Why we have no idea what's going on

Sometime in the early 1980's, I went with my scientist brother to hear Jerry Mander speak at San Francisco State. It was an informal lecture, sparsely attended, in a classroom somewhere on campus. Mander had just published Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television. He was serious about his thesis; a guy with a video camera from the school TV station showed up to tape the lecture and Mander dismissed him quickly and without humor. At one time Mander had been a founding partner in the brilliant advertising firm of Gossage & Mander, based in San Francisco, and introduced a style and format that forever changed the look of TV ads. For example, in the seminal Volkswagen series of ads, G&M simply extolled the ability of the VW to go forward and backward, concluding with the tag line: "Isn't that wonderful?" Thus was born the notion of irony in advertising, a style which has been emulated ever since. All TV advertising now strives to be funny, with varying degrees of success.

So Jerry Mander is actually a funny guy, but he wasn't amused by the effects of television. Maybe he got religion, in a sense; maybe he became appalled at the effects of his own work, his ability to manipulate the general public with images and minimal text. Maybe he got worried. The essence of his four arguments was as follows:

"The first argument is theoretical and environmental. It attempts to set the framework by which we can understand television's place in modern society. Yet, this argument is not about television itself. In fact, television will be mentioned only occasionally. It is about a process, already long underway, which has successfully redirected and confined human experience and therefore knowledge and perceived reality. We have all been moved into such a narrow and deprived channel of experience that a dangerous instrument like television can come along and seem useful, interesting, sane, and worthwhile at the same time it further boxes people into a physical and mental condition appropriate for the emergence of autocratic control.

"The second argument concerns the emergence of the controllers. That television would be used and expanded by the present powers-that-be was inevitable, and should have been predictable at the outset. The technology permits of no other controllers.

"The third argument concerns the effects of television upon individual human bodies and minds, effects which fit the purposes of the people who control the medium.

"The fourth argument demonstrates that television has no democratic potential. The technology itself places absolute limits on what may pass through it. The medium, in effect, chooses its own content from a very narrow field of possibilities. The effect is to drastically confine all human understanding within a rigid channel. What binds the four arguments together is that they deal with aspects of television that are not reformable.

"What is revealed in the end is that there is ideology in the technology itself. To speak of television as "neutral" and therefore subject to change is as absurd as speaking of the reform of a technology such as guns."

Maybe Jerry Mander was following in the large footsteps of Marshall McCluhan, and others who have worked in a field one might call "technological epistemology." It's very difficult to get your mind around, because it requires us to simply give up the notion that we can trust the mass media information that lies at the core of our roof-brain chatter, our dinner table conversations, our blogging, our confidence that we have any idea about what's going on in the world at large. Our picture of reality is "mediated," in Mander's word, through television; it is not direct; it is not based upon unfiltered sensory inputs; it is edited; it is systematically biased by the demands of the medium itself.

The election of George W. Bush, a phenomenon of modern history which always vexes my understanding, can perhaps best be understood as yet another unholy manifestation of the dark truth at the center of Mander's work. We do not elect national leaders on the basis of first-hand perceptions. We elect them on the basis of manufactured images which are packaged and sold to privately owned television stations. The successful leaders are those who have become most adept at the manipulation of the imagery, who know how to avoid the "sound bite" error of ever saying anything blunt which would look bad out of context, who know how to impersonate the qualities which appeal to some "real" value in the American voter. Thus, George W. Bush was sold as a folksy, honest, down-to-earth cowboy. Over the long, painful years, most Americans have realized that they were sold a bill of goods, as their unconscious minds have gradually assimilated all the dissonant clues that undercut this false image. But look at all the damage that was done through the power of television's fake and mediated reality in the interim. Had George W. Bush been running for mayor of a town of say 1,000 people, no such mistake could ever have been made. The citizens would have known him for an idiot to begin with. His smug and immature personality would have rubbed everyone the wrong way. He could have remained the town drunk he was always meant to be. But his handlers knew he had the last name, the malleability, and the complete lack of personal convictions which made him ideal for their mass marketing purposes. These are not, alas, the same qualities necessary for a president to deal with actual, immutable reality in the world.

The Iraq War might be seen as a kind of black box, in this epistemological analysis. It is generally conceded that the environment around Baghdad is simply too dangerous to permit thorough reporting. All of the statistics concerning attacks, deaths, injuries, refugees, etc., are systematically distorted by those with a political agenda, without fear of decisive refutation, because no better numbers are available. Those of us watching cable news receive our information in a mediated way, through TV. If television decided to show us, for three solid weeks, images of children walking untroubled toward their school in some Iraqi small town, the American public would gradually change its view. But such images (of the kind Donald Rumsfeld mourned the lack of) are not newsworthy. A car bomb sending an orange-black cloud four stories high in the central part of Baghdad, with a tableau of dismembered bodies and burning vehicles in the foreground, makes good news. People will watch the news and sit through the ads to see such mayhem. And these mediated images, confined to the tight focus of a TV screen which eliminates all context, gradually become our picture of Iraqi reality. I think the American public has turned against the war for a couple of reasons. One, the images of George W. Bush, with his trademark smirk and garbled syntax, sicken most people to the point where they oppose anything he's for. And second, the anti-war imagery, with pictures of gore, explosions, death, is more arresting than anything positive that might be put on the screen. TV doesn't care what's right as long as you watch. It's really that simple.

I don't think Jerry Mander expected TV to go away, and it never will, of course. It's an unthinkable world without the electronic hearth blazing. We derive our false, frustrating, distorted view of life on Earth by looking at it and absorbing its images. Where it will ultimately lead is scary to contemplate.