THE TV EFFECT

 

This blog has been sharing an overview of American history to provide a summary account of how the US has become a nation of people disposed to deviant behavior.  Starting with the posting, “Early On,”[1] that account has reviewed those aspects of America’s past that have encouraged too many Americans to deviate from laws or norms.  The focus of this review has been the nation’s culture.

It began by describing how in its origin, the nation struggled through the clash between Calvinism and transcendentalism.  It then described how the individualism of transcendentalism was reinforced by pragmatism as the basic ideas of William James were reviewed.  That posting, “Representations of Reality,”[2] left readers with an indication that the advent of television solidified a self-centered sense of reality among the American people.  Interested readers are encouraged to read those two prior postings if they have not done so.

On the topic of TV, this blog counts on the work of the late Neil Postman.  “I believe the epistemology created by television not only is inferior to a print-based epistemology but is dangerous and absurdist,”[3] wrote Postman.  Written exposition, which was the major method of communication coming into the mid-twentieth century, demands analysis and inferential thinking skills.  By way of a historical note, Postman claimed that the beginning of the end for exposition began with the invention of the photograph but surely was accomplished with the effects of TV.

By what means?  The image media of television demands passivity as the viewer is presented with a discontinuous, trivial reality.  This is highly congruent with the philosophical disposition left from the nation’s historical development.  America was ready for the worst effects of this newer media.

One can compare that to a previous time when information was expressed through written words; this previous state demands a culture which promotes a reflective and useful presentation of information in its discourse of reality.  Postman related how America was different in the nineteenth century despite its transcendental biases.  In fact, America was a book and pamphlet reading nation.

 

Public business was channeled into and expressed through print, which became the model, the metaphor and the measure of all discourse.  The resonances [defined as the power of influencing thought and action] of the lineal, analytical structure of print, and in particular, of expository prose, could be felt everywhere.[4]

 

As opposed to that level of reflection, the television culture is bombarded with a constant stream of useless, disconnected information.  This “peek-a-boo” form of messaging or discourse is ubiquitous with “only one pervasive voice – the voice of entertainment.”[5]  It also seems alive and well in the age of the cell phone. While Postman gave in his cited book many examples of the pervasiveness of this entertainment outlook, the example most relevant here is in the chapter entitled, “Teaching as an Amusing Activity.” 

As elsewhere, the character of the media in classrooms determines the character of the activity.  In terms of schooling, that is, the activity is formulating the curriculum.  What is most frightening about Postman’s argument is that the cited dangers seem to be accepted as innovative education.  He argued that educational television follows TV’s commandments:  no prerequisites, no perplexity, and avoidance of exposition. 

More generally, within that media, this approach renders it impossible for any instructional messaging to look at any issue responsibly either within classrooms, or at home.  There are the cable channel news networks, such as Fox, CNN, and MSNBC, but their viewership is best measured in the hundreds of thousands of viewers (Fox leads with over 2 million), [6] a fraction of the adult population.

To the argument that TV allows educators the ability to present studied materials dramatically, Postman cited research that questions the notion of that advantage – that is that learning takes place when material is presented in dramatic style.  He summed up the effect of curriculum based on TV as follows:

 

And, in the end, what will the students have learned?  They will … have learned something about [the subject matter].  Mainly, they will have learned that learning is a form of entertainment or, more precisely, that anything worth learning can take the form of an entertainment, and ought to.[7]

 

This blogger can only add that during the course of his career (1972-2007), his experience demonstrated an ever-shorter tolerance among students to engage with plain verbal communication.  And in addition, the prevailing disposition that students expressed seemed to be, as they walked into the classroom, “entertain me or what you have to do or say is illegitimate.”

By illegitimate this blogger does not mean only boring, but that the experience is an unjustified waste of their time.  And of course, the relevant standard of entertainment is defined by the prevailing media forms, such as TV, which are multi-million-dollar media productions. 

At best, only a relative handful of individual teachers, in the multitude of classrooms across the nation, can compete with that level of entertainment.  And that is to say nothing about whether those teachers who can are actually teaching anything of worth.  One can suppose the answer is no, given the general estimation as to how effective American schools are – mediocre at best.[8]

But TV is not the only agent legitimizing this dysfunctional cultural bias.  Educators themselves have adopted certain concepts and paradigms that further complicate the situation and compound the prevailing individualism, anti-intellectualism, and temporal view of the American people.  Educators have not been immune from the above-described historical forces.  And to boot, these forces met their “scientific” foundation in perceptual/humanistic psychology, a turn which this blog will next address.

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[1] Robert Gutierrez, “Early On,” Gravitas:  A Voice for Civics, February 13, 2024, accessed February 15, 2024, URL:  https://gravitascivics.blogspot.com/.

[2] Robert Gutierrez, “Representations of Reality,” Gravitas:  A Voice for Civics, February 16, 2024, accessed February 17, 2024, URL:  https://gravitascivics.blogspot.com/.

[3] Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death (New York, NY:  Penguin Books, 1985), 27.

[4] Ibid., 41.

[5] Ibid., 80.

[6] “Dominick Mastrangelo, “Fox News Top-Rated Cable Channel for Eighth Straight Year,” The Hill, December 14, 2023, accessed February 17, 2024, URL:  https://thehill.com/homenews/media/4360708-fox-news-top-rated-cable-news-channel/#:~:text=Fox%20News%20took%20the%20crown,to%20Nielsen%20Media%20Research%20data.

[7] Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death, 154.  Emphasis added.

[8] Julia Ryan, “American Schools vs. the World:  Expensive, Unequal, Bad at Math,” The Atlantic, December 3, 2013, accessed February 19, 2024, https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2013/12/american-schools-vs-the-world-expensive-unequal-bad-at-math/281983/.