Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
practically all the individuals in this society have in common. It is the unify-
ing substratum of experience.” In the U.S., for example, the average television
is on more than six hours per day. Television proved to be more than up to the
challenge of providing viewers with massive amounts of rapid, discontinuous
information, with conveniences ranging from the remote control, introduced
in the 1950s, to MTV and the VCR in the 1980s, to cable and satellite TV with
hundreds of channels and digitized DVDs in the 1990s. By privatizing and
individualizing entertainment, the rise of home-delivery media played an
important role in the decline of public space (Oldenburg 1989; Postman
1992). In drawing the multitudes indoors, television helped to eclipse the
public agora, deepening the bourgeois process of individualization and com-
modi
ered “a ringside seat at
the grand but impersonal spectacles of the world stage” (Marvin 1988:157),
bringing mass audiences indoors and accelerating the long-standing trend
toward the privatization of experience.
As television became ubiquitous, the medium played an ever-larger role in
daily life. Television news, religious services, and its role in covering elections,
promoting celebrities, and entertaining children gave the technology enor-
mous ideological power. As an enormous body of work has demonstrated,
television powerfully structures everyday understandings by providing unre-
alistic role models, gender and ethnic stereotypes, promoting immediate grat-
i
fi
cation. In privatizing leisure time, television o
ff
cation, short attention spans, and a “sound bite” mentality that encourages
passive, not active learning, detracting from reading, schoolwork, and exer-
cise (Esslin 1982; Kellner 1990; Elasmar 2002). The most vulnerable viewers
are young children, for whom it is often di
fi
cult to distinguish fantasy and
reality. The average U.S. child sees 18,000 murders by age 18, promoting a
desensitization to violence, and 20,000 advertisements per year, which shape
the social construction of wants and desires, facilitating the deep penetration
of commodity relations into consciousness, and reproducing mass consumer
culture in a manner no other medium can rival. For heavy viewers, television
resembles a state of hypnosis. In short, television a
ff
ects not just
what
people
know, but equally important,
how
they know.
The medium has spawned a large, often contradictory set of interpret-
ations. For optimists such as McLuhan (1962), television, like other electronic
media, formed the basis of uniting the “global village,” uniting disparate
peoples through the power of the electronic message and destroying geo-
graphically based power imbalances. For others, it formed a “vast wasteland”
(Esslin 1982:103), a banal, anti-intellectual, and mentally debilitating world
that robbed viewers of their critical powers of intellect and cultivated values
of ephemerality and super
ciality. Williams (1974) maintains that this rela-
tionship is not one-way, pointing to how television and mass culture shaped
one another in a recursive, dialectical relationship. For Gould et al. (1984),
international exports of television shows were an important means of pro-
curing and legitimating American cultural hegemony. And for yet others,
television is the compelling model that other forms of social discourse must
fi
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