The truth about television

There has been a lot of debate about the effects of television since the goggle-box made its entrance in our livingrooms. In this debate McLuhan, the prophet of the new media, takes an important role. According to him, man is ‘made’ by television, though, it will finally lead to his liberaration. McLuhan is a man of paradoxes. He challenges me to inquire his thesis. The central question in this article is therefore, in howfar is McLuhan’s vision on TV tenable? Before the arrival of the electronic media, such as television, we lived in what McLuhan calls, ‘the Gutenberg age’ This was an age in which the printing press of Gutenberg was the central medium and in which man was not really free. McLuhan argues (as far you can call it arguing) this out in the following way. All media have effect on our ‘sense ratio’ this means, on the balance of our senses. Every medium is namely an extension of a human capacity. A book is for example an extension of our eye and a computer is an extension of our central nervesystem. When one sense gets too much extended by a single medium, it leads to an automatic contract of our other senses. This was the case in the Gutenberg age. The printed book was the only medium in these days and the eye got the most pressure so that an ‘eye culture’came into existence. This extension of our eye had changed our whole way of thinking. By too much attention on the use of the eye we became cool, calculating individuals. With Gutenberg the rise of individualism began and community-thinking got under pressure. McLuhan shows us that a medium, such as a printing press, is capable of determining our way of doing and thinking. It can create us. Technologies are in no way neutral according to McLuhan: “The medium is the message.” But this does not necessarily mean total unfreedom. With the arrival of television there is hope as a matter of fact according to the autor. This medium has namely some attractive qualities. First, in this medium image and sound are combined, which means that the use of the ear increases. The ‘sense ratio’ gets in balance again. Second, the televisionscreen (in the time of McLuhan’s writing) shows the spectator millions of little dots that he has to process. The viewer only grasps on a dozen a second so that the spectator has to create the image himself. He has to ‘taste’ the screen. McLuhan calls the television therefore a ‘tactile’ medium. Because of its imperfect screen quality the television invites us to become more involved. We have to interpret and fill in the image in an active way. Television is therefore a ‘cool’medium because it has a low amount of information and it demands a high degree of involvement. More over, the information on TV is not a lineair, logical sequence of messages. All images, texts, and sounds appear simultaneously and mixed up. The meaning is not so clear therefore. And we are forced to use our creativity to get to a solution of the puzzle. This is a form of recreation. In the first place, television introduces people from different countries to eachother. It brings us common experiences Modern man is brought back in the ancient tribal relation again. Because of the fact that television speaks to our hear- and taste capacity rebirth of our feeling is stimulated. We then feel again the need in deep relations with others. The village community thinking will arise and the world in large will become a ‘global village’. Secondly, television changes us from rational, calculating individuals into creative, associative and interactive thinkers. This thinking was in the past only a gift of artists. So television will make artists of all of us, we will unfold  ourselves and thus will be freed from our on rational thinking based individualism. This process is unavoidable. Man has no control on the medium anymore. What McLuhan concludes is that television determinated us to be free, free to unfold ourselves. It will lead to a renaissance of civilization.  In my opinion McLuhan’s thesis is not tenable. Television is a synthesis of two old media, which both possesses qualities that make man stupid and uncritical. Those two media are the telegraph and the photograph. The telegraph introduced a new sort of information, namely a well of non-related, mixed up and unimportant information, that came from all corners of the world. This stream of information crosses the nation, but no one was asking for it. This had two consequences. First, telegraph legitimated the idea of context-free information, which means, the idea that information not necessarily needed to have a serving function for societal goals. Information became a goal an sich. It beame trading stuff. The telegraph made ‘all’ information important, everything was news as long as people wanted to pay for it. In this way the telegraph ‘created’ our thinking. We started to see unimportant information as important. We were not able anymore to discern between relevant and irrelevant information. In other words, wheter information was important was an unimportant question. Secondly, because of the speed of the mass of information that came to us from all over the world, the coherence of the information got lost. Information got fragmentized and was no longer a lineair, logical sequence of messages.Whereas McLuhan calls this a possive thing, he forgets then that all we can do with this sort of information, is recognize it and – because logical connections disappear – not ‘understand’ it. The telegraph ,makes humans to passive consumers of information. The activity of reasoning, understanding and giving meaning to messages gets suppressed and what is left over is that our critical capacity will implode. Then, photography complements telegraphy. She gave newsflashes from here and there a particular face. Because of the fact that photographs traditionally have the connotation of being scientific objective and neutral evidence, they provided information of an illusion of truth. Here plays the old rule an important part: seeing, then believing. The cooperation of photography and telegraphy made us to dumb beings. We believe what we see and don’t doubt the truth of the images. Because TV is the synthese of both media, the effect gets stronger since the interaction of images and texts penetrates the viewer. Our ability to be critical will decrease. Two factors play a role in this process  furthermore. First, television is comfortable to us. We have grown up with it since our early childhood and It was our most comfortable friend that teached us all about the world as we were young. The trust in this medium is born early. Second, television is associated with spare time and relaxing. It garuantees fun and entertainment. Media presents information as entertainment (the news ‘show’). In this way, serious and important information is presented as entertainment and thus important information is made unimportant. Television has erased the discours and we got less critical. We trust like a blind the images of television and cannot discern between meaningful and non-‘sense’. McLuhan’s thesis that television, although determining, makes us free is thus not tenable. It will not lead to unfolding ourselves. It shrinks our unfolding because it erases our critical capacity. Television determines us in the way that it makes uncritical, following sheeps out of us. We better free ourselves ‘from’ television and its prophets.