If you didn't read my previous post about "Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television," you must read that first to get some context.
One of many, many things about Jerry Mander's book that I found fascinating was a thought experiment he asks readers to take in order to prove that TV images are more powerful than those from the reader's actual experience. I'll give a shortened version of it here.
Bring each of these to mind:
* China
* Africa
* Borneo
* ancient Rome
* a Russian village
* Ben Franklin
* the Old West
* the FBI
* the Old South
* an American farm family
* the Crusades
* the war room at the Pentagon
* a preoperation conference of doctors
* dope smugglers
* the landing of the Pilgrims
* a Stone Age tribe
"Were you able to come up with images for any or all of them? It is extremely unlikely that you have experienced more than two or three of them personally. (Well, I count four.) Obviously the images wer either out of your own imagination or else they were from the media."
"Now let's go a step further.
"Please bring to mind a baseball game or football game. Have you got one? Hold it for a moment.
"If you are like most Americans, you have actually been to a game. You have seen one directly and probably participated in one personally. You have probably also watched at least one of them on television. Here's the question: Which one did you bring to mind? The television version or the one you experienced directly?"
(As I have only been to a half dozen or so games and have never seen a game on TV except in passing through the room in which one was being viewed, I am probably an exception to this confusion. I actually can tell the real games from the TV ones. But I bet this is not the case with most Americans.)
Mander then speaks about an experience that resonates more strongly with me. He asks if you have ever read a book before you've seen the movie. Of course. You make images in your mind as you're reading the book of the characters and the setting. But once you see the movie, you cannot recall the images you created. The movie images have usurped your own.
Mander writes, "Once images are inside your head, the mind doesn't really distinguish between the image that was gathered directly and the one that derived from television." YIKES!
"We are left with a very bizarre phenomenon. Television is capbable of dominating personally derived imagery--from books or imagination--and it is also capable, at least some of the time, of causing confusion as to what is real experience and what is television experience. The mind is very democratic about its image banks, all are equally available for our recall and use. And so when we call on our images for whatever purposes we may have for them, we are as likely to produce an implanted image as one which was originally our own.
"The root of this unfortunate problem lies with the fact that until very recently, human beings had no need to make distinctions between artificial images of distant events and life directly lived."
Mander makes quick business of the person who thinks she is too sophisticated or too savvy or too smart to be fooled by TV, the person who says, "I know the difference between reality and TV." Mander says that we're not discussing facts here, we're talking about images. Your mind may be able to tell fact from fiction, but it treats all images the same.
Monday, November 15, 2010
Revolutionary Book--And it's 33 Years Old!
I finally got around to reading a book that has been sitting on my shelf for years: Jerry Mander's "Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television." It discusses radical ideas that you've never heard before because, well, they couldn't be discussed on TV.
Written by a former ad exec who started the first ad firm to cater to nonprofits, Mander wrote a formidable tome, pulbished in 1977. It is sweeping, going far beyond TV, into the basic building blocks of our modern society. For example, Mander writes of how the modern person doubts her experience, her intuition, her feelings. She looks to "experts" to tell her such things as "Mother's milk is good for babies" or "Stay healthy by eating fresh fruits and vegetables." These are things that our experience should tell us, but we need experts to give us cues.
He also writes of the modern world as a sensory-deprived environment. Instead of walking through forests that are teeming with diversity in terms of color, light, shape, form, speed, and size, we whiz by at high speeds down uniform-looking freeways and spend our days under artificial light in white-walled offices that are generally devoid of variations in sound and highly routine.
All of this fits in well with TV, which is also a sensory-deprivation experience. TV must be viewed in a dark or darkened room, otherwise it can't be seen. It is only concerned with the auditory and the visual, but both of these are distorted from everyday life. For example, on TV we can hear the whispered conversation of a couple standing on a distant hill. Time and space are also distorted, as the events we're seeing are not occurring now or here, but somewhere else at some other time.
The book deals with so many facets of the TV experience. It's impossible to do justice to this book. Mander explains why hyperactivity is promoted by TV-watching. Children--and adults--see exciting, threatening, scary things on TV and their bodies are compelled to act, but no action is possible. (We can't hit the bad guy or run away from the rapist or put a stake through the vampire's heart.) The watcher is forever in a state of wanting to act but being unable to do anything. This frustrated action is at the ground of hyperactivity.
Mander spends a great deal of time discussing the plight of indigenous people as portrayed on TV. Whereas the people themselves want to convey a feeling for their land and their way of life and their spiritual awareness of their environment, that is not possible to convey on TV. That takes time, a lot of time, and it takes direct experience. Land-use issues are reduced to legal battles and justice and discrimination, when in fact, the indigenous people see it in much more intimate, creative, encompassing, interconnected terms.
The same is true of environmental/nature programs. Mander finally came to see, with his nonprofit ad clients, that they should avoid TV. The more they attempted to show the beauty and the wonder of the places they were attempting to save from destruction, the more the public felt these lands were expendable. Unless you have walked in a redwood forest and felt the stillness and the wonder down to your very bones, you do not understand what a redwood forest is. If you have just seen redwoods on a tiny TV screen, without the smells, sounds, and sensuality of a forest, you are most likely to concur with Ronald Reagan, who said, "If you've seen one redwood, you've seen them all." Given a TV experience of redwoods, it's much easier to side with economic development and jobs.
What Mander discovered is that death is more effective on TV than life. So instead of showing footage of gorgeous redwoods, he began producing commercials of stump forests. I remember these commercials so clearly. They were shocking. And I vividly recall when I was camping at Kings Canyon National Park and took a bunch of dirt roads to see where I'd end up. I ended up in a stump forest. It was horrifying to be driving through such beauty and splendor and then to turn a corner and see the slaughter of hundreds upon hundreds of redwoods. It was as if nature itself had been killed.
Mander discusses the mediated environment--how people rely on TV for their experiences, their feeling fixes, their guidelines on how to act with other people. And then how eventually we turn into the people on TV.
The bottom line is YOU MUST READ THIS BOOK. If you are a teacher, I implore you to incorporate it into your class. You could easily spend an entire semester discussing it. It would be perfect for a college class in journalism, communication, psychology, pop culture, American studies, political science, philosophy, and of course, advertising.
This book is just too good not to read it. You will continually sigh "Oh, wow" and pull your friend or family member aside and read something aloud to him or her.
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