TELEVISION

Along with the radio, television has become the primary means for broadcast communication and entertainment. As such it calls for ethical and political assessment. What follows will thus focus on such assessments, noting a spectrum of views running from positive to negative in relation to both content and practice.

Background

The word television, a hybrid compound of the Greek tele (distance) and the English vision, names a technological invention from the 1920s in which electromagnetic waves are used to control a beam of electrons scanning a cathode-ray tube so as to create an image. The initially distinctive feature of this technology was that, unlike motion pictures but like radio, it could be personalized for home or individual use. Over the course of more than half a century the electronics underwent continuous modification: Vacuum tubes were replaced with transistors and then integrated circuits; the black-and-white cathode-ray tube became colored and was then replaced by a high-definition, flat, liquid crystal display; and analog transmission was transformed to digital. The information transmitted thus became increasingly rich in a technical sense.

The commercial development and regulation of television followed the pattern established by radio: Television was initially promoted by the same corporations, and existing regulatory agencies and frameworks were adopted to distribute a limited transmission spectrum among competing private interests. Some countries established national broadcast operations independent of or complementing private operations. But in all cases television viewers received programs free of charge, except for advertising time or taxes. With the advent of video recording systems, cable, and satellite television, however, transmission resources were greatly enlarged, and fundamental shifts took place within the industry that created pay-for-view television. Yet this further increase in technical information delivery and in regulatory regime change failed to alter the basic content, which has remained of two sorts: information and entertainment. Indeed, the TV is the centerpiece of home entertainment systems.

Moral Promise and Threat

From its post–World War II appearance, the promise of TV has been at once praised and criticized. As a new, more vivid and pervasive form of mass communication than anything that had preceded it (magazines, newspapers, radio, and movies) it was subject to intensified versions of both the hype of modernity, which sees technological innovation as inherently beneficial, and mass culture criticism, which argues technology's dangers and debasements. A love–hate relationship was manifest in tensions between promises of increased democratic enlightenment and worries about the commercialization of culture.

On the one hand, television brings diverse quality dramas into the home, and international news programs depict a variety of countries, cultures, and perspectives in a single broadcast. On the other, pop-culture programs, such as those on MTV, present fragmented images that draw from a multicultural mix of music, fashion, sexuality, and ethnic traditions. The moral significance of numerous "high" and "low" cultural programs can be attributed to their ability to deconstruct monolithic images and ideologies: "Implicit in pluriculture is a kind of bricolage relativism. One may pick and choose culture fragments, multiply choices, and in the process reflectively find one's own standards provincial or arbitrary—certainly no longer simply a priori obvious" (Ihde 1995, p. 155).

While traditional cultures find themselves forced to confront modern secular images, so too are provincial U.S. (and other Eurocentric) audiences forced to question their own identities when confronted with traditional religious images. Television thus presents viewers with the opportunity to engage the global "community of those who have nothing in common" (in Alphonso Lingus's formulation) such that they may become more reflective about the arbitrary nature of their own cultural identity. Any particular cultural position is but one of many such perspectives within the wider cultural arena. For example, the multiperspectival international coverage of the "War on Terrorism" suggests that the conflict between East and West cannot be adequately explained by the partial metanarratives of either side.

Criticism

For present purposes television criticism may be distinguished into three types: those not influenced by Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980), those influenced by McLuhan, and those reacting against or going beyond McLuhan. As the typology suggests, the ideas of McLuhan, who argued the primacy not of television content but of its formal properties, have played a central role. "The medium is the message" was the sound-bite summary of his theory in Understanding Media (1964).

Prior to or subsequently ignoring McLuhan have been studies focused on issues related to the content of television and the social influence of this content. Does television advertising work? Do the attitudes and opinions expressed on TV influence or just represent those of the viewers? In the 1950s concern often emphasized the impact of television on leisure and culture. In the early 2000s the concern shifted to the political or cultural biases of television programming. This tradition of criticism also distinguishes different genres—news, cultural programming, sports, soaps, and so on. Most television criticism in the mass media has been of this type, which thus represents the most common critical approach. Studies by Cecelia Tichi (1991) and Lynn Spigel (1992) are scholarly contributions to this tradition.

Among criticisms that have been influenced by McLuhan's work are more intellectual studies, some of which have become classic references. Examples include Tony Schwartz's Media: The Second God (1981), Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985), and Joshua Meyrowitz's No Sense of Place (1985). More thickly analytic than McLuhan, but in the same vein, Stanley Cavell (1984) contrasts the basic experience of movies as viewing with that of television as monitoring. All successful TV formats—from sitcoms and game shows to sports coverage and news—are forms of monitoring. For Cavell it is no accident that the television receiver is called a monitor, and that TV is used to monitor everything from banks to parking lots.

Most representative of the reaction to McLuhan is the work of Brian Winston (1998), who originally titled his work Misunderstanding Media. For Winston television is not the radically new medium envisioned by McLuhan, but simply another instance of technological performance based on progressively developing scientific competence. Moreover, "there is nothing in the histories of electrical and electronic communication systems to indicate that significant major changes have not been accommodated by preexisting social formations" (p. 2). Building on but transcending McLuhan is the teletheory of Gregory L. Ulmer (1989) and the concept of the televisual as developed by Tony Fry (1993).

Cutting across these three types of criticism are negative and positive assessments that focus either on the physical aspects of the technology or its content/form. Although there is no proof that a person can become physically ill from watching television, conclusive scientific evidence does not exist that details what challenges to health are likely to arise from exposure to extremely low doses of low-level radiation over long periods of time. Indeed, critics suggest that there is no threshold of exposure below which radiation may not harmfully affect humans. From an environmental perspective, critics further note not only that the process of manufacturing televisions generates toxic problems, but also that the level of electronic waste is growing rapidly. This dilemma is exacerbated by the fact it is often less expensive and more convenient to replace rather than fix a malfunctioning television.

Negative assessments of the content of television programs vary. There are psychological worries about exposing children to violent and sexually charged programs, feminist and multicultural arguments about how television programs routinely stereotype women and other minorities in adverse ways, and sociopolitical concerns about the connection between television and political propaganda. Whereas the televised coverage of the Vietnam War in the 1960s facilitated a negative public reaction of the conflict because of its association with the "real" coverage of battlefield and civilian casualties, recent critical works that exemplify McLuhan's famous pronouncement that "the medium is the message," such as Jean Baudrillard's provocatively titled The Gulf War Did Not Take Place (1995) and Paul Virilio's Strategy of Deception (2000), suggest that the selective presentation of events during the Gulf War and the Kosovo conflict are indicative that people now live in a "hyper-real" time in which ever proliferating images are produced that are dissociated from reality. For example, during the Gulf War the impression that indiscriminate bombing and civilian causalities were minimized was fostered through the media's constant presentation of "smart bombs" that that destroyed only deliberately chosen and carefully delimited targets. A more recent argument, presented by Michael Moore in his Oscar-winning documentary Bowling for Columbine (2002), is that the media distortion of topics such as urban violence has produced a culture of fear in which American citizens routinely mistake deliberately sensationalized reporting for the presentation of unbiased facts.

In Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television (1978), Jerry Mander, a disillusioned advertising mogul, goes so far as to argue that because television is biased in favor of corporate interests and because it functions best when conveying simplified linear messages, it is beyond reform; the power of television to discipline people into accepting repressive control can be combated only by eliminating it completely. Mander also contends that television bolsters the tendency toward living in an artificial environment. This argument is given more in-depth philosophical examination by Albert Borgmann.

Ethical Criticism

Considering the sociological reports concerning how highly people esteem their televisions, Borgmann insists that the "telephone and television are the technological devices that have weakened literacy and impoverished the culture of the world" (1995, p. 90). Writing letters, telling stories, engaging in conversations, attending plays, reading to one another, and silently reading books and periodicals to oneself have all taken a backseat to watching television. Television routinely provides an alienating experience that disengages subjects from one another and inhibits genuine intersubjective connection by promoting self-oriented comportment. Whereas the scattered family once gathered around the "culture of the table," today TV dinners dominate. Not only is food reduced to a meal to be grabbed, but the festive and conversational context of dining—a focal practice—is lost. Seduced by the soothing presence of the television, people have come to experience engagement with others and with nature as exertion, as a cruel and unjust demand. When their favorite show is on, they do not want anyone to interrupt and pull them away from their passive contentment.

Borgmann grounds his negative assessment of television in an ontological distinction between two kinds of reality: disposable devices and commanding things. Disposable devices are readily available commodities that make technologically mediated experiences instantly available without the use of much skill. Indeed, learning to watch television requires little effort; young children ascertain how to do it, often without any formal instruction. Disposable devices thus belong to a world of pliable material; their emotional and moral significance is subjective and flexible. Their use, as Borgmann takes the example of television to illustrate, encourages a shallow life of distraction and isolation.

By contrast, commanding things are focal objects that express meaning on the basis of their own intrinsic qualities; the emotional and moral significance that people invest in them is largely based on the sense-bestowing capacity of the objects themselves. Commanding things direct one's attention because they require skill to use and we treat people who can adroitly operate them with respect. Whereas one does not value someone because they know how to operate a television, one admires musicians whose disciplined training allows them to create beautiful, memorable music. Furthermore, in contrast to the withdrawn and individualist behavior that disposable devices such as television encourage, commanding things further the end of communal engagement. One of the reasons why a person learns to use an instrument is to be able to extend the range of communication, to be expressive to others through the sounds that the instrument makes possible.

Assessment

Borgmann's criticisms, along with many others, have themselves been criticized as failures to appreciate the potential for enriching one's world through multivalent monitoring. From aesthetic installations of multiple television monitors to sports bars and space probe transmissions, television has the power to extend the human sensorium in ways not unlike the telescope and microscope. The ultimate promise of television may not be its utility to preexisting cultural ideals (such as democracy) but its performative presentation of scientific experience in ways that cannot help but insinuate science and technology ever more deeply into culture. To the extent to which science and technology may themselves be viewed as morally worthy projects, so too may television be viewed throughout its increasingly information-rich manifestations.

EVAN M. SELINGER

SEE ALSO Advertising, Marketing, and Public Relations;Communications Ethics;Communication Systems;Entertainment;Globalism and Globalization;Popular Culture;Violence.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Baudrillard, Jean. (1995). The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, trans. Paul Patton. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Borgmann, Albert. (1984). Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life: A Philosophical Inquiry. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Borgmann, Albert. (1995). "The Moral Significance of the Material Culture." In Technology and the Politics of Knowledge, ed. Andrew Feenberg and Alastair Hannay. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Cavell, Stanley. (1984). "The Fact of Television." In his Themes Out of School: Effects and Causes. San Francisco: North Point Press.

Fry, Tony, ed. (1993). RUA TV? Heidegger and the Televisual. Sydney, Australia: Power Publications.

Heidegger, Martin. (1966). Discourse on Thinking. New York: Harper and Row.

Ihde, Don. (1995). "Image Technologies and Traditional Culture." In Technology and the Politics of Knowledge, ed. Andrew Feenberg and Alastair Hannay. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Mander, Jerry. (1978). Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television. New York: Morrow.

McLuhan, Marshall. (1964). Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Mellencamp, Patricia, ed. (1990). Logics of Television: Essays in Cultural Criticism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Meyrowitz, Joshua. (1985). No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior. New York: Oxford University Press.

Newcomb, Horace, ed. (1976). Television: The Critical View. New York: Oxford University Press. A collection representative of early-generation TV criticism.

Postman, Neil. (1985). Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. New York: Viking.

Schwartz, Tony. (1981). Media: The Second God. New York: Random House.

Spigel, Lynn. (1992). Make Room for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Cultural history.

Tichi, Cecelia. (1991). Electronic Hearth: Creating an American Television Culture. New York: Oxford University Press. Although the focus is on content, also influenced by McLuhan.

Ulmer, Gregory L. (1989). Teletheory: Grammatology in the Age of Video. New York: Routledge; 2nd edition, New York: Atropos Press, 2004.

Virilio, Paul. (2000). Strategy of Deception, trans. Chris Turner. London: Verso.

Winston, Brian. (1998). Media Technology and Society: A History; From the Telegraph to the Internet. London: Routledge. This is a "reworking and updating" of his Misunderstanding Media (1986).