Chapter 5

TV Close Up

        Like media, addiction shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action. Addiction invests lives with artificia1 perception and arbitrary values.

        Television enables our addictions and is itself addictive because of (1) constant focus on substances removed from their context, and (2) constant repetition of its images.

        Focus is the enlargement of a small area of a picture and the resulting disappearance of the surrounding area. We define compulsive focus as having two aspects: chronic repetition of focus, and compulsive avoidance of context.

        TV cannot help but do this. The television set is a box to begin with. It contains a box-shaped screen that presents pictures torn from their terrain in the real world. When the television camera further focuses on a small part of the torn-out picture, TV itself becomes the context of the image.

The result is cognitive impairment: loss of classification and seriation. The basic activity of mind is to relate things logically and to rank them in importance. TV subverts this. The images are placed in the wrong mental categories, and loss of seriation results in impairment of such things as ranking priorities, and moral judgment.

The biggest side-effect is male-villain female-victim.

[Obsessions. The mental equivalent of compulsions, they consist of focused and repetitive thinking about a particular thing or idea removed from its context.]

         There is a second context over and above the screen, namely, the larger picture, the world background into which pictures and ideas fit This is the cognitive context, the organization or understanding of what we see. It is called, "real life." Get the picture?

TV news creates a surreal version of life by its compulsive focus on rare one-in-a-million events, the one tenth of one percent of all the events in a day. Night after night viewers see only extremely rare events and begin to form a perception of the world as filled with the type of events seen on the nightly news.

[New York City's negative media image belies the fact that so many people pay so much to live there (see for example, New York Times 06/14/92).]

[Austin Texas, 1992. After a multiple murder in a local restaurant, many residents buy guns and take self-defense classes convinced that a major crime wave is spreading over their fair city. Yet as a professor at the University of Texas at Austin says, there is actually a decline in violent crime in the area.]

         Most of the residents don't believe the professor. They are reacting to years of compulsive news focus on one-in-a-million events. The rare has become the usual. The News has become reality out of context. The Six O'clock News is surreal.

[TV  news context is often a picture surrounding the focus area.]  The Chicago skyline surrounds the politician on the nightly news. This is the 'context' that places the story in Chicago. Context can also be created by a "set-up shot." Instead of surrounding his head, the fake skyline is shown a few seconds before the person appears screen.

[Sound Bytes I. Politicians know that in order to win election they must spent in bits & pieces for TV.] They have 9 or 10 seconds to get their sound-byte message across. So they must oversimplify complex problems and make oversimplified accusations about opponents who are not there to reply. The viewers get big bite of junkfood. Talkshows provide some of the missing background, but to fewer viewers.

[Sound Bytes II. In the 1980s, sound bytes averaged 9.8 seconds. By the early 90s down to 6.3 seconds. Inflation again.]

        Over the years compulsive viewers see tens of thousands of fictional killings in everything from cartoons to soaps to war and horror films.

[TV Guide study finds increase in violence portrayed in television programs. Children's cartoons are most violent (see Newsweek,  08/17/92).]

[2000. A study finds NO children's movie is without at least some kind of violence.]

       Real-life death, however, is almost never seen on TV.

[California, 1991. Debate rages over televised executions (US News & World Report, 06/17/91, p. 10.)]

        The most powerful use of this most powerful tool is advertising. There one finds a boom in zoom-in. While news talkshows try to reconnect stories and pictures to the real world, advertisers do the very opposite.

[Beerland. The bottle on the screen is huge, zooming our attention to it in a big way. Next, our attention is fixated on the beer midpour The sound track increases our fixation on the action until our minds are completely absorbed in Beerland There, beautiful people in bathing suits drink and play on a beautiful beach They appear to be having great fun while new relationships bud.]

        We agree with McLuhan that ads reflect daily life, but we say that the reflections are surreal shadows on a cave wall. Advertisers create surreal worlds to surround substances with surreal settings. They replace the missing context not with reality but with Beerland, a surreal world where beer drinking is involved in everything that happens. The little never-never lands of Adworld are devoid of any meaning or purpose other than total attention to the focus substance.

        Over time and by slow operations, the beer beaches and car-topped mountains of Adworld can no longer be re-integrated into reality because each misrepresents it. So, life goes on rather nicely in Coffeeland here "the best part of waking up is coffee in your cup," A fix, first thing. In Burgerillo, due west of Sixpack, "you have it right away, your way."

        The big problem is superdenial. With its powerful mixed drink of compulsive focus on substances flash-by, and surreal reconstruction of the worlds around them, television advertising denies our addictions by showing them close up. Right there in front of us are all our addictions but we cannot step outside Addictionland, the Western Hemisphere of Adworld, in order to see them as they are. For a consciousness unable to focus on anything for very long at all, the speedy flash-by of beer bottles and bikinis in Beerland is very powerful.

         The power of advertisements to create purchase of substances is what pays for the media. Adworld lives or dies with this power, the power of suggestion.

        The psychological conditions necessary for effective suggestion were discovered nearly a century ago by a great psychiatrist-psychologist Dr. Boris Sidis (pr. "sigh-diss"). This unsung hero theorized that suggestion is made possible by disaggregation of consciousness--a breakup of the organization of consciousness "...in which the subwaking reflex consciousness enters into direct communication with the external world." Sidis's Law of Suggestion is "The more disaggregated the consciousness, the more suggestible it is."

        Sidis proposed that the psychological conditions necessary to bring about disaggregation are:

1.  Fixation of Attention

2.  Distraction

3.  Repetition

4,  Limitation of voluntary movement

5.  Limitation of the field of consciousness

6.  Inhibition

7.  Immediate execution of the suggestion.

The Psychology of Suggestion

        Over time and by slow operations, the viewer sees tens of thousands of bits and pieces of information every day. The bits and pieces no overall organization, no synthesis in a larger picture.

        That job of synthesis of the is taken over by the TV medium itself. In a disaggregated state, the viewer is highly suggestible,  floats adrift, with this wind and that, without destiny. With the real-world context removed, the medium itself becomes the surrounding world. This creates whole new worlds for advertisers to use.

[TV Quiz Shows. Contestants answer questions on facts. The flash-by facts consumed by the viewer are disaggregated.]

        Addicted viewers watch TV six or more hours per day. Since one third of all TV time is devoted to advertising. two or more hours of a compulsive viewers day are spent in Adworld.]

         Extended travel in Adworid is not without its side effects. Many compulsive viewers become less and less able to distinguish fantasy from reality. Because of the energetic mixed-drink of Sidis's conditions, flashby and create surreal contexts for the substances. Television advertising gives compulsive viewers--over time and by slow operations--the impression that Beerland and Car Mountain are part of real life.

        At its heart fantasy is intended to appear real. The viewer is taken in--fooled--and experiences fantasy as reality. This type of fantasy is not dysfunctional. But there is a type that is.

         To some viewers the fantasy characters in the daytime dramas (soaps operas) have become teat-persons. For these viewers the clear border between real life and fantasy is out or focus. Fiction becomes nonfiction.

[Setting: A late-afternoon talkshow on which a number of daytime-drama (soap-open) stars are guests. After considerable applause from a wildly enthusiastic audience; the soapstars proceed to talk not about themselves as the real persons behind the character, but about the plot lives of the characters they represent. The hostess asks the same kinds of questions asked on most talkshows, but this time the actors answer the questions as their characters would. The context is not reality but the plots of the soaps When the actors are asked about their relationships with each other, here too the line is crossed. When two characters have an intimate relationship in a plot, some audience members seem to think that the actors themselves are similarly involved.]

[Robert Young, the actor who played a TV doctor, received thousands of letters asking for medical advice.]

[Daytime-drama (soap opera) producers report that when there is a wedding in the plot. gifts arrive at local television stations.]

[1992. U.S. Vice President J. Danforth Quayle picks a fight with a fictional TV character, and then sends a real gift to her fictional baby.]

        There is also the reverse of fantasy real-persons.

[Oscars All Acting. One of the largest TV audiences assembled each year is for the National Academy of Film Arts and Sciences' 'Oscar" Awards Ceremony. Movie stars appear in front of more than a billion viewers worldwide. They act as themselves. Few TV producers dare dream of so large an audience.

[Lifestyles. The Rich and Famous are not reclusive like Packard's Ultras. Their mass appeal derives from their rarity--one in a hundred--and widespread wealth & power and fame addiction.]

        As ASCOs television corporations need more and more money & power. Inflation is expressed in many ways such as increased cost of advertising. Another expression of inflation is compulsive imitation of financially successful shows. 

        Completely codependent on Adworld, television corporation live and die on statistical surveys of viewer TV use. Advertisers are only interested in the number of viewers who will see their ads, and in the type of consumer a particular show will reach. As such, TV is indeed a reflection of what viewers want. The reflection, however, is but a statistical shadow. True, you just might find they try sometimes to give you what you want, but this involves financial risk. To the Chairman of the Board the past is far less risky than the future, so TV corporations tend to focus on the status quo ante. Shows that break barriers, that reintegrate consciousness, are few and far between. Much of the TV present is reruns of the past.

        The very idea of a game is that it is itself the context for rules and regulations that have no meaning outside of the game. A baseball field's boundaries are entirely internal to the game itself and have no meaning in the real world. Thus, spectator sports are perfect for the compulsive focus and repetition of TV. Adworld is where professional sports are played.

[The Endless Weekend: Compulsive Sports Viewing. For too many viewers, the only I expression passion Occurs during the game.

[The Game Isn't Enough. Twenty-four-hour-sports-talk radio is part corporate real life, and part the fantasy real-world of sports.]

[Athletes are at high risk of addiction. As if their high effort, high repetition, high endorphine life styles were not enough they must also deal with fast-lane money and fame. Worse, many are "on' television.]

[See Baseball and Billions by Andrew Zimbalist.]

       Some addicted viewers compulsively seek to appear on TV themselves but TV corporations control who gets 'on'." Competition is fast and furious. They will run a long gauntlet of rejection. There are countless examples of famous stars who were rejected a hundred times before being 'discovered' by some media executive This is testimony to the corporate wealth and power hierarchy's predominance. It subsumes any merit or artistic hierarchy.

[Can't They Tell? Pop singer Madonna camped out on a media executive's doorstep for six weeks in order to be 'discovered'. Robert M. Pirsig, author of the massive best-seller Zen and the Art of Motorcycle was rejected by 120 publishers. A recent Pulitzer winner was rejected by 13.]

        They are very much needed. But what the credentialed group says on TV has little to do with what they studied in Academe. Most viewers don't know this, however, and don't realize that Oprah, Jerry, Sally Jessie, Montel, et al., are able therapists.

© 2008 danmahony.com

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