How Destructive Is Television?

Even if the content of television was fairly innocent, it would still have a damaging effect on our patterns of thought if watched more than a very moderate amount. The very nature of television and movies is that it is necessary to pack a story, eventful and complex enough to provide entertainment, into a very limited amount of time. This inevitably distorts reality and most viewers cannot prevent it from inevitably distorting their patterns of thought.

Real people are extremely diverse and complex. In order to squeeze a story into the required time frame, it becomes necessary to resort to gross over-simplification and stereotyping. A television program or movie rarely has the time to portray a character in all of their natural complexity like books do without this over-simplification. These patterns will inevitably affect viewers' thought patterns over time and they will carry this thinking out into the real world. The result will be the lumping of people together and pre-conceived notions of what a person will be like. Written stories, in contrast, not only can develop a character fully but exercise the reader's imagination in doing so.

The artificial compression of time that is unavoidable in television affects the conception of time in the entire society when we watch as much television as we do. We have a very short concept of time as a whole. How did we get ourselves into this mess of being dependent on the oil in the Middle East to continue our way of life and setting the earth's climate on a collision course with disaster at the same time? By very short-term thinking, thats how. The Y2K crisis at the turn of the millenium turned out to be pretty much a non-crisis, but it was another clear example of large scale short-term thinking.

In order to pack a story into a very brief time span, television and movies must make heavy use of non-verbal communication and cues. I believe that this greatly distorts communication between human beings, particularly between those from different countries or groups and between those who watch a lot of television and those who don't. Excessive reliance on non-verbal cues in communication definitely promotes misunderstandings. Television takes every little thing about a person; the way they walk, their expressions, gestures and demeanor and loads it all with meaning.

In reality, such things may mean nothing. But someone whose thought patterns are affected by television will read meaning into perceived non-verbal gestures anyway. This certainly invites misunderstandings of all description. On a television studio set, everything in the scene has some meaning and makes some contribution to the story. Every little thing "means" something, which in the real world may mean nothing. Television producers have, in effect, created a non-verbal supplement to the standard spoken and written language.

Misunderstandings are inevitable when some people "speak" this television non-verbal language while others don't. This is especially true with persons of different cultural background. I, for example, have not watched an ordinary television show in years and the non-verbal elements of communication mean relatively little to me. I find the loading of everything with meaning as is done on television to be ridiculous in the real world.

Romance has always been a prominent feature of entertainment in television and movies. But what does this do to distort life in the real world? Suppose a guy smiles at a girl, what does it mean? Maybe it means nothing but it the distorted non-verbal language of the screen, he must be trying to hook up with her. Suppose a guy goes to a place of business and there is a girl that works there. Obviously he must be going there because he wants to go out with her. Why, because that's the way it works in the movies, that's why.

Television fills up our lives with entertainment. That inevitably causes us to feel that we have a kind of right to be entertained. What would normally be the private lives of people are considered to be public entertainment on television. This has created a tabloid culture where many people feel that they have the right to be entertained by the lives of others. What should be nobody's business but their own is considered as legitimate entertainment.

I believe that television has distorted society even more than we have thought. A person might say or write something about some topic and there may be those who think that there is a hidden sexual innuendo to it because that is the way it works on television or in the movies.

Television bombards viewers with ads and entertainment. This gives the impression that quiet reflection or reading is somehow abnormal because it does not fit into the television studio set, when the reality is that it is the world of television that is distorted. Spending one's life being bombarded with ads gives the impression that "I am the center of the universe, everyone wants my attention, everything revolves around me".

What is the problem with our trying to be an example to the world of what a society should be? Paris Hilton is the problem, or at least one of the symptoms of the problem. The obsession with her antics is significant not for what it indicates about her but for what it indicates about us. While she was in court for traffic issues, news helicopters filled the sky overhead. Not from paparazzi, but from "real" news organizations. Before her, there was the similar national (and international) obsession with the twisted, tragic life of the late Anne Nicole Smith.

Given obsessions such as these, why on earth would anyone across the world want to use our society as an model? Unless it is a model of what they do not want to be like. It is the public in general who create lives such as these with the constant obsession with the private lives of others for entertainment.

The main reason that we are so hated across the world is what people see of us on television. If they got to know many of the average people, most people might like us. Instead, there are many thousands of people who would sacrifice their own lives to kill some of us. They do not embrace what our society has to offer, they vociferously fight against it.

TELEVISION AND GUN MASSACRES

I had no sooner completed the posting above, than the horrible shootings occurred at Virginia Tech University. I maintain that it is television that is the foundation of the wave of such shootings in recent decades. Here is my reasoning.

These horrific and seemingly senseless massacres began on a large scale in the Sixties with the Charles Whitman sniper shootings at a university in Texas. Part of the inspiration for this may have been the assassination of John F. Kennedy a few years prior, also in Texas.

What changed about the world to produce such mindless horror? Guns are a focal point of the problem but rural American boys have grown up with guns for more than two hundred years so guns alone cannot be considered as the reason. Likewise, there has been poverty, great income disparities and, crime in America since the beginning. The wild west was legendary for it's bad guys and shoot-outs, at least until the frontier was declared closed in 1890. But even then, massacres of completely innocent people because the killer was mad at the world, such as happened at Virginia Tech, were virtually unknown.

Another period that was legendary for it's crime was the 1930s. Al Capone, Bonnie and Clyde, Ma Barker and, Machine Gun Kelly have become the figures of a twisted kind of folklore. But even here, the goal of such figures was simply money, usually obtained by bank robbery. As a general rule, as long as bank employees cooperated and made no effort to resist a robbery, no one necessarily got hurt.

But in the Fifties, another factor emerged. America was building it's postwar suburban prosperity and television became a feature of most homes. Westerns and cops-and-robbers shows involving an abundance of guns were a staple on television from it's inception. The generation that reached adulthood in the Sixties was the first to have grown up with television.

This is the time that the massacres began to be a frequent news story, as well as a general increase in crime as a whole. The thing that was so different was the senselessness. This was not the bad guys of the west in a shootout over gold. It was not the bank robbers of the Thirties after cash. It was twisted individuals, many from prosperous homes, who were mad at the world and were seeking a glorious death in their own distorted minds and were striking back at society and bringing thirty or so people along with them at the same time. How can anyone say that television is not the driving force behind this?

TELEVISION DISTORTS REALITY

A major destructive effect of television is simply how it distorts viewer's perceptions of the way things work in the real world. We read stories of people doing things that they see on television, such as jumping out of one moving pickup truck into another, and getting killed or seriously injured while doing it. But examples like that are only the most obvious ones. What about warfare and the way that television shapes the public perception of it?

The majority of the public, aside from those that do a significant amount of reading, get their idea of how warfare operates mainly from what they see on television. It is true that war movies can serve as a military recruiting tool. The trouble begins with the short concept of time promoted by television and movies. Television became a staple of homes in advanced countries in the decade following the end of the Second World War. A flood of movies and programs taking place in that war was a part of television from the beginning. The first TV program that I recall watching was "The Rat Patrol".

World War Two seemed to be made for the television that would become widespread in the following decade. When two conventional military forces face off, the war tends to consist of a series of battles. The two forces will clash followed by a period of resupply and reorganization followed by another battle with the side that got the worse of the previous battle tending to retreat in order to regroup and the other side trying to press it's advantage.

The battles in the Pacific Theater of the war, with two military forces together on a small island, would naturally be intense but relatively short. The battles in Europe, where the armies had room to maneuver, would be a little less intense but the ground war had more of a continuous nature to it than the sporadic island hopping in the Pacific. Those battles, whether in the Pacific or in Europe, fit perfectly into a two or three hour movie. In addition, the large-scale amphibious landings of the Second World War could be readily reenacted with all the required drama and adrenaline.

The generation that reached adulthood in the Sixties was the first to have grown up with television. That is where the trouble began. The mid-Sixties brought the Vietnam War. It was about as different from the Second World War as night is from day. It was largely a guerilla war with the VC, meaning Vietnamese Communists or Viet Cong, supporting their allies in Communist North Vietnam against South Vietnam and it's ally, the United States.

In early 1968, the Communists launched what is known as the Tet Offensive. Targets across South Vietnam were suddenly attacked in a vast offensive operation. The American public perceived the fact that even though U.S. forces had been in the country for more than three years, the enemy was capable of striking cities and military bases all across South Vietnam at will, as well as massacring thousands of civilians in the City of Hue. So, the war effort must be unsuccessful and Americans were essentially dying there for nothing.

The facts were completely different. For the Communists, the Tet Offensive was not a success at all. They were hoping that the operation would promote a large-scale people's uprising in South Vietnam, which did not happen. Most attacks on urban areas were repulsed in a short time, fighting continued only in Saigon and Hue for longer. The attempt to overrun Khe Sanh, the large U.S. base in the northern part of the country was not successful. Most importantly, the VC suffered heavy losses that put it out of action as a major combat force.

Nevertheless America was, by this time, a nation steeped in World War Two movies. This is what defined the public conception of what warfare was and how it worked. The people wondered what had been accomplished in the previous years of involvement in Vietnam if the enemy was capable of launching massive strikes all over South Vietnam anytime they felt inclined to do so.

A drawn-out insurgency war without the classic battles and amphibious landings in the movies just did not get any sympathy. In those World War Two movies, there was no doubt who was the good guys and who was the bad guys. There was no doubt about the goals of the war, to get the front line to the enemy's capital city and have him sign the armistice on the dotted line. It was all as simple as a football game.

In contrast, everything about this war was so murky. Was the thoroughly corrupt government of our allies really the "good guys"? Why did the war drag on year after year with no way to really know if we were making progress? There had been no Pearl Harbor style attack on America, why was this war even necessary? Events were just not unfolding like they do in the movies.

Warfare is only one way that television distorts the way viewers perceive things as working in the real world. Another is crime. I don't mean the promotion of crime by the portrayal of it on television, that is already obvious. Television also has a great effect on the operation of the judicial system.

It was recently in the news that more than two hundred people in America have been freed by DNA evidence, many after spending more than twenty years in prison. Clearly, the judicial system has very serious faults. I believe that a major part of the problem is that when the average citizen reports for jury duty, most of what they "know" about crime and courtrooms is what they have seen on television.