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"Until we
can use the most powerful communications medium in the world to benefit
all children, rather than to exploit them, all the other efforts we
make in their behalf will be incomplete. In a nation where, increasingly,
children spend more time with television than doing anything else,
it is unaccepotable that that time should be taken up principally
by salesmen, animated assualt artists, and leering talk-show hosts."
By the late 1980s an increasingly
deregulated broadcasting industry had made some decisive victories
vis-à-vis education; the most noticeable being the sheer number
of hours television was consuming of a child's day. On average children
between six and twelve watch 20 to 28 hours a week. But television
has come to dominate more than a child's time. It assumes the characteristics
of the cultural landscape around it, replacing narratives with its
own stories, concocting its own heroes, fabricating its own legends,
definingh its own grammatical rules. David Marc has argued that even if television is single-mindedly commercial, it "leaves behind a body of dreams that is, to a large extent, the culture we live in. "And his conclusion is enough to set a teacher's teeth on edge: Television, he asserts, not education, is the "most effective purveyor of language, image, and narrative in American culture." To George Gerbner, the power of television is even more extensive. Writing in the Journal of Communication he notes that "Television provides, perhaps for the first time since preindustrial religion, a strong cultural link, a shared daily ritual of highly compelling and informative content..." Like an unruly college student that takes over the dean's office, television will actually expropriate the terms and structures of education for its own promotion, as Michael T. Marsden proudly beams, "The television commercial...I have christened [it] the sonnet form of the twentieth century..." Television's transformational claims to the world around it affects every aspect of our lives, including our politics where it draws frequent complaints from commentators such as Time Magazine's Lance Morrow who saw the 1988 presidential election as "a series of television visuals, of staged events created for TV cameras. The issues have become as weightless as clouds of electrons, and the candidates mere actors in commercials..." Lacking serious debate or analysis pollster Lou Harris made the obvious conclusion: "The simple story of this election is that the Bush commercials have worked and the Dukakis commercials have not." The commercial character of television has itself drawn intense fire for its replacement of rational discourse with mass marketing techniques. Vance Packard in his famous book The Hidden Persuaders was horrified by "the extraordinary ability of TV to etch messages on your brains" and argued that "many of us are being influenced and manipulated far more than we realize, in patterns of our everyday lives." In a similar vein Daniel Boorstein argued that most Americans seriously under estimate the effect of advertising. "We think it means an increase in untruthfulness. In fact, it has meant a reshaping of our very concept of truth." The argument is seldom refuted today: modern advertising as epitomized on television doesn't adhere to common rules of persuasion, but has formulated its own game plan utilizing various diversionary tactics to motivate the viewer, tactics that are intended to subvert the rational process with rapid fire images, emotional appeals, and incoherent arguments. In response to such advertising directed at children, vice-president Al Gore commented angrily: "We are strip-mining our children's minds and doing it for commercial profit." Noting concerns parents and educators more that the potential effect television may have on the brains of their children. Neil Postman has argued that while watching television: "we are largely using the right hemisphere of the brain, the left possibly being somewhat of a burden in the process. Thus continuous television watching over centuries could conceivably have the effect of weakening left brain activity and producing a population of 'right-brained' people...in other words, people whose state of mind is somewhat analogous to that of a modern day baboon." The challenge to education has perhaps never been more palpable. According to Kate Moody, "The eye and brain functions employed in TV viewing are likely to put demands on different parts of the brain than those used in reading, causing incalculably different kinds of cognitive development..." Many of the potential effects on the brain are related to the specific techniques utilized by television. Speaking specifically of images, Neil Postman suggests that television's "imagery is fast moving, concrete, discontinuous, and alogical, requiring emotional response, not conceptual processing..." Thus for Postman, "the TV curriculum poses a serious challenge, not merely to school performance, but civilization itself." Many people have also noted television's affect on behavior, charging that it encourages passivity, indifference, and violence.
By the 1990s television had teamed up with popular culture to give education a sound trouncing. Anti-intellectualism, it seemed, had reached an appalling level as teachers confronted a television culture of insults and disrespect. "Beavis and Butt-head" is one of the many current manifestations of television's new ironic attachment to everything dumb, drawing a complaint from Newsweek that "Stupidity, served with knowing intelligence, is now TV's answer to real smarts." Or, as Esquire's Jamie Malanowski sums it up: "So this is what we've come to: smart people then matched quotes from Shakespeare; smart people now match quotes from Seinfeld." |
