How Audio-visual Media Distorts Truth because Viewers can’t Focus on Sound and Images Simultaneously
How Audio-visual Media Distorts Truth because Viewers can’t Focus on Sound and Images Simultaneously
By
David Gottfried
This is an addendum to an earlier post on substack which explained how the electronic media helps make people compliant, docile dunces fooled by idiot boxes, whether they be Archie Bunker’s TV set or the sleek, ultra-speedy computer of a speed-freak fashion critic.
When we view audio visual media, which I am defining as media which gives you pictures to look at and sounds to listen to, your concentration is impaired because part of you is looking at the picture and part of you is listening to the music. Because your attention is dissipated and diverted, you are more vulnerable to the sleights of hand, omissions, and logical fallacies employed by the advertiser, whether it be a corporation selling junk, or a politician selling a junkie political program.
For example, whenever I hear newscasters discuss health care policy, I always see pictures of pills going into pill vials in an assembly line, or some other such nonsense. When I have watched people watching such clips, their eyes have seemed to glaze over, they seemed to approach sleep and the general impression was that of a semi hypnotic state.
As they are nodding off to edifying film footage of pills going into vials -- like hypnosis subjects nodding off before a pendulum swung before their eyes -- the news announcers feed the corporate bullshit. With regard to pharmaceuticals, they most commonly tell us that regulating drug prices will cut into profits and reduce expenditures for research. Of course, they never mention (you have to read the back pages of the NY Times to get this) that many drugs, sold by corporations, were actually invented by scientists employed by Uncle Sam and that the government is, arguably, the rightful owner of the drugs. The TV viewer believes the brainwashing just as certainly as the patient who has undergone hypnosis.
Sometimes, the sound and vision come together synergistically to make a viewer such a passive pushover that all his autonomy and critical intellect is dead and gone. For example, I remember, in 1971, there was a commercial for Ivory Soap that really wowed the couch potatoes. The sorry viewers gravitated to Ivory Soap as if it consisted of the congealed secretions of saints and saviors.
The announcer told us, in a voice as earnest as that of the blondest, sweetest actress in Hollywood, that Ivory Soap was 99 and 44 one-hundredths percent pure. The charming voice was augmented with footage of the prettiest hands handling ivory with all the reverence that a priest might have for the communion wafer.
Most viewers never figured-out why the commercial was such a con job. It said that ivory was almost 100 percent pure, but pure what. Was it pure horseshit? The viewers, floating away on imbecile images of a woman’s pretty hands, had all the analytic power of vegetables in the back wards of mental hospitals.
The preceding should be considered a supplement to the following piece, which I previously posted in substack, which delineated 10 ways in which the electronic media rotted cognition and creativity.