Ten Specific Reasons Why Television and other Forms of Visual Media are making us Nauseatingly Stupid
(And I group the internet with television as most of the sorry populace only uses their computers to look at videos)
By
David Gottfried
Many people say, without explanation, that television and other forms of image media make us stupid. I want to go further. I want to show you exactly how and why television makes you stupid. I want to teach you to hate CBS, NBC and ABC.
1) HASTY AND INVALID EXTRAPOLATOIN: On the evening news in 2003, Americans were treated to film footage of 100 people in Baghdad toppling a statue of Sadaam. Of course, 100 people on your TV screen are not necessarily representative of the millions of people in Iraq. But the TV viewers, swept away with mind-numbing visuals, do not think of this. A print article, which stated that 100 people destroyed a statue of Sadaam, would generate a yawn.
A reader would be more apt to think – because while we are reading, our minds are less apt to slumber – and realize that 100 people aren’t necessarily representative of much of anything. The American people, their intellects stunted by infantile, picture-book news, quickly extrapolated from one crowd to all the millions of Iraqis and concluded, to our great peril, that the Iraqis loved us.
2. WE READ FASTER THAN A NARRATOR CAN SPEAK: The rate at which a narrator speaks is always slower than the rate at which we can read – unless of course one is barely literate. Ergo, more ideas, per minute, will always be relayed by reading.
3. A pic is not worth a thousand words. It is an amalgam of half-truths, distortions and extraneous and irrelevant nonsense which will tend to dissuade us from an examination of the truth. People assume that what they see has to be true, and so they view visuals with less skepticism than ideas. But pictures lie in more ways they can imagine.
4. During the Vietnam War, the United States government was desperate to demonstrate that South Vietnamese soldiers were truly assisting us in fighting the communists. At times the pentagon gave the networks film footage of South Vietnamese soldiers running around in rugged, rural terrain, guns firing, supposedly in battle. However, the film footage was make-believe as the South Vietnamese soldiers were running around in Georgia. (The supposedly “liberal” networks never mentioned that the film footage had come from the Pentagon when they aired it to millions of gullible Americans.)
5. Some radio and television “news” providers turned up the treble when activists from the left were broadcast. The accentuation of the treble made them seem juvenile, anxious, neurotic and a bit effeminate. (In the title of this essay, I let off the barons of the audio media too soon.)
6. The electronic media makes for a frenzied, hysterical body politic that knows not what it is doing. At the end of 1992 and the beginning of 1993, the evening television news was splattered with pictures of starving people in Somalia. We intervened. Shortly thereafter, we saw pictures of marines tortured in Somalia. Then we ran away. We react. We never think.
7. The discussion of public policy is always undermined by the picture media. Notice that whenever an announcer, on a television news show, speaks about the health care debate in Washington, the camera focuses on pictures of pills going into vials, and nurses wielding syringes, and old people in wheel chairs. None of these pictures tell us anything about the virtues of the public option or any other issues under discussion. But they will take our attention away from concentrating on what the narrator has said. The narrator will speak for perhaps a mere two minutes. But the narrator has not only mentioned next to nothing about the substantive issues because his time is so severely limited; his brief span of time is further undermined by the deflection of so much energy toward our wasteful viewing of superfluous pseudo medical scenes of pills going into bottles.
8. When I was involved in AIDS activism, a guy from television stressed that we had to concentrate on flooding the airwaves with pictures of bleeding AIDS patients and protesters who were bleeding because the police had assaulted them. This does a great job of dramatizing the matter. The fellow aids activist said, “We just need pics of suffering.” But the pics of suffering do not tell us what public policies would best combat that suffering, and why heterosexuals, who did not abuse drugs, would also benefit from aids research. (At the beginning of the epidemic, there were virtually no antiviral drugs in existence. By discovering drugs to fight the AIDS virus, we would learn how to fight viruses. Also, because viral infection is often implicated in cancer, by learning about AIDS we would garner knowledge that could amplify our battle against neoplasms.)
9. The image media makes it harder for dissenters to challenge the status quo and proffer new ideas. If one is in a political organization, and one wants attention on the evening news, one will have to be dramatic, or a bit absurd, or fuming with apocalyptical rage. Very simply, television wants to give us a show, to boost ratings, and the last thing they want is an objective, dispassionate discussion of the issues.
In the late 1960’s the media made and then destroyed the new left. It made the new left by letting the left blaze across the airwaves with untrammeled id -- in the form of the black panthers, the yippies, and other radical groups, the left burst forth with exuberance. To get on the airwaves, the left had to do absurd things. (For example, at the close of 1967, at a protest against the Vietnam War at the Pentagon, Allen Ginsburg said that he would levitate the Pentagon with his Buddhist incantations. The pentagon stayed put.) At first, the antics of the left got it much needed attention. But the silly stupid coverage eventually did us in. Eventually, the left was dismissed and ridiculed, and Richard Nixon was narrowly elected in 1968, and then won re-election in a landslide in 1972, and the left, which once was poised to change America, had become an impotent laughing-stock.
Broader Philosophical Implications:
10. The Western world had always believed in the primacy of words and ideas.
However, the rise of the picture news defiled and degraded whatever propensity we may have once had for insightful thought. Both of the foundations of Western thought – Jewish thought and Greek thought – believed in the primacy of words and ideas.
The Hebraic wing of the Western World, as codified in The Old Testament, lauds words and ideation: In the opening passages of Genesis, we read, “And G-d said let there be light.” By announcing that light will ensue, light does ensue. The idea of light precedes the phenomenon of light.
Likewise, Plato said that there was something called “Nous,” a sort of heaven of ideas, and that before things came into existence on earth, they were formulated in that heaven of ideas.
However, the rise of images over print media signals the death of our culture of words and ideas.
In our new unbrave world, we have silly scampering idiots who purport to be making a provocative point by dying their hair purple. Instead of having interesting things to say, people try to look “interesting” and become inane spectacles.
They think they are radical. These are of course the sort of Radicals that makes Goldmann Sachs tickled pink. They much prefer to see the spoiled and cosseted students of NYU spend hundreds of dollars on metal piercings – I don’t know what the fad is now; they change so quickly – than to see them march a mere mile South, to Wall Street, stop the traffic, raise supposedly anachronistic red flags high, and call for the heads of the titans of international fascist capitalism.