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Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television
Jerry Mander
Most Americans, whether on the political left, center or right, will
argue that technology is neutral, that any technology is merely a
benign instrument, a tool, and depending upon the hands into which
it falls, it may be used one way or another. There is nothing that
prevents a technology from being used well or badly; nothing
intrinsic in the technology itself or the circumstances of its
emergence which can predetermine its use, its control or its effects
upon individual human lives or the social and political forms around
us.
The argument goes that television is merely a window or a conduit
through which any perception, any argument or reality may pass. It
therefore has the potential to be enlightening to people who watch
it and is potentially useful to democratic processes. It will be the
central point of this book that these assumptions about television,
as about other technologies, are totally wrong.
If you once accept the principle of an army - a collection of
military technologies and people to run them - all gathered together
for the purpose of fighting, overpowering, killing and winning, then
it is obvious that the supervisors of armies will be the sort of
people who desire to fight, overpower, kill and win, and who are
also good at these assignments: generals. The fact of generals,
then, is predictable by the creation of armies. The kinds of
generals are also predetermined. Humanistic, loving, pacifistic
generals, though they may exist from time to time, are extremely
rare in armies. It is useless to advocate that we have more of them.
If you accept the existence of automobiles, you also accept the
existence of roads laid upon the landscape, oil to run the cars, and
huge institutions to find the oil, pump it and distribute it. In
addition you accept a sped-up style of life and the movement of
humans through the terrain at speeds that make it impossible to pay
attention to whatever is growing there. Humans who use cars sit in
fixed positions for long hours following a narrow strip of gray
pavement, with eyes fixed forward, engaged in the task of driving.
As long as they are driving, they are living within what we might
call "roadform". Slowly they evolve into car-people. McLuhan told us
that cars "extended the human feet, but he put it the wrong way.
Cars replaced human feet.
If you accept nuclear power plants, you also accept a
techno-scientific-industrial-military elite. Without these people in
charge, you could not have nuclear power. You and I getting together
with a few friends could not make use of nuclear power. We could not
build such a plant, nor could we make personal use of its output,
nor handle or store the radioactive waste products which remain
dangerous to life for thousands of years. The wastes, in turn,
determine that future societies will have to maintain a
technological capacity to deal with the problem, and the military
capability to protect the wastes. So the existence of the technology
determines many aspects of the society.
If you accept mass production, you accept that a small number of
people will supervise the daily existence of a much larger number of
people. You accept that human beings will spend long hours, every
day, engaged in repetitive work, while suppressing any desires for
experience or activity beyond this work. The workers' behaviour
becomes subject to the machine. With mass production, you also
accept that huge numbers of identical items will need to be
efficiently distributed to huge numbers of people and that
institutions such as advertising will arise to do this. One
technological process cannot exist without the other, creating
symbolic relationships among technologies themselves.
If you accept the existence of advertising, you accept a system
designed to persuade and to dominate minds by interfering in
people's thinking patterns. You also accept that the system will be
used by the sorts of people who like to influence people and are
good at it. No person who did not wish to dominate others would
choose to use advertising, or choosing it, succeed in it. So the
basic nature of advertising and all technologies created to serve it
will be consistent with this purpose, will encourage this behavior
in society, and will tend to push social evolution in this
direction.
In all of these instances, the basic form of the institution and the
technology determines its interaction with the world, the way it
will be used, the kind of people who use it, and to what ends. And
so it is with television. Far from being "neutral," television
itself predetermines who shall use it, how they will use it, what
effects it will have on individual lives, and, if it continues to be
widely used, what sorts of political forms will inevitably emerge.
It was only after a long while and many half-steps of change in
viewpoint that I finally faced the fact that television is not
reformable, that it must be gotten rid of totally if our society is
to return to something like sane and democratic functioning. So, to
argue that case, especially considering that it involves a
technology accepted as readily and utterly as electric light itself,
is not something that ought to be done rapidly or lightly. Nor can
such a case be confined to the technology itself, as if it existed
aside from a context.
The first argument is theoretical and environmental. It attempts to
set the framework by which we can understand television's place in
modern society. Yet, this argument is not about television itself.
In fact, television will be mentioned only occasionally. It is about
a process, already long underway, which has successfully redirected
and confined human experience and therefore knowledge and perceived
reality. We have all been moved into such a narrow and deprived
channel of experience that a dangerous instrument like television
can come along and seem useful, interesting, sane, and worthwhile at
the same time it further boxes people into a physical and mental
condition appropriate for the emergence of autocratic control.
The second argument concerns the emergence of the controllers. That
television would be used and expanded by the present powers-that-be
was inevitable, and should have been predictable at the outset. The
technology permits of no other controllers.
The third argument concerns the effects of television upon
individual human bodies and minds, effects which fit the purposes of
the people who control the medium.
The fourth argument demonstrates that television has no democratic
potential. The technology itself places absolute limits on what may
pass through it. The medium, in effect, chooses its own content from
a very narrow field of possibilities. The effect is to drastically
confine all human understanding within a rigid channel. What binds
the four arguments together is that they deal with aspects of
television that are not reformable.
What is revealed in the end is that there is ideology in the
technology itself. To speak of television as "neutral" and therefore
subject to change is as absurd as speaking of the reform of a
technology such as guns.
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From the book "Questioning Technology", edited by John Zerzan and
Alice Carnes.
New Society Publishers, Philadelphia PA. ISBN: 0-86571-205-0.
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