Monday, August 23, 2004
(9:24 AM) | Adam Kotsko:
Television
Before I begin, a couple notes: first, you would possibly be better off skipping this post and reading this one, a review of the "Thinking in Action" series that addresses the commodification of philosophy. I found it via this post by Adrian at The Young Hegelian, dealing with the problem of too many damn books. Second, my post about Burger King and graduate school was the 750th post to appear on The Weblog. That's a lot of posts.The only time I watch TV anymore is when visiting home, and as such, I'm not very good at watching TV. Unaccustomed to the passivity of television-viewing, I unconsciously assume that the words coming out of the television require a response. At times, that leads to a very annoying experience for everyone else. Yesterday, for instance, while most people in the room were ignoring the TV, talking about people I didn't know, I blurted out, "Who in the world has to finance a $500 computer?" Everyone looked at me as though I were from outer space, then went back to what they were doing.
The question still stands: who does have to finance a $500 computer? Perhaps some people experience computer emergencies, where their computer breaks down in the middle of a project and they need another one immediately -- but then why not find a public computer, or borrow a friends'? Why must Best Buy (or whoever) aggressively market their financing plans with "no payments and no interest for six months"? Is saving up $500 out of the question? It would take me a few months to do so, but I daresay I could manage it. But that, of course, would take me off the constant treadmill of debt, perhaps allow me to go a brief period without working, perhaps even give me a more realistic view of the value of money so that I wouldn't spend it so promiscuously on useless consumer products. So -- no payments and no interest for six months. It helps Best Buy to sell more computers, to have a promise of more money coming in in the future, and it contributes to the society-wide quest to keep the average person from ever constituting a reserve, from ever being free from anxiety about money, even for a moment. It's not a conspiracy, but it functions like one.
And all the commercials for drugs! They're disturbing -- all this list of side effects, "generally mild," with a request to ask your doctor if this medicine is right for you. Doesn't this seem horribly backward to anyone else? Shouldn't you go to the doctor to report symptoms, then she prescribes the drug that is right for you, rather than going to the doctor with a request for a particular drug that some commercial has already assured you is right? And this is virtually every commercial break.
Even watching the Olympics themselves -- though it is infinitely preferable to the decorating shows that are normally on when I'm visiting -- was a disturbing experience. One could easily come away from NBC's coverage believing that the United States won nearly all the medals. In a time of global unrest, a responsible television network might take an international sporting event as an opportunity for cultivating sympathy with people of other countries and sharing joy in their accomplishments as well -- perhaps by showing more events in which Americans are not real contenders or by doing a biographical montage on a foreign athlete. Admittedly, I only watched a few hours of coverage over a couple days, but I saw none of that.
I suppose that one way you can tell that I'm on the left is that in my opinion, ideally there would be disproportionately little coverage of American athletes, that the broadcasters would recognize that overwhelming power and prestige of the United States in almost every area of life around the globe and thus go out of their way to make the Olympics into an opportunity for other countries, especially smaller countries, to shine -- in front of an American audience. Perhaps a related phenomenon: aside from my horror at the events themselves, my first reaction to 9/11 was to worry about what we were going to do to other people as a result; apparently, the average reaction was to worry about when "the terrorists" were going to strike again, and as illustrated in Michael Moore's latest film, television was ready and willing to exploit, encourage, and even help create that fear.
The commercials for McDonald's (with Ronald McDonald participating in various events) and Budweiser (with ridiculously easy events) were humorous only in their mockery of the idiotic announcers -- to a certain degree, the announcers are already parodies of themselves, such that merely imitating them is enough to produce a satirical effect. Yet this irony itself seems vaguely menacing. If television is already self-consciously making fun of itself, what is left for the audience to mock? The possibilities for derision of television are artificially truncated by a front-loading of the mockery process itself.
A similar problem seems to grow out of the Fox News phenomenon. Although it is presented as a way of broadening the variety of political discourse, in reality it flattens it out -- not only by granting a few convenient positions a canonical "conservative" status and thus prematurely short-circuiting debate among conservative-minded people, but also in attaching a certain derisive "attitude" to conservative discourse. Certainly a conservative could come away from a centrist or "liberal" news broadcast disgusted at the unfair coverage contained therein and thus engage in a debate about it -- but Fox News produces that same attitude in the context of a newscast with which the viewer ostensibly agrees. Rather than being disgusted with one particular newscast he has seen, the viewer is in effect disgusted with all the other newscasts, which he has not seen (and I'm sure most of us know at least one conservative who claims to watch nothing but Fox News). The slogans "Fair and Balanced" and "We report, you decide" are similar in structure -- they are not directed toward the Fox newscast itself, which is transparently biased and celebrated for that, but rather toward every other newscast. Rather than being a positive claim that Fox can be trusted, the slogans are more importantly a claim that everyone else cannot, that there is only one viable option. For this reason, the "attitude" of Fox News, rather than the conservative bias itself, is the true danger.
I'll have to see if these opinions still hold around Christmas time, which will likely be the next time I watch television.
