Don't Kill Your Television

Hi,

Thanks for writing this--I couldn't agree more with it. I'm very much pro-TV. I think in the near future it won't be TV or internet but just different sized screens. I also find it interesting how the act of watching videos and DVDs have changed TV: it used to be this big central "family gather around" kind of EVENT, now, you can put in a DVD you've seen a million times to have it on "in the background". I think this could be a possible avenue to explore. In a (you guessed it) DVD outtake of Vanilla Sky, Cameron Crowe said that in part he envisioned "Vanilla Sky" being enjoyed in bits and pieces, while people are talking and hanging out...maybe someone would put it on at a party, etc. I like those ideas...like the kinda stuff they used to play on stacked televisions at clubs and loft parties. TV as a backdrop to life.

Andy Warhol was a big fan of TV. Nuff said! t

hx again!

-TRUE

Years ago, in Canada at least, a common interlude between shows and replacing commercials were calm little scenes of rivers, brooks, streams, and other natural areas. I had always thought they were shown in order to fill space where adverts had not been purchased or perhaps simply for enjoyment.

There was also these little segments called "Hinterland Who's Who" :

"Most Canadians who had television in the 1960s or 1970s will remember it — the haunting strains of a lone flute, the trademark theme of Hinterland Who’s Who. The series of 60-second vignettes was created to educate the public about this country’s native wildlife through excellent film footage, natural sounds, and relaxed narration."

Here's one for the Snowy Owl

Intersting how television is now in some sort of crisis with the writers strike. Currently, programming is on hold, shows are left unfinished and re-runs abound. Some writers are now looking to start web-based programming unbound by studio demands. Not really a novel idea, but leaving gaps in traditional television programming. How will those gaps be filled?

While traditional box-in-room television is prominent - online video is everywhere and there are many options and many are engaging (and creating) programs beyond the mundane. For example, Open Media Network a P2PTV application, which focuses on educational and public service programs and Miro an Internet television application developed by the Participatory Culture Foundation.

As handleld devices, for example phones with streaming video, become more widespread, people will be able to access all sorts of programming, anywhere, anytime, on demand.

The question and challenge is what will be demanded, or invited into the hearts and minds of many.

Mcluhan's "the medium is the message" has been expanded by Manuel Castells in his book The Rise of the Network Society as simply "the message is the message" - in other words, as media is ubiquitous, it is no longer the format or means of delivery that prevails, but in fact the message. The content is what makes the impact and this impact can be dulling or awakening. The message is growing out of the medium.Or, via personal devices and the like, it is now an era of the Immediate. No mediation, peer2peer, straight to the dome, one to one and one for all.

wanderlust

Quote: Ali Hossaini It would help if there were a convenient way to shunt video off the Net onto TVs.

Not sure how "convenient" this is, but creeping around the corner is: MythTV

MythTV is a Linux application which turns a computer with the necessary hardware into a digital video recorder, a digital multimedia home entertainment system, or Home Theater Personal Computer.

Isaac Richards explained his motivation for creating the device: “ I got tired of the rather low quality cable box that AT&T Broadband provides with their digital cable service. It's slow to change channels, ridden with ads, and the program guide is a joke. So, I figured it'd be fun to try and build a replacement. Yes, I could have just bought a TiVo, but I wanted to have more than just a PVR — I want a web browser built in, a mail client, maybe some games. Basically, I want the mythical convergence box that's been talked about for a few years now."

Psychiatrists and doctors will point out that hives can result from either allergies to food or stress. Television is indeed similar to a drug and one that can lull a consciousness from being alert and imaginative (and nervous) into the nepenthe of a dullard. The hives that Mr. Hossaini suffered vanished with his distractions - the television programs he watched equalling the effect of the sedative his doctor prescribed.

However, there are some distinctions to be made about a visual medium evolving "alongside consciousness", based on the brain's difficulty in distinguishing between orality and literacy. In this week's New Yorker, Caleb Crain in 'Twilight of the Books' writes about the history of literacy and how television may in fact be damaging our abilities to retain and process information. Proust elaborated on Ruskin's comparison of reading to a conversation with the "wise and noble" by noting that it went further than that. Reading, Proust said, was "to receive a communication with another way of thinking...while continuing to enjoy the intellectual power that one has in solitude and that conversation dissipates immediately."

Research suggests that abstract thinking is the result of being literate, while the oral mind-set "embed their thoughts in stories...Cliche´and stereotype are valued, as accumulations of wisdom and analysis is frowned upon, for putting those accumulations at risk". This reminds me of my years spent in the highly illiterate broadcast world, where TV is not only the object of work, but also the main topic of conversation; recountings of the previous evening's serial dramas or comedies almost the only culture around the water cooler. If you didn't watch television religiously, you couldn't become a member of the sect and you would have no idea about the storylines. If one ever tried to involve these 'orals' in discussions that might be investigative or analytical or even more dangerous, anything resembling high art or culture, the immediacy of being an outsider (and an outcast) would be obvious to all. "As the scholars Jack Goody and Ian Watt observed, it is only in a literate culture that the past's inconsistencies have to be accounted for, a process that encourages skepticism and forces history to diverge from myth."

Crain says that the antagonism between words and moving images begins early; "babies know on average 6-8 fewer words for every hour of baby DVDs and videos they watch daily.... and that conflict continues throughout a child's development." Perhaps this is why painting has persisted as an art form alongside literature. Our brains can't process both in a medium at once without making us stupid. Television and film can be wonderful, but apparently the combination of content and imagery isn't as interesting for our brains as words and visuals in their respective separate and distinct mediums. Imagination, Einstein said, is more important than knowledge. What studies have found is that visuals combined with words, is more than we can handle, at least in this phase of our evolution. Hossaini has an intriguing question to make, but at this point I wouldn't stake any claim on consciousness evolving alongside television. Instead, it might be suggested that the opiate of the medium has dulled our consciousnesses to the point of no return. Reading skills have worsened dramatically in the past few decades and we all know what's happening to book sales and newspapers. The Internet however, Crain notes, doesn't seem to 'be antagonistic to literacy'. But if streaming media overtakes it with networks like YouTube and Myth TV, these synergies could vanish.

The opportunity to watch opera, poetry, paintings and dance on television is akin to seeing animals in a zoo. It will never replace the excitement or thrill of interacting with a musician or poet directly in a 'live' performance or even replace standing before a painting in a museum. Obviously this is one reason some actors still prefer the energy of the stage to film. When I lived in rural and remote Nova Scotia more than 30 years ago, I was stunned by the (mostly oral and illiterate) community's involvement with music. Celebrations and livestock fairs were punctuated by amateur and excellent fiddlers, singing, bagpipe playing and dancing. Everyone got together and made music. They didn't watch much TV - this was still an agrarian culture with summers spent bailing hay and slaughtering sheep. I was struck by the way they kept a heritage vital through one form of art that everyone, young and old, was involved in. I question that the community (or music) would have existed if everyone had sat around and done little but be glued to a monitor.

I found Daniel Pinchbeck's notes on this blog interesting. The idea of transformation, especially in terms of 'conditioning into a consumerist belief system' is obviously what advertising has been doing since television's founding. Whether it's our only hope will be determined by the power elite and who owns the airwaves (legally we the viewers do). But as Ralph Nader claims, corporate control of money is now governing the world, and not governments.

His recommendation for holiday reading: The Bank Teller and Other Essays on the Politics of Meaning, by Peter Gabel (Acada Books.) Law Professor, Law Dean and college President, Peter Gabel gets down to fundamentals about the “politics of meaning.” This is not a muckraking exposé but rather a relentless push on readers to examine their isolation and alienation from one another, their neighborhood, workplace, and community without which a functioning democracy cannot evolve.

Finally, I would ask what concepts or innovation television has spawned except perhaps, the technology of its own being. Why the need for transcendental television when it so readily accomplishes that task?

TV may indeed be the only tool capable of changing the massmind. Of course, it won't be commercial TV as we know it. Commercial television isn't interested in anything other than maintaining the status quo, no matter how destructive. It is merely an audience delivery system, employed by the mindless greed machine. The fact that it actually changes the audience it sells to Burger King isn't a concern. And while there are individual minds resilient enough to resist the greed-based programming, the collective unconscious is undoubtedly affected by anything viewed by anyone. There is no way to measure what this does to us.

Watching a typical TV, still with a relatively small screen, reduces eye-movement, and induces alpha brainwaves, with the resultant, pleasurable (and healthy) relaxation response. As such, it fills the basic survival need of humans to meditate, and has been shown to be addictive. People used to stare at clouds, or campfires. But now... a flickering photon rectangle with a mostly crass agenda.

Fortunately, change is underway. Thanks to the internet granting access to virtually everybody, there are many more people already trying to harness the redemptive power of the moving-image-rectangle medium. I urge you all to check this out: http://peace.tv/

Of course, pure ambient TV would be great too. Ambient HD (we could produce hundreds of hours of content for next to nothing).

Just read a blog elsewhere about a mother (and multimedia visual and literary artist) who wants to start “MA TV”: Mothers Against Television. She is trying to drum up support for her new organization, and wants people to comment if we support the idea (of getting rid of television.)

I want to join MATV (as a concern mother), but seems to cite a prerequisite: “But first: Get Rid of Your TV.” Applaud the passion to start such a movement, might even philosophically agree, but there is no way to get rid of our fairly new huge television, purchased by my husband.

The MATV mom has some very good reasons for being against television:

“But my beef with TV is not only the proliferation of gun-violence, there, but the desensitization, documented lack of inspiration, creativity and attention span it causes in children, and the proliferation of violent behaviour of ANY kind that I believe it precipitates. Not to mention consumerism.”

Her arguments, in short, are not completely dissimilar to Mander's.

http://rickshawunschooling.blogspot.com/2008/02/matv-mothers-against-tv....