Hi Ali-

Your article reminded me of a television channel idea I'd heard about some time ago that was having trouble getting picked up. The premise was, it would feature only videos of puppies, with no human interaction, accompanied by soothing music. It would be something that families could switch on in the background while they visited -- non-intrusive and comforting -- or you could just relax to it after a hectic day. I think it exemplifies the concept you are describing here of radically shifting how the medium is used.

I've found a website for it here: The Puppy Channel.

"The Puppy Channel® is the first of CHANNEMALS(SM), a family of cable/satellite/Internet networks in development. Television programming will consist of video of "puppies being puppies" accompanied by relaxing instrumental music and no talk, showing virtually no people. It will provide a "quiet time" alternative for families. On the Internet, the programming will offer far more variety."

-st

AS Allen Ginsberg called it, and I am one, I grew up as a child in the early days of television.I was baby sitted by the tube of light glittering in the day and shimmering in the night.I can more or less see how my whole mindset formed by the shows and movies that became my world.In the early days of TV I prolly was shunted back and forth between becoming a cannon fodder unit or a beatnik.But I think in my case Maynard G. Crebs won out.One of the shows that really stuck in my child mind was a comedy show, that had these guys in gorilla costumes robing banks and stuff like that.I think the person who was the mastermind of the edgy show was into surrealism.Later as a teenager we had Soupy Sales, who did everything he could to transcend the medium.Ah those innocent early booby tuby days.

 Television is a strange medium. I watched it massively when I was a kid, and I believe it had a destructive effect on me, for the most part. 

I agree that television should not be ignored but needs to be repurposed. I think Bucky Fuller was onto something when he proposed it could be an educational medium for the global masses. My personal concept, these days, is that television should not be approached as art, entertainment, news, or information, but considered a tool for planetary transformation. I mean this literally: television tells people what to buy, and their buying patterns leads to forests disappearing, toxic waste flooding the oceans, etcetera. 

Television entrains people to social habits and, as it is used now, conditions them into the consumerist belief system.  China and India are currently following the American propaganda we beamed at them over a half-century, from "Leave It To Beaver" to "Dallas" - but we know that the planet cannot survive this consumerist onslaught. If we are going to save the planet from eco-cide, we are going to have to reprogram and repattern social ideology and individual behavior on a global scale. This requires offering a new paradigm in which psychic and spiritual development are the essential meaning of human existence, not acquiring lots of stuff. Because it is  ubiquitous, television is the only tool that could effect a reprogramming, on the level of daily practice, for the human species. 

As a tool of planetary transformation, television is our only hope.  

"Will the transformation."-Rilke

i really wish i could talk to someone who understands mcluhan better than i do, becuase i struggle with the same thing you are struggling with here: if the medium is the message than is it not hopeless to create change by switching out content? maybe it just means that content flows naturally with respect to the structure of the medium and that the key is to rebuild the medium to as to change the source of the content. the adaptable internet, of course, represents that opportunity. one of the things mcluhuan observed about television was that since the medium itself is that which organizes culture, even those motivated by mind controlling the masses have no need to manipulate what's on. just "give the people what they want" so that they tune in and turn off. unfortunatly, celebrity justice and toxic beauty products to make us look like celebrities seem to be what that is. or is it simply that we do not really know what we want, irrespective of television?mcluhan noted how media both extend and fragment our sences. video and television are revolutionary. they extend our sight. we can literally see what is going on in another country from within our homes, however, we sit completely entranced (at what other time do even your eyes remain totally motionless?) while we take it in. the internet fragments our sences even more (representing the externalization of our collective brain) but opens up vast new possiblities in global connectivity and communication at the same time. i think what makes the internet so great is that things like utube and wikepedia draw content from everywhere, democraticaly, whereas big buisness pretty much has control of the airwaves. radio would be great too if clearchannel wern't running the show. this is why we have to defend net nutrality at all costs, by the way, AND compensate for the next revolution in communications technology before we let it take control of the rest of our sences. maybe that's the problem. we don't know what we're getting into as kids (or getting our kids into as parents) when we turn on the tube or the radio, and we don't have control. it seems to me that electronic technology is our western cultural destiny, fragmentary as it may be. in that regard, i may willingly sacrifice a portion of my sences to radio and television, but it is not a matter of my will that my sences be sacrificed to Clear Channel and Fox. that these companies were allowed to gain control reflects, perhaps, that we did not have addaquate appreation for the profundity of these media's natures when we first allowed them into our lives. if we had, we might have had the good sence to amend the constitution to protect individual liberty by keeping people in control of new technology. you do well to point out, however, how quickly and hungerly world culture has gobbled up the tv, as though starved for vision...Jeremy Narvy in The Cosmic Serpent quips about the natives referring to ayahuasca as "forest television." i find this to be no idle comparison. i too watched copious ammounts of tv in my early years (until alarmingly enough i started to have dreams that took place in animated television worlds like Futurama), until through experimenting with ayahuasca myself, i found all need and desire for tv disappear, specifically becuase of ayahuasca's visual dimention, now an integral part of my daily thought process: infinately more rich in continuity, color, and relevence to me than the television image. i have even come to think of the psychedelic experience in very technological terms: like tuning your brain into a certian frequency (relating to the will and/or consciousness of the plant?).i'm going to go out on an intuitional limb and pull in some other philosophy. if, as Terence Mckenna suggests, human history represents the fall out of entheogenic consiousness via sacraments like mushrooms and ayahuasca, than media (and especially written language) might represent our collective attempts to compensate for the lack as much as inferior drugs like sugar and alcohol do. if television is the bastardization of entheogenic vision, then i believe its fault is its lack of connectivity to nature. maybe i first got the idea while hitchhiking down miles and miles of hidious garbage strewn highways in Mexico and thinking about millions of people inside thier homes with eyes fixated on tv, oblivious to the consuquenes of thier lifestyle, becuase, of course, television never shows the ghetto and the garbage (becuase if it did, no one would watch it). what does it show? our ideals and desires as best as we can concieve them: glitz and glammer and soda pop buzz. both the evolution of technology and the desperate need to reconnect to nature seem to be aspects of our collective path. perhaps in entheogenic medicine we can find the wisdom to understand our purpose and gain control our media toward our goal, rather than being controlled by it. perhaps in the end we will have no more need for media like television and radio, becuase we will learn to tune into the same frequencies in our heads. regardless, television is hear for now and must be respected as an important element of global consciousness. only let those with vision gain control of it (and at least stop turning up the volume and frames per second during commercials). one last thing that just occured to me. maybe what the paranormal projects described in the recent article "The Ghosts in Our Machines" represent, is the capacity to use media to tune into the very same spiritual freqencies the shamans do with thier sacraments.

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

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L4IHaI6406w

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.

 

For those of us that lived in the early Star Trek series, i wonder how many of us got our neurons dispersed to the far ends of the cosmos out there, where they boldy go...

How incredibly lame. . .

Hey folks, guss what , Valium (10mg) makes the TV experience even better! [Beaming self outta here!]

I think we need unconventional ways to incorporate television. For example, a favorite psychadelic past-time of mine, is to watch television with a soundtrack of my choosing (or just using the "shuffle" function). Inspired by Fantasia and Radiohead, the combinations are endless, especially given the really quick frame rate we are moving to... You see some really astonishing synchronicity that way, plus it opens television up for critical discussion by abstracting it from its original spectacular form and intervening as the viewer. \

wanderlust

 

Important topic, thanks for making me think on this Ali. It will be interesting to see how it evolves & merges with the Web. It strikes me as one of those things in our life that is getting better and worse at the same time. Media education / literacy seems ever more important.

Getting even worse?: 

A Howard Beale (Peter Finch) speech from the film Network:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MTN3s2iVKKI

Getting even better?: 

The 1 laptop per child:

http://www.laptopgiving.org/en/give-one-get-one.php

 

peace. 

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."

The idea of ‘needing’ television to spread the ‘transformative’ word is the quickest road to having an “organic” community co-opted into a brand or the next new lifestyle. McLuhan said "it is only too typical that the "content" of any medium blinds us to the character of the medium." Thus the character of the medium is the message. The character of television is to push consumer goods. People don’t just watch the advertising and become brainwashed into buying the products, they also enjoy the advertising because it lets them know that they bought the right thing. And the news is there to tell them that they’re going to wind up in bodybags if they don’t go on a vacation with a Visa card.

The phonetic alphabet and the typographic media are an extension of the visual sense. The typographic culture helped to create a machine age which has resulted in fragmentation and isolation. For awhile television did create a comeback of a more integral perception. When television was owned by accountable individuals they aired the brutality in Vietnam thus helping to foster the upheaval of the 60’s. They had their window and it was sold out. And not because of anyone’s fault in particular. That’s just why they call it a window.

The window that Pinchbeck has spoken of is right now because of the internet. The internet is what’s keeping the lights on at the moment. On the surface it might appear to look like a YouTube talent contest, but it’s really changing the way you think. As the central nervous system inverts itself across the globe the ego will recede in its wake, meaning that we are in store for a transvaluation of everything that we thought we understood as either art or technology.

http://users.california.com/~rathbone/transval.htm

This is not another collectivist movement happening here, this is about the birth of our individual consciousness and the awareness of empathy as something crucial for our survival as a collective species. Our brains are hardwired to create new realities. ‘Cut-ups’ and ‘Mashups’ help crack the code of their perspective media, but only for a little while until they are co-opted into what looks like a Van Gogh refrigerator magnet to an enlightened 10 year old.

This is about human maturity and our capacity to experience the metaphysical.

Spirits In The Material World said it best:

There is no political solution

To our troubled evolution

Have no faith in constitution

There is no bloody revolution

Our so-called leaders speak

With words they try to jail you

They subjugate the meek

But its the rhetoric of failure

Where does the answer lie?

Living from day to day

If its something we can’t buy

There must be another way

We are spirits in the material world

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).

Last night here in Vancouver, at a great Winter Solstice event called Luminance IV, there was a screening of "Entheogen: Awakening the Divine Within." Of course kudo'd here before: http://www.realitysandwich.com/archaic_revival

With Mr. Hossaini's topic, and all the comments still percolating, I found myself envisioning this important and beautifully-crafted film broadcast on TV.

The good vibrations of the gathering lingered and today I've been enjoying notions of an advanced hacker taking over the broadcast of the Superbowl or something, and screening it.

How about a near-future society where this film and others like it are not seen as controversial, and rightly recognized as watershed points, and Oscar-worthy. Actually not difficult to imagine. Am reminded of one of those McKenna quotes: 

"If the truth can be told so as to be understood, it will be believed."

I think Rod Mann's film goes a long way in that direction. 

Does a great job of introducing lesser-known terms like "entrainment" and "concrescence" with great interviewees (you know who). Made me wonder if a new term for a new Television will help with the evolution? Suggestions?

 

happy soulstice ~ 

 

PS He also screened a trailer for his next film, I think called "Eschatology" - looks great as well.  

The tv and computer mouse helps me with quitting cigarettes. When I think, I want to smoke. If you want to blank out completely, I recommend using a 5ft wide tv.

To be sure, television is, in fact, the drug of the nation, breeding ignorance and feeding radiation, as sung by Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy. 

Is it hypocritical to use television to critique television? Or just clever?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sgOWTM5R2DA

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....