Having a feast in the Middle East
Taken from Test Card F

"The crisis in Islam in the modern world does not make 'good' TV; the delivery of a video bomb does. Even if the media spent hours analyzing Mid-East history and culture the likely result would be boredom. Because Mid-East history and culture are boring? Anything but. Because boredom is what the media delivers best. No matter what brand of information you choose to consume, you will never be a participant." Anti-Media (U.S.)

Television technology is able to carry on some types of communication but not others -it is at its most effective when transmitting simplified linear messages. It's especially good for advertising, (it's new, buy it; or: he's a hero, trust him and buy his lifestyle through our product) but not for much else. Believe it or not, all of life's experiences cannot be transmitted to us electronically. What it means to be a human being is only rarely glimpsed. Instead, how wonderful it must be to become fabulously rich and powerful is constantly shoved down our throats.

Programme content is always subordinate to presentation. As the Director General of the BBC at that time told the Annan Committee, "It's no good if you put the explanation after the audience has switched off", while ITN suggested that "people would be bored to death" by anything other than the usual technicolour sensationalism. The limitations of the medium demand that the images and issues presented appear dramatic, different and above all entertaining because watching telly is fundamentally motiveless activity. It is only the technical hype of fast editing, dissolves and stop-start image collage that keeps us from throwing it out the window. Presentation of otherworld exotica and a larger than life reality struggles constantly to break out of television's self-perpetuating spiral of indifferenceto mere difference. Television is a homogenising home blender of everything -and the kitchen sink-culture, baby, bathwater and then some. Much of the product is self-referentiality to
other content and events that have only existed on TV; infrequent users find an awful lot of it completely unintelligible.

Boredom was a problem found by newscasters during the two months before the Gulf War. In the countdown to the January deadline they grew to need this war to conform to the ordinary rhythms of television (and it was with a hollow air of surprise that commencement of the slaughter was announced).

Time in the TV world is a peculiar thing; it does not wander as life wanders, or pause as life always pauses. The present is only the moment for holding you
in place for what comes next. The future counts only as continuation, the past does not matter at all; urgency is in the instantaneous and hence immediately superceded. The technology of transmission even sits unevenly with the advertisers' need to implant the desire to go and consume something else, which is why they need to repeat their ads so often-it also accounts for why millions turn off `educational' and `informational' programmes in favour of soap serials, with their familiar characters in endless but regular and connected situations.
We get delivered straight to our living rooms the newest news every day, now, this minute, as each news bulletin consumes the one before it. Images are no sooner presented than replaced by more infotainment in a void, having no connection to past or future, only an illusory present-time. Through immediacy, fragmentation of reality is guaranteed. This is important, for outrages committed by governments can be shelved to a later date where they become reproduced as a redundant history that has been and gone, therefore safe to show, rather than events which we might be tempted to make active decisions on. The delay in transmitting the exposure of British arms deals with Iraq or the cancellation of Ken Loach's Irish drama `Hidden Agenda' after the Warrington bombing being two examples among thousands that could be picked out. The complete package of lies presented during the Gulf War has since been faithfully documented by the very same media that originally vomited them up.

Information is disseminated in such quantity and at such speed that confirmation becomes impossible. Television's imposed world view comprises a thousand and one fragments where anything equals anything else-what counts is the primacy of television which will keep on going even after you turn it off. It is a kaleidoscopic device that ensures no one learns too much. An obsessive frenzy of attention is organised over the most banal of problems ("never mind the politics, was he wearing his own hair?"); a frame later grand and graphic theories elaborate sweeping and arbitrary models of development, environment or history. The earth and all its peoples are flattened and rebuilt to fit virtual media reality.

Events are isolated and made to stand, fall, sit up and beg according to media definition. The epitome has to be Dan Rather's live report from the Berlin Wall on November 9 1989 when he told viewers, "History is taking place before your very eyes". Such `journalism' is sports commentary, making it no more and no less an event than the furore over Diego Maradona's World Cup ball-to-hand shake; emotional and super-fluous, something like discussing economics by only covering bank robberies (or BCCI fraud). This emotionalism has its roots in a necessary transitory news sensationalism -the isolation of experience from its context and then its dramatic exploitation. Information is offered up as pure inexplicable significance.
Sure, we live in an `information age', but does that mean we are better informed? "This is supposed to be a war for freedom, " moaned Robert Fisk in
the Independent about the Gulf War, "but the Western Armies want to control the flow of information". For the TV viewer though, despite sanitisation of the massacre, there was a mindfield of information, from ex-generals, military spokesmen
and conjecturing correspondents telling us more than we ever wanted to know about `smart' weapons, stealth bombers, Scud, Cruise, Patriot. We were not so much convinced of any moral justice on the part of the `Allies' as exhausted and saturated into submission. What did the critical reporters want to show us-dismembered bodies, mutilation? Ah, sweet pornography of death. Breathe in and smell the New World Odour.

What manna from heaven for the broadcasters when the Pentagon supplied the hair-trigger videotapes of bombs dropping from the skies. Even the lack of blood and guts could provide plenty of mileage for discussions of `hiding the realities of war'-as if we're so fucking ignorant to think war could ever be anything but a festival of mass murder.
War can be something of a tricky one for television. War movies are neat, but `the real thing' does not always go better with Coke:
To cure the problem an upbeat tone to coverage was adopted which not only retained the rental of the jeopardised advertising space but helped to sell the war as commodity spectacle too. (Maybe next time around they can sell advertising space on the bombs; soft drinks and colateral damage).

News is manufactured to fit into the pre-existing dynamics of newsworthiness, always to serve in the reproduction of alienated relations. Complex realities are reduced to the level of personalities and packaged as self-contained `newsbites' -the Gulf War becomes Norman Swarzkopf and his `theatre of war'. All collective movements must be individualised into one leader to qualify as newsworthy, and if there is no leader, why, they'll create one. Gitlin's superb "The Whole World is Watching-Mass Media in the Making and Unmaking of the New Left" describes how the media shaped the image of this movement for the American public according to their function of `star'-making (the movement then adapted itself to fit the televised image).

You'd be pretty surprised if in real life a starving child, a McDonalds clown and Princess Anne popped up in front of you in quick succession. On flat-earth TV we suspend our disbelief almost without thinking because television always presents itself as `the most real' reality. As Nick Ross and Sue Cook write in their book about being presenters of Crimewatch UK: "For some extraordinary reason people only believe their experiences [in witnessing a crime] when they see something on Crimewatch". It's a pretty long fall down the reality gap when the only reference many can find in experiencing real-life tragedy is along the lines of, "It was just like in a movie".

Through disconnection and confinement, stories arrive from nowhere and disappear back there again forever. Once a news report has served its primary entertainment function programmers charge onto something else. It is exhausted in the moment of its utterence -even if we videotape it, it's no longer 'current'*. If it were a material product it would be necessary to throw it away. Where does that leave the viewer? Does it just go in one ear, or eye, and out the other? Well, yes and no. In San Francisco a survey was carried out to discover how much people remember of what they see on TV. Two thousand people were telephoned shortly after the evening news and asked to list as many of the news items they had just seen as they could. More than half of those who watched the whole programme could not remember even one. It's quite reminiscent of motorway driving, where you have no memory of the last ten
minutes -or was it miles?- of your journey.

 

"Observing human practice is irrelevant if one cannot
catch up with the point of the effort. So much effort
is required to remain 'in control' of the continual
permutations that usual cautions about control slip
by. One watches in the hope that what has been
obscured will eventually become clear."

Milwaukee Access N (U.S.)

 

The `Mulholland' experiment in the early 70's wired ten kids to electroencephalograph (EEG) machines (which measure brain wave activity) and sat them down in front of their chosen favourite programmes. He expected to see plenty of fast beta waves, which would indicate that they were actively responding to something (as is produced when reading or during conversation); instead all he could find were the slower alpha waves of the kind found when a person is in a coma or put in a trance where the subject is not
interacting with the outside world at all.

Maybe this could be explained away as habituation to a repetitive format. Further research found the closing of our minds as emanating from the machine itself. . In our normal conscious state, the right side of the brain absorbs whatever images come in and whatever emotional associations these may have, while Area 39 of the left cortex provides the logical analysis and integration necessary if we are to make any sense out of the images and put them to practical use. It was found that the left brain can be lulled into stasis by repetitive stimuli such as flickering lights or TV signals. It stops processing the incoming stimulus because it does not seem to be of any use. The right brain soaks up the images like a sponge and, apparently, it goes in and stays in-not as comprehension but as emotion-later on "you're doing things without knowing why you're doing them or where the motivation came from".

 

"This is life. This is what's happening -

"Heavy TV viewers are more likely to overestimate the proportion of the general population
involved in police work. They are more likely to overestimate the danger of their own
neighbourhood. They are more likely to have a sense of fear about daily life. They are more likely to overestimate the probability of being involved in a violent crime. While many adults may be aware of the fictitiousness of TV, it is hard for many peopleto distinguish between the real world in which they live and the TV... while people are aware that events portrayed on TV are not 'really' happening, they believe that TVaccurately indicates that such things happen, how they happen, when they happen, where they happen, and to and by what sort of people they happen. Thus they develop mental sets modelled on the TV portrayal of reality. As this conception of reality is shared by their peer or reference group, it has real consequences for their lives".

Ontario Royal Commission on Violence in the Communications Industry 1976

- We can't switch to another channel"

 

Nobody would deny that TV ads are made in order to persuade people to buy things. Presumably this is what they do, or companies would not spend such huge sums making them and having them screened. One of the winners of the IPA Gold 1992 Effectiveness Awards was the Haagen Dazs ice cream-as-sexual experience ads which cost £500,000 and increased sales by 60% over a period of a year.

It seems the stereotypes presented for consumption and the images of success and failure are being internalised. On 27 February 1986 14.4 million people tuned into East Enders and watched Angie try to kill herself after she found out her husband had been screwing around again. At Hackney Hospital in East London the total number of deliberate overdose cases
admitted during the following week went up by 300%. Later that year, in November, Angie and Den tried to get their marriage back together by going to see a marriage guidance counsellor; the National Marriage Guidance Council recorded a 50% increase in the number of callers in need of their services. In this instance is the emotional force of the action increased through personalisation and familiarity? Would the same effect be found through televised coverage of riots? Apparently, to some degree, yes; as reporting of riots has been subject to blanket bans to forestall `copycat rioting'. That, as the loony right suggests, television can create a culture of rioting, is very much in doubt. There does seem to be more basis to the belief that we can be made to salivate on cue for ice cream, blood or Baronness Thatcher's head on a stick and might act on advance publicity on the likely occurrence of rioting. It's more likely though that we'd stay home in the hope of watching the whole thing, with replays, on TV. With any luck, the revolution will be televised.

The `revolutions' in Eastern Europe certainly have been played out more on the screen than the street-most of the battles that have occurred between the old and new bosses have been for the television stations. The image has become the predominant mode of public address. In Romania, the new rulers were inaugurated live on the box; the State Television station which hosted the show adapted itself seamlessly to the new conditions:

Today, business has returned to usual and the political situation stabilised. Television continues to be a tool for control, but with a new caste of exploiters' (fittingly, a large number of them from media and cultural professions). By January 1993 the independent stations that sprang up during the leadership struggle in Romania had all had their operating licences refused, in order to make way for a company that intends to pipe in CNN 20 hours a day.

TV constantly imposes images which in their immediacy and directness impede conceptual thinking. It inhibits thought by inducing us to live, mentally, in a world of arbitrary and fragmented definitions and automatic ideological equations. By encouraging us to accept ready-made ideas it is fostering in its viewers a mental passivity manifest in purely emotional activity (such as impulse buying). Sure, take your desires for reality; just make sure they're your own. Can television teach us to be radical? Though we may all suffer from mass illusion, there is no formula for mass disillusionment; all efforts only embroider our illusions.

"An antiwar film is generally assumed to have a 'powerful' effect if it presents a barrage of the horrors of war. The actual subliminal effect of such a barrage is, if anything, pro-war-getting caught up in an irresistible onslaught of chaos and violence is precisely what is exciting about war to jaded spectators. Overwhelming people with a rapid succession of emotion-rousing images only confirms them in their habitual sense of helplessness in the face of a world beyond their control. Spectators may be shocked into a momentary anti-war revulsion by pictures of napalmed babies, but they may just as easily be whipped into a fascistic fury the next day by different images-of flag burners, say." Bureau of Public Secrets

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