with my newfound chutzpah, I embrace his statement because it feels like spiritual truth to me.

Mander paraphrases Benjamin:

“The disconnection from inherent meaning… leads to a similarly disconnected aesthetics in which all uses for images are equal. All meaning in art and also human acts becomes only what is invested into them… Everything, even war, is capable of becoming art…”

I have personal experience with the disconnection of art from its aura, its meaning. In grad school for Theatre & Performance Studies, I was aghast as the nihilism that passed for art. The meaning of a piece was “whatever you want it to mean!” and the most inscrutable work received the highest praise. Feeling as though I was being corralled into apathetic detachment, I almost left the program.

What I experienced was the fruit of the seeds planted by the Italian futurists, watered by the disillusionment of World War II. Filippo Marinetti, one of the founders of Italian Futurism, said this:

“War is beautiful because it initiates the dreamt-of metalization of the human body. War is beautiful because it enriches a flowering meadow with the fiery orchids of machine guns. War is beautiful because it combines the gunfire, the cannonades, the cease-fire, the scents, and the stench of putrefaction into a symphony.”

The Italian futurists valued invention, modernity, youth, speed, industry, and disruption. They believed that history was pointless, and that technology was a triumph of humanity over nature. In their eyes, fascism was to be championed, morality scorned, and innovation never, for any reason, hindered.

I’m not the first one to recognize the parallels between the futurists of yore and the ones leading the tech revolution charge today. Yuval Harari is perhaps one of the most outspoken — and I’d say, outright robotic himself — futurists. Here’s just one of his cozy quotes:

“What we are talking about now is like a second Industrial Revolution but the product this time will not be textiles or machines or vehicles or even weapons. The product this time will be humans, themselves.”

When we detach ourselves from the meaning inherent to art, human beings, and nature, we create a vacuum that futurism — and fascism — will happily fill. Both are centered on the notion that all experience is equal and self-alienation is progress.

Benjamin’s final thought is chilling:

“[Mankind’s] self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order.”

On Friday evening, I gathered with my sons and husband and watched A Man Called Otto from Netflix. Most of us had been feeling pretty ill during the week, so we were in the mood for some gentle entertainment.

It did not disappoint. It was earnest and heart-centric, and the story — though fairly predictable — made me cry. I went to bed thinking about the power of story, how it can move and shape us. I thought about the medium, the stories available through it, and the four arguments that Mander so eloquently lays out… and felt conflicted. I drifted off, hoping that by morning, I’d have some clear opinions to share.

I set out to determine whether Mander’s premise for the book was correct: if it were possible to eliminate television (and I know, that’s an enormous if), would we as a species be better off? Was his argumentation correct, and does it still apply in 2023?

I’ll admit to my own bias in writing this series, which probably comes as no surprise to any of my regular readers (thank you, peeps): I thought, of course it should be eliminated, but that’s probably impossible.

After writing all four of these essays, and a conversation with my 23-year-old daughter yesterday, I’m in a slightly different place. She told me that none of her peers can look up at the sun and determine which direction is east, west, north, or south. These are college students, mind you.

They think her ability to do that is crazy, incredible, otherworldly… and in a way, it is. She was raised in the real world, which IS an “other world.” She can drive a tractor, paint a room, and a bunch of other “crazy, incredible” things that her peers cannot.

I recently responded to a commenter, saying that video watching is the equivalent of an entirely liquid diet -- there's no chewing necessary, so your jaw muscles go slack. Television, along with all the technologies it has spawned, is making us go slack.

It is ruining our ability to converse, to write, to think, to navigate, to pay attention, to focus, to sleep. We don’t know how to be alone, to be present to others, or to overcome social discomfort. We’re forgetting how to be patient, to work hard, to not care what others think. We don’t remember important dates or anyone’s phone number.

Language is losing ground, along with the development of the brain that comes with attempting to put words to experiences. We don’t tell our own stories anymore; we imbibe others’. We are, quite literally, lost without a compass.

But all of that, every single loss, cannot compare to the evisceration of the human soul itself.

Taking all of that into consideration, plus Mander’s observations — the mediation between humanity and the real world, the colonization of our minds and even of the framework for our beliefs, the physical and mental detriment to human beings, and the inherent, limiting biases of the technology itself — I do think we’d be better off without it.

Just like we’d probably be better off without alcohol.

Because that is what television is. The most powerful, addictive substance ever discovered, attached like a toxic IV to our persons, and given to some children as young as two.

Toby Rogers

calls television “the poison pumped directly into nearly every home,” saying, “I think we massively underestimated the harms from TV. Alcohol and drugs kill people, families, and communities. TV kills entire societies. Social media is just TV that you make yourself for free in order to imprison and poison yourself.”

We think we can’t live without it now. But we did, and we could again. Some of us are already living without it, investing in the people and land around them. Some are weaning themselves more and more, feeling more sovereign daily.

Try this: imagine you are camping in a clearing of a forest. You’re seated near a campfire, and its warmth finds your bones. You tilt your head back, look up, breathe in the infinite spray of stars, and feel complete. You know, in that moment, that you are whole.

That’s the feeling you’re never supposed to feel, except maybe after purchasing something. That’s a feeling tech futurists minimize. You may be a whole human, but only with technological improvements can you possibly transcend beyond your puny corporeal limitations.

Mander said we now “equate technological evolution with evolution itself,” which was a mind-blower for me. I’d never considered: of course we do. That is what the creators of every new technology tell us is true.

But what if we were to equate spiritual evolution with evolution itself? What impossibilities could we make possible by turning our powerful attention inward, toward new realities, new dimensions? Could we regain our diminished senses, lost to the hours spent in mediated environments? Might we tap into forgotten powers and creative capacities, waiting for us to remember them?

Who knows? We’ll never find out unless and until we free our minds enough to try. Whether that means we step away, more and more, until we find the right balance, or some of us walk away entirely — the decision should be up to us.

I’ll leave you with some last thoughts from Mander, on this topic. In 2014, speaking to an audience in NYC, he said,

“Is this what we want? Did anyone ever ask us? Can we please have a vote on this?”

and he also said,

“Don’t accept the homily that once the genie is out of the bottle, you can’t put it back. All it takes is public discussion and empowerment.”

So let’s talk about it.

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As always, keep your light shining bright.

xox
M