Television Still Bad

Television is Still Bad For You

By John Taylor; 21 January, 2006

I caught the tail end of a Pete Rose interview with the author of a
book called "Everything Bad is Good For You," about how television and
video games are not as bad as many people think. He points to Woody
Allen's film Sleeper, where a fellow goes into suspended animation and
wakes up in a distant future only to find that smoking is now
considered good for you. Whenever anyone feels tired they are urged,
"Take a cigarette, it will pep you up." Everything we now think is bad
turns out to be a good thing and vice versa.

The writer does not go that far but he does claim that television has
become better over past decades and many people put it down and avoid
it unfairly in his opinion. The writing quality in television series
is now much more compelling, the number and depth of characters are
improved, and so on. He cites studies showing that while movies have
not become more complex (you can only go so deep in an hour and a
half) television has done so, by leaps and bounds. Perhaps so, but
movies have improved in other ways, in my opinion; maybe not
complexity but quality of writing is better, special effects are
incredible, and on and on. This degrades his point, since you now get
a better bang for your buck, and more to the point one hour of movie
watching will provide more entertainment value than the hundreds of
hours sitting on a couch that it takes to cover a season of a
television series. I cannot say this with his authority because I have
never attempted such a marathon couch-sitting session, but I have not
tried heroin either and I am against that too.

The author (whose name I did not catch) points to the fact that video
games above all have exploded in complexity to such an extent that IQ
scores in youth are soaring. A person rated above average in an
intelligence test in the 1960's would be far below average now. Kids
today have little general knowledge but a razor-like ability to solve
problems on the fly. To me this may just be proof that standard IQ
tests always have been inadequate; they do not measure what is most
important, such as the ability to work creatively with others, to
evince virtues and deal with real life situations -- so called EQ, or
emotional intelligence.

Above all, there is the problem of testing itself. Examinations are
artificial; they only approximate the real world. This is demonstrated
in the so-called Winston Churchill effect, where people very good at
taking tests are eclipsed by others, like Churchill. He is the
familiar extreme of someone who showed up terrible in every test he
ever took and failed in school but excelled in life itself by saving
the free world. Putting noses to video terminals may pump up youths'
ability to take tests and do nothing else for them. Judging by the way
things are, this may be so. For every technical problem solved today a
thousand new ones crop up. What little social, political, moral and
spiritual savvy we used to have are degrading to the crisis point.

Our author concedes that like everything, television and video games
have to be taken in moderation. The question is, how much is a
moderate quantity? That is always the question, recognized in every
reasoned debate since Aristotle and before. The only thing I can
answer to that is, a lot less than most people think.

This author says more TV may be better than many think, as does my
father, who is a sort of TV evangelist. He deplores my keeping
television away from our kids, calling the deprivation a "punishment"
(they are allowed only after homework and piano practice, and then
only films, not television). He calls me cruel and goes on about all
the wonderful kid's shows the little ones are missing out on. He even
pays for a second satellite feed from his dish for us just in case I
ever change my mind. But I tell him over and over that I would not
take that feed even if they paid me the fifty bucks a month it costs,
instead of their having the temerity to ask *me* to pay for it. But I
have to restrict it so severely mostly for myself. I admit it, I
easily get addicted. More than the tiniest tidbit of television -- we
get PBS and sometimes TVO from our antenna, and I sometimes watch a
little after the kids have gone to bed -- easily grows into an evil,
unbridled force that gets inside my brain and metastasizes into a sort
of mental cancer.

I concede that television would not be as bad if it were not situated
where it is. Planted in the middle of the living room, it sucks away
at the natural information flow of family and communal life. It
catches you just when your defenses are down and bathes you in images
designed to manipulate. The center of the home no longer can properly
be called a living or even a recreation room, it should be called the
vegetating station or the brainwashing chamber. Believe me, it is no
coincidence that TV execs call evening hours "prime time." There was
no such term in the family before because evening is not just "prime
time" for them, it is the only time. Those few hours are the only
chance for everyone to come together and interact on more than the
most superficial level. Prime time has become stolen time. The robber
is the state, the wealthy few and the corporations. The victim is the
institution of the family.

The insidiousness of television, even a very little of it, is that it
cuts out the guest-host relationship that is perhaps the main
information function of a family. Guests have become interruptions,
distractions from the boob tube. For millions of years households
gratefully accepted guests, offered them free food and accommodation
in order to get one thing back: information. Not having a mass media
data pump flowing into their living room, people felt a lack, a real
need for news and entertainment, and guests offered that. Believe it
or not, a guest, even the worst of the lot, is better at giving news
than any news anchor backed up by a wealthy network and dozens of
hired consultants and talking heads. A guest does things with
information that no television can hope to offer.

How so? Because a guest is alive, present, right before you. You can
cross examine a guest. You can argue with them. You can mingle,
sympathize, change a guest and change yourself, or even better,
pretend to change for them. You can form a new friendship, or thank
God that you do not have a friend like that. You can serve a guest and
in doing so get to know a whole, three dimensional human being. If the
guest turns out to be a schlep, that is even more fun. Best of all,
you can witness other family members interacting with that schlep. A
guest is a new element, an untested commodity worth far more than five
hundred channels.

The best thing about getting to know a guest is that you do not forget
the information you pick up. It stays because it is yours, you helped
make it. I had a guest a decade ago who hailed from Sweden. Not a
pleasant person at all, rather a know-it-all. The sort of tourist who
goes around the world in a quest to prove how much better her home is
than anywhere else. Yet I learned more from her than a thousand
televised travel documentaries taken in passively and forgotten a few
days later. This Swede was alive, obnoxious and got me angry.

She said, her nose turned in the air, you guys are stupid here. You
pay five bucks a month on your phone bill for "services" like call
waiting and call forwarding and in Sweden we get them all, at no extra
cost. What are you paying for, something that is already built into
the microchips of the phone exchanges? It costs them nothing extra,
once the chip is installed. That is not a service, it is rank
exploitation. Such capabilities should be included in every telephone
bill free, like in Sweden. This infuriated me and I swore never to pay
a cent extra on my phone bill. Plus, it gave me ammunition against the
thousand salespersons who in the intervening decade have called
periodically and tried to persuade me to pay for the bells and
whistles of telephony. I am grateful to that Swede, who made me a
better consumer, or non-consumer, who I am sure saved me thousands of
dollars over the past decade. Five dollars a month for this and five
for that adds up to big money over time, as corporate swindlers well
know.

The importance of guests I cannot emphasize enough. A salon with
guests in it gives a chance for every person in your home to see one
another in a novel situation. We are bound to say things we otherwise
never would, teach lessons that children would not otherwise hear from
you; you will show a part of yourself they otherwise never might
witness in the family alone, especially in "couch potato" mode. You
and family members can work ideas out together with the guest, show
virtues in motion, get involved with the guest together as a family
learning team. You learn and teach, both together and apart. You can
put homegrown ideas forward and mingle them with similar yet different
commodities and attitudes grown in foreign soil on another side of the
planet. Even a neighbor next door offers novel lessons, interesting
possibilities, information of surprising local events that a whole
world flickering on an idiot box cannot offer.

As with most things, television is at root a spiritual problem. I was
interested to hear at our World Religion Day a Buddhist monk recite
the vows that they now require of new acolytes. One vow is to swear
off promiscuous television viewing, which subjects the mind to
violent, lust-provoking images. All right Buddha! That is making an
old spiritual teaching relevant to the dilemmas of the 21st Century.
Swearing off the tube is the first step to inner peace, to chastity,
and to a stronger, more vibrant family and social life. In a word, the
biggest reason of all to avoid it is to give us a chance to make love
real, to expunge the lie that we call love today.

"In the hearts of men no real love is found, and the condition is such
that, unless their susceptibilities are quickened by some power so
that unity, love and accord may develop within them, there can be no
healing, no agreement among mankind. Love and unity are the needs of
the body politic today. Without these there can be no progress or
prosperity attained. Therefore, the friends of God must adhere to the
power which will create this love and unity in the hearts of the sons
of men." (Abdu'l-Baha, Promulgation, 171)

--
John Taylor

badijet@gmail.com