Four generations old (or maybe five), but already the medium of
choice-this statement does not define television, but probably
captures its social significance. It can be said from the outset
that while cinematography is at the borderline between the
civilization of literacy and that of illiteracy, television
definitely embodies the conflict between the two. In fact,
television irreversibly tipped the balance in favor of the
visual. The invention of television took place in the context of
the change in scale of humankind. Primarily, television
occasions the transition from the universe of mechanics and
chemistry, implicit in film making and viewing, to that of
electricity, in particular electronics, and, more recently,
digital technology.
Television, as a product of this change in the structure and
nature of human theoretic and practical experience, results from
the perceived pragmatic need to capture and transmit dynamic
images. Electricity was already the medium for capturing and
transmitting sound at the speed of electrons along telephone
networks. And since images and actions are influenced by the
light we view them in, it followed that light is what we
actually wanted to record and transmit. This is television.
Cumbersome and still owing a lot to mechanics, television
started as a news medium, allowing for almost instantaneous
connection between the source of information and the audience. It
was initially mostly illustrative. Today, it is constitutive, in
the sense that it not only records news, it makes news. It
constitutes a generalized mass-medium supporting entertainment
and ritual (political, religious, military).
Literacy corresponds to the experiences of human self-definition
in the world of classical physics and chemistry. It is based on
the same underlying structure, and projects characteristics of
this experience. Electricity and electronics correspond to very
fast processes (practically instantaneous), high leverage of
human action, diversity, more varied mediating elements, and
feedback. The film camera has the main characteristics of
literacy. It can be compared to the printing press. But the
comparison is only partially adequate since it writes movements
to film, and lets us read them together on the shared white page
called the screen. Between recording the movement and viewing
it, time is used for processing and duplication.
Television is structurally different, capturing movement and
everything else belonging to what we call reality, in order to
make it immediately available to the viewer. Electronic
mediation is much more elaborate, has many more layers than
cinematography, and as a result is much more efficient. Film
mapped from the selected world of movement, in a studio, on the
street, or in a laboratory, to a limited viewership: public in a
movie theater. It requested that people share the screen on
which its images were projected. Television maps from many
cameras to the entire world, and all can simultaneously partake
in its images. Television is distributed and introduces
simultaneity in that several events from several locations can be
broadcast on the TV screen. By comparison, cinematography is
centralized. Filming is limited to the location where it is
being carried on. Cinematography is intrinsically sequential in
that it follows the narrative structure and constitutes a closed
entity. Once edited for showing, the film cannot be interrupted
to insert anything new.
There are still many who see the two as closely related, and
others who see the use of television only as a carrier (of film,
for instance). They ignore the defining fact that film and
television, despite some commonalties, belong to practical
experiences impossible to reconcile. In fact, while film passed
the climax of its attraction, television became the most
pervasive medium. Due to the use of television in education,
corporate communication, sports, artistic and other
performances, such as space exploration and war, television
impacts upon social interaction without being an interactive
medium. A televised event can address audiences close to the
world's entire population. When recording images for television
became possible, television supported continued human
experiences of decentralization, which previous communication
technologies could not provide. The video camera and the video
cassette recorder, especially in its digital version, make each
of us own not only the receivers of the language of images and
sounds, but also emitters, the sources, the private Hollywood
studios. That is, they make us live the language of TV, and
substitute it for literacy. Interactive TV will undoubtedly
contribute even more in this direction.
It is already the case that instead of writing a letter, some
people make a video and send it to family and authorities, and
to TV stations interested in viewer feedback and news stories.
The massive deployment of troops in the Desert Storm operation
made clear how the shift from literate to illiterate
communication integrates video communication. Together with the
telephone, television and video dominated communication patterns
of the people involved. Subsequent troop deployments confirmed
the pattern of illiterate communication.
Among the many networks through which the foundation of our
existence is continuously altered, cable TV plays a distinct
role. Many consider it more important than libraries, probably
for the wrong reasons. Whether living in thickly populated urban
clusters or in remote locations, people are physically connected
through multi- channeled communication networks, and even through
interactive media. Cable TV is often seen only as another entry
to our home for downloading classical programs as well as
pornography and superstition. The full utilization of the
electronic avenue as a multi-lane, bi-directional highway
through which we can be receivers of what we want to accept, and
senders of visual messages to whomever is interested and willing
to interact with these messages, is still more a goal than a
reality. With computer- supported visual communication
integrating digital television, we will dispose of the entire
infrastructure for a visually dominated civilization. In the age
of Internet, wired or wireless networks become part of the
artificial nervous system of advanced societies. Whether in its
modem-based variant, or through other advanced schemes for
transporting digital information and supporting interaction, the
cable system already contributes to the transformation of the
nature of many human practical experiences. These can be
experiences of entertainment, but also of learning, teaching,
even work.
There is a negative side to all this development, and a need to
face consequences that over time can accumulate beyond what we
already know and understand. Children growing up with TV miss
the experience of movement. Jaron Lanier discussed the "famous
childhood zombiehood," an expression of staring into nothing, a
limited ability to see beyond a television image, the desire for
instant gratification, and a lack of basic common sense
appreciation for doing work in order to achieve satisfaction.
Games developed around video technology train children to behave
like laboratory rats that learn a maze by rote. They grow up
accepting the politics of telegenic competition, a poor
substitute for competence and commitment. Their vote is focused
on brands, regardless of whether they regard political choices or
cereals. Addressed en masse, such viewers gel in the mass image
of polls that rapidly succeed one another. That technology makes
possible alternatives to literacy embodied in the visual is
unquestionable. To what extent these alternatives carry with them
previous determinations and constraints, or they correspond to a
new stage in human civilization, is the crux of the matter. The
degree of necessity and thus the efficiency of any new form of
visual expression, communication, or interaction can be
ascertained only in how individuals constitute themselves
through practical activities coherently integrating the visual.
There is no higher form of empowerment than in the fulfillment of
our individual possibilities. Telegenic or not, a president or a
TV star has little, if any, impact on our fulfillment in the
interconnected world of our time.
Television implies a great deal of language, but such language
frees the audience from the requirement of literacy. You do not
need to know how to write or read to watch TV; you need to be in
command of a limited part of spoken language in order to
understand a TV show, even to actively participate in it-from
going on a game show to using cable networks, videotex, or
interactive programs, exploring the Internet, or setting up a
presence on the network.
Growing up with TV results in stereotypes of language and
attitudes representing a background of shared expressions,
gestures, and values. To see in these only the negative, the low
end, is easier than to acknowledge that previous backgrounds,
constituted on the underlying structure of literacy, have become
untenable under the new pragmatic circumstances. Due to its
characteristics, television belongs to the framework of rapid
change typical of the dynamics of needs and expectations within
the new scale of humankind. There are many varied implications
to this: it makes each of us more passive, more and more subject
to manipulations (economic, political, religious), robbing (or
freeing) us from the satisfaction of a more personal relation (to
others, art, literature, etc.). Nobody should underestimate any
of these and many other factors discussed by media ecologists
and sociologists. But to stubbornly, and quite myopically,
consider TV only from the perspective and expectations of
literacy is presumptuous. We have to understand the structural
changes that made TV and video possible. Moreover, we have to
consider the changes they, in turn, brought about. Otherwise we
will miss the opportunities opened by the practical experience of
understanding the new choices presented to us, and even the new
possibilities opened. There is so much more after TV, even on
500 channels and after video-on-demand!
Language is not an absolute democratic medium; literacy, with
intrinsic elitist characteristics, even less. Although it was
used to ascertain principles of democracy, literacy ended up,
again and again, betraying them. Because they are closer to
things and actions, and because they require a relatively
smaller background of shared knowledge, images are more
accessible, although less challenging. But where words and text
can obscure the meaning of a message, images can be immediately
related to what they refer to. There are more built-in checks in
the visual than in the verbal, although the deceptive power of
an image can be exploited probably much more than the power of
the word. Such, and many other considerations are useful, since
the transfer of social and political functions from literacy
(books and newspapers, political manifestos, ceremonies and
rituals based on writing and reading) to the visual, especially
television, requires that we understand the consequences of this
transfer. But it is not television that keeps voters away from
exercising the right to elect their representatives in the
civilization of illiteracy, and not the visual that makes us
elect actors, lawyers, peanut farmers, or successful oilmen to
the highest (and least useful) posts in the government.
Conditions that require the multitude of languages that we use,
the layers of mediation, the tendency to decentralization, to
name a few, resulted in the increased influence of the visual,
as well as in some of the choices mentioned so far.
High definition television (HDTV) helps us distinguish some
characteristics of the entire development under discussion-for
instance, how the function of integration is carried out.
Integration through the intermediary of literacy required shared
knowledge, and in particular, knowledge of writing and reading.
Integration through the intermediary of modern image-producing
technology, especially television and computer-aided visual
communication, means access to and sharing of information.
Television has made countries which are so different in their
identity, history, and culture (as we know the countries of the
world to be) seem sometimes so similar that one has to ask how
this uniformity came about. Some will point to the influence of
the market process- advertisements look much the same all over
the world. Others may note the influence of technology-an
electronic eye open on the world that renders uniform everything
within its range. The new dynamics of human interaction, required
by our striving for higher efficiency appropriate to the scale
of humankind, probably explains the process better. The
similarity is determined by the mechanism we use to achieve this
higher efficiency, i.e., progressively deeper labor division,
increased mediation, and the need for alternative mechanisms for
human integration, that is reflected in TV images. This
similarity makes up the substratum of TV images, as well as the
substratum of fashion trends, new rituals, and new values, as
transitory as all these prove to be.
Literacy and television are not reciprocally exclusive. If this
were not the case, the solution to the lower levels of literacy
would be at hand. Nevertheless, all those who hoped to increase
the quality of literacy by using television had to accept that
this was a goal for which the means are not appropriate.
Language stabilizes, induces uniformity, depersonalizes;
television keeps up with change, allows and invites diversity,
makes possible personalized interaction among those connected
through a TV chain of cameras and receivers. Literacy is a
medium of tedious elaboration and inertia. TV is spontaneous and
instantaneous. Moreover, it also supports forms of scientific
activity for which language is not at all suited. We cannot send
language to look at what our eyes do not see directly, or see
only through some instruments. We cannot anticipate, in
language, processes which, once made possible on a television
screen, make future human experience conceivable. I know that in
these last lines I started crossing the border between
television and digital image processing, but this is no accident.
Indeed, human experience with television, in its various forms
and applications, although not at all closed, made necessary the
next step towards a language of images which can take advantage
of computer technology and of networking.
With the advent of HDTV, television achieves a quality that makes
it appropriate for integration in many practical experiences.
Design (of clothes, furniture, new products) can result from a
collaborative effort of people working at different sites, and
in the manufacture of their design during a live session.
Modifications are almost instantaneously integrated in the
sample. The product can be actually tested, and decisions
leading to production made. Communication at such levels of
effectiveness is actually integrated in the creative and
productive effort. The language is that of the product, a visual
reality in progress. The results are design and production cycles
much shorter than literacy-based communication can support.
HDTV is television brought to a level of efficiency that only
digital formats make possible. The reception of digital
television opens the possibility to proceed from each and every
image considered appropriate to storing, manipulating, and
integrating it in a new context. Digital television reinstates
activity, and is subject to creative programming and
interactivity. The individual can make up a new universe through
the effort of understanding and creative planning. It is quite
possible that alternative forms of communication, much richer
than those in use today, will emerge from practical experiences
of human self-constitution in this new realm. That in ten years
all our TV sets, if the TV set remains a distinct receiver, will
be digital says much less than the endless creative ideas
emerging around the reality of digital television.