Article: 309 of sgi.talk.ratical
From: (dave "who can do? ratmandu!" ratcliffe)
Subject: think what goebbels wud've given for television
Organization: Silicon Graphics, Inc.
Date: Wed, 16 Oct 1991 14:17:04 GMT
Lines: 282
As a one-way communication device, television is an instrument of
social control, a way to engage and influence many people without
granting them the right to talk back. . . . The apparatus itself-
-large, centralized transmission facilities and sets in every home
that can only receive signals--reinforces a pattern of passive
dependence. From this most basic level on up to its daily content,
television returns the message inherent in the very idea of
broadcasting: watch, don't do.
from m.a.p.:
Article: 994 of misc.activism.progressive
From: rich@pencil.cs.missouri.edu (Rich Winkel)
Subject: Propaganda Review #1, Winter 87/88 (part 6/6)
Organization: PACH
Date: Thu, 10 Oct 1991 09:23:20 GMT
Lines: 475
/** propaganda.rev: 2.20 **/
** Written 8:19 pm Sep 28, 1991 by ppaull in cdp:propaganda.rev **
"That's Entertainment"
by Jay Rosen
As a one-way communication device, television is an instrument of
social control, a way to engage and influence many people without
granting them the right to talk back. This familiar interpretation
of broadcasting as a social form can be taken a step further: it
is possible to view the entire enterprise of television as
propagandistic.
The apparatus itself--large, centralized transmission facilities
and sets in every home that can only receive signals--reinforces
a pattern of passive dependence. From this most basic level on
up to its daily content, television returns the message inherent
in the very idea of broadcasting: watch, don't do.
Different forms of television programming can be seen as
different ways to impress upon the population the rewards of
spectatorship. Entertainment is merely the name we give to the
most obvious case.
Where the Action Is
As a form of propaganda, entertainment's strategy is to convert
the passivity of the audience into the image of its opposite.
Sometimes this is a simple naming trick. Take, for example, the
"action show," a type of television drama named for the exchange
of violence among criminals and cops. In an action show, action
is what the characters do and what happens to their cars and
helicopters. By glorifying these kinds of action, the passivity
of the audience is reinforced and renamed as its opposite.
A true "action show" would be self-cancelling, as the crazed
newscaster Howard Beale demonstrated in the film Network. Beale
urges his viewers to rise out of their chairs, open the windows
and scream out to each other his motto, "I'm mad as hell, and I'm
not going to take it anymore!"
If the audience obeys, it is no longer an audience. To use
television as Beale does is to abandon it for a recovered public
realm, in which citizens are ready to act, listen, and talk to
one another. So contrary is this to the logic of broadcasting
that only an insane person would try it. That, of course, is the
plot device in the film. Beale's assassination is a ritual
purification of network thinking, a kind of witch-burning meant
to dramatize the permissible limits of broadcasting as a social
tool.
Donahue Does It
Phil Donahue is fully within these limits. He hands television
over to citizens only to take it back whenever he senses the
momentum of the show weakening. The tick-tocking of Donahue's
microphone, to and fro between host and housewife, is a teasing
rhythm meant to defer its suggested climax: the takeover of
television by the silent and the dispossessed.
Donahue imagines himself a populist, the talk show host who
believes ordinary people have "something to say." But his
loyalty cannot be to free speech, the imperfections of which
drive a TV producer wild with impatience. In granting the
audience its right to speak, Donahue is not sincere. There are
no apologies when he jerks the microphone away and heads back
down the steps.
As a piece of propaganda that presents broadcasting as a forum
for free speech, the Donahue program is quite complex. With its
call-in link to home viewers, it seems to offer another reversal
of the audience's traditionally silent and inert role. But this
too is symbolic and limited. The whole exercise has about it
the air of a show trial, in which rights are granted only for
their theatrical value.
In the end, Donahue's function is to cut people off and enforce
for television a higher imperative than free speech: to keep
things moving. It is his movement from speaker to speaker that
ultimately keeps the audience still--and therefore still an
audience. Donahue moves to make sure you don't.
Sight and Sound
The baser forms of entertainment use movement to enforce
passivity in much cruder ways. The language is instructive: "a
sight and sound spectacular," "an entertainment extravaganza," "a
cavalcade of stars." The effort is to leave the recipient
dumbstruck by the force of the superlative as it rushes toward
exhaustion.
Where language falters in conveying the essence of the
spectacular, the visuals take over. A big production number in,
say, the Miss America pageant or the Academy Awards show will
attempt to overwhelm the audience with movement--legs, sets,
costumes, and especially the movement of light.
Most of the visual shorthands for entertainment involve the play
of light: the blinking lights of the theater marquee, the
criss-crossing spotlights of a Hollywood opening, the neon lights
of Broadway and Las Vegas. The symbol of Elvis Presley's decay
into a mere entertainer is the glittery costume he wore at his
Vegas stage shows.
Glitter "reads" entertainment because its purpose is merely to
stun the audience with the sparkle of light--at the deepest
level, to blind the spectator into submission. Thus Presley was
called "the King" by his fans. By dressing in glitter, Elvis
signaled a sad kinship with Liberace, a self-declared entertainer
whose act was gradually refined into pure spectacle.
In all spectacle, the effort is to leave the audience awestruck
and, in a way, helpless. Liberace would stand before his fans
and let them adore the sight of his diamond-spangled outfits.
The energy evoked by such a display is disabling for the
audience. The light reflecting off the diamonds is intended to
blind; the fury of the big production number encourages its
passive consumption as "sight and sound." These very terms, now
an entertainment cliche, are quite accurate ways of describing
the goals of the entertainer as spectacle-maker: to get the
audience to watch and listen to sights and sounds. This is as
close to pure consumption as culture can get.
Television graphics present the spectacular in its most
concentrated form. Using computer animation, image-makers are
creating a world of pure movement unbound by the laws of physics.
Logos twist and zoom in abstract space; layers of language curve
toward the viewer, only to separate and reform as some new term;
animated cities spring magically from maps and lure the spectator
in as if on a guided missile.
It is significant that some of the heaviest uses of the new
graphics are promotions for the networks themselves--in effect,
ads for television watching as a way of life. ("Come Home to
NBC" was the theme of one such campaign last season.) In an
effort to present television as worth watching, and watching as
something worth doing, the networks create little
mini-spectacles, light shows in which the company name is
coronated. In these ten-second fantasias, television attempts to
re-enchant itself by a display of image-wealth. So rich am I in
visual delights, says television, that, here, I'll waste a few
just to entertain my subjects.
The Function of Slick
Visual sophistication is ordinarily employed toward more
practical ends, like instant replays in sporting events and
lead-ins to newscasts. These techniques create the atmosphere of
slick professionalism we are accustomed to seeing on TV, an
atmosphere that itself has propaganda value. It suggests a
reason for the concentration of television in a few hands: that
those hands are expert at producing good, or what is sometimes
called "broadcast quality," television.
Never a neutral practice, professionalism in broadcasting has the
effect of intimidating any lay person who picks up a video
camera. More important, it systematically spoils the audience
for anything other than the current level of slickness. This is
one of the most pervasive effects of the mass media: the
consigning of whole fields of expression to the art houses, or,
worse, to a psycho-social territory that, for lack of a fit name,
can be called "the boring."
The manufacture of boredom is an important segment of what Hans
Enzensberger termed the "consciousness industry," the mass
producers of entertainment. The strategy is by now familiar. By
pushing the frontiers of image and sound outward for no other
purpose than to gain an audience, the biggest firms defoliate the
field for less powerful producers, forcing them either to adopt
the production values of the big boys or aim for a smaller
audience that is reacting against the aesthetics of the
marketplace.
Independent film, video, and recording companies all face this
pressure; the space in which they might offer an alternative to
entertainment is continually being squeezed by the majors.
This power to narrow the field of reception is exercised directly
on individuals: it comes to bear on the body itself through
changes in what the ear regards as a pleasant sound, what the eye
considers an interesting sight. By turning the bodies of the
audience against the independents, the consciousness industry
heads off one threat but creates another--the possibility that
some limit will be reached in the audience's sensitivity to
change.
Ultimate Entertainment
Among audiophiles, some people are known to have "golden ears,"
meaning that they can hear the differences in sound quality that
separates components at the upper end of the price scale. For
those with less sensitive ears, the extra $600 spent on a better
model can be enjoyed only as a technical fact--better numbers on
a page.
The implications in the visual realm are interesting to
contemplate. Image-makers may one day seek out the "golden eyes"
that can see the advantages the highest quality imagery affords.
So far the consciousness industry has not realized that it is
exhausting the resource on which it depends--the audience's
capacity to respond to stunning sights and slicker sounds.
The consumption of consumers themselves is too troubling a
prospect for the consciousness industry to face. And yet that is
the logical end of the entertainment project--a population
stripped of its will to muster the awe, or even the interest, the
spectacle seems to demand.
Last Laughs
So strained are the various attempts to prop up the spectacle
that they create a second industry out of parody. Thus the live
comedy boom throughout the 1980s and the rise of David Letterman
as a resident wise guy in the entertainment household.
Parody is a kind of negative empowerment of the audience. It
empowers because it gives back to things their right names. The
ridiculously inflated is presented as ridiculously inflated. The
laughs that result are the sound of the audience rediscovering
its collective wits in the shared recognition of how stupid the
thing being parodied really is.
But the joke may still be on us. When the balloon has been
popped and the conceit exposed, the functions of parody are over.
No political program can be made of parody.
The limits of parody and its target--hype--are the same. Neither
can provide the good will that makes communication possible in
the first place. Both share features with Reaganomics, in that
they light up the present by consuming the future. Like so much
of the present order, the situation is inherently unstable.
A population of spectators is expensive to maintain because it
believes less and less in the reality from which it is encouraged
to escape, making the spectacle seem not so special, its puncture
by parody not as sharp. But there is unlikely to be a change in
direction. To lower the intensity level of the consciousness
industry and thus preserve its future would require massive
coordination and a completely different way of thinking.
Jay Rosen is an assistant professor of journalism at New York
University and an associate of the Center for War, Peace, and the
News Media.
*** End of Article *That's Entertainment* by Jay Rosen ***
** End of text from cdp:propaganda.rev **
--
daveus rattus
yer friendly neighborhood ratman
KOYAANISQATSI
ko.yan.nis.qatsi (from the Hopi Language) n. 1. crazy life. 2. life
in turmoil. 3. life out of balance. 4. life disintegrating.
5. a state of life that calls for another way of living.