Now Age Minute - 8.22.11
Meet The Flintstones
Just when you thought it was safe to dive into another season of Jersey Shore, a report comes out of Australia, claiming that watching television can actually take years off your life (and you thought only your brain was in jeopardy). From an article in the Telegraph,
Anyone who spends six hours a day in front of the box is at risk of dying five years sooner than those who enjoy more active pastimes, it is claimed.
Researchers say that watching too much TV is as dangerous as smoking or being overweight, and that the "ubiquitous sedentary behavior" should be seen as a "public health problem".
Experts from the University of Queensland, Australia, write: "TV viewing time may have adverse health consequences that rival those of lack of physical activity, obesity and smoking; every single hour of TV viewed may shorten life by as much as 22 minutes.
My bipolar relationship with television goes back to my youth. Midway through first grade my parents transferred me from the local public school to the Waldorf school nearby. My new teacher had one, seemingly bizarre, request for my parents: no TV for me. Keep in mind that this was the 60s. In other words, the request fell upon deaf ears, as we're talking about a time when television was solidifying its grip upon American society. And our household was not about to buck that trend. And for me, pretty much nothing was going to come between me and the Flintstones.
It wasn't until my early twenties, at a book fair at the Waldorf school, I happened upon a book that grabbed me before I grabbed it. Titled, "Four Arguments For The Elimination Of Television", by Jerry Mander, it was a book that changed my views towards, and the way I watched, television forever.
While the aforementioned Australian study of television viewers focused on lifestyle habits that tend to accompany TV watching, Mander's book offers a deeper and more thoughtful critique of television as a technology, how human beings interact with the technology, and the resulting effect on the viewer(s).
While I'm not going to distill the entirety of Mander's arguments in this column, I'll highlight a few points in particular that underscore my argument. First, is his assertion, that when one watches television they go into a hypnotic trance, with the conscious mind taking a nap as the medium's messages pass directly into the subconscious mind of the viewer. That's why television advertising is so effective. Marketers know they're molding the minds of the viewing masses, who will shop as they're told. The same hold true for politics, and so on.
Next, what Mander refers to as, "the mediation of experience", is for me the most haunting of the arguments he presents. It takes little arm twisting to win that argument, as, when you're watching television, that's the only experience you're having. Sure, you may be watching something "educational" on the Discovery Channel, but when you watch that nature program, you're not in nature. If you're unsure, the next time you're tranced into a captivating program about, say, hog farming, ask yourself, what does it smell like? Unless you're frying bacon at the same time, probably not like pigs. If life is about having actual experiences, television robs you of your life.
When I ponder the current state of the flatlined, homogenized, commodified American mind, I wonder how we got here. After all, this is not the mind that propelled our Founders, or what's been called the "Greatest Generation". No, something's gone terribly wrong. In his book, "The Assault On Reason", Al Gore writes,
As the dominance of television has grown, extremely important elements of American democracy have begun to be pushed to the sidelines. But the most serious loss by far has been the playing field itself. The "marketplace of ideas" so beloved and so carefully protected by our Founders was a space in which "truths", in John Stuart Mill's words, could be discovered and refined through "the fullest and freest comparison of opposite opinions". The print-based public sphere that had emerged from the books, pamphlets, and essays of the Enlightenment has, in the blinking eyes of a single generation, come to seem as remote as the horse and buggy.
Yes, when we're watching TV, we're not reading. We're not sharpening our imagination and ability to reason, we're flattening it. As technology hurtles us further and further away from our natural world, our intelligence, and our humanity, what we're left with is an obscene world of 24/7 celebrity worship. Even the Huffington Post is in the game. Just scan down the mind-melting right side of their main page. Boobs and butts of the rich and famous.
Progress in technology does not equal progress in human intelligence. In fact, it's probably caused us to regress. And no technology has driven that regression more than television. While television is not the lone responsible technology for dumbing of America, it's the lead ship (along with processed foods and pharmaceuticals) on our collective voyage towards societal illiteracy.
To me, the greatest crisis facing us now is a lack of discernment (to understand what's obscure). Discernment is sharpened by both reading and observation of actual experience. Television effectively replaces those activities, and, thereby, obliterates discernment. And it does so on a mass scale, turning the nuanced into the simple; individuals into sheep. Yes, television is robbing humanity of its humanness.
We're at a fork in our American journey, equal in magnitude to the Civil War. The road we take will determine the nature of our democracy. One thing, however, is clear. Trusting television to guide us will ensure that the technology that brought us the Flintstones will ultimately turn us into them.
-Craig Gordon
"I'm an apeman, I'm an ape-ape-man, I'm an apeman"
-Ray Davies
