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.