Nodding Doggy Style
Taken from Test Card F

"A new source of viewers could be at hand however. Some eight and a half million people say that their pets are watching more television than ever, with about half describing them as 'active viewers'." Times 27.8.91

Time spent sitting in front of the telly cannot be given over to anything else. Why read between the lines to deconstruct the manipulated knowledge about a life you stopped living as you sat down to watch? Sure, neither is writing or conversation a transparent window on the world. They are a map; maps obviously differ from the area they describe, they are its representation, through which we can recognise nevertheless the terrain in question. What someone says or writes is taken with a pinch of salt because conversation and the written word is easily discerned and understood as subjective. Filmed footage demands for itself an imperative "truth". No matter what anyone may have said, "the bastards" were indeed "torturing our boys" in the Gulf when the BBC screened the pictures of the battered faces of captured Brit flyers Lieutenants John Peters and Adrian Nichol.
(Peters' wife was given the full version of the video by `visitors' on condition she kept quiet about it. On the un-broadcast tapes her husband told them he was fine and his bruises had occurred when he ejected from his aircraft. The Dispatches series wheeled out the 'made for TV' version again just before the re-introduction of the Iraqi no-fly zone).

The image operates upon us in a manner which conceals its ideological function because it appears to record rather than to transform. Its power lies in its visual character as an actual trace of reality, the evidence of our own eyes-'this really happened, see for yourself'. Television deals above all in manipulating emotion, with no time for reflection; we are made to feel part of the event because millions are seeing it at the same time. It is a constant mental battle to remind ourselves that the electronic image is an illusion created through its manufacture, the editing process.

Harvard University research group set out in the early '80s to compare ways in which children respond to what they read in a book and what they see on television, by presenting exactly the same material to two groups of children. One group simply had to sit and listen to somebody reading them a story while the other group was shown a film in which the same story was read out as the soundtrack and illustrations from the book were shown on the screen. The real-life storyteller and the television narrator were the same person.

The book group was found to have taken in a good deal more of the story than the TV group. They could recall whole chunks of it verbatim as well as several details, whereas the TV group showed that they had absorbed the images, left most of the words behind and couldn't speak much of what they had seen. The TV story was accepted as what the project described as a 'self-contained experience' -images with little connection to anything else. Children in the book group were much better than those in the TV group when it came to discussing, conceptualising and even abstracting from the story. The results seemed to indicate that it is not the content of a TV programme that affects viewers negatively but the medium itself. TV is a lazy medium through providing all the images for us (someone else's) and by suppressing " inferential reasoning" creative and imaginative thought becomes impossible.

Broadcast programming compounds this disconnection. It is constantly in flux-if we disagree with something we can't go back and reconsider it. In conversation, in reading, we take the elements of what is said or written as well as the utterence as a whole and translate it in our minds into another active and responsive context. When we watch television we have no opportunity to take part in the discourse; it allows no reciprocal (give and take) action between transmitter and receiver. The ability to respond on equal terms at the pace of our own intellect is denied us and we are lulled into uncritical consumption of the assumptions and connotations made. If we do disagree, we have only the democratic right to turn. off. Only one party to the relationship initiates the communication, that same party gets to illustrate the talk, and before it comes to questions at the end time, they rush on to ' something else. It's a modern-day Nuremberg rally; it's like discussing politics with someone with a '` technicolour megaphone and schooled in fast-talking,who has put the receivers into 50 million separate isolation booths. The bark of the producer is amplified to an overwhelming roar against which the supervised consumer can barely whisper. And with the right pictures you can prove anything.

Are we being systematically brainwashed by images of immense mental power over which we have no control? And are we being forced to watch? Or to put it another way: have we got any choice? Is anyone in our `information age' society outside TV, beyond its compulsions? TV licence snoopers now work on the premise that every household must have a TV-if you ain't got a licence for one, it follows that you're trying to watch for free. So you get a visit (and not to bring you unedited war videos starring your husband). We are surrounded and worked on from birth to be passive consumers, at the receiving end of initiatives originated remotely and conditioned into internalising the media's ways of seeing. Although it is perfectly possible to decode TV messages, disagree with them and reverse their ideology, it is not the case that we are free to decode as we wish. Oppositional readings are dependent upon an ability to make an accurate decoding in the first place.

"The objection that we overate greatly the indoctrinating power of the media misses the point. The preconditioning does not start with the mass production of radio and television and the centralization of their control. The people entered this stage as preconditioned receptacles of long standing." Herbert Marcuse

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