<p>I read an article from a CR SAT section dealing with this topic… It satirized the “television makes you stupid” statement.</p>
<p>Hmm, let’s see if I can find it through Google…</p>
<p>Oooh, I found it! It’s super long though. </p>
<p>“Television makes you stupid.”
Virtually all current theories of the medium come down to this simple statement. As a rule, this conclusion is delivered with a melancholy undertone. Four principal theories can be distinguished. </p>
<p>The manipulation thesis points to an ideological dimension. It sees in television above all an instrument of political domination. The medium is understood as a neutral vessel, which pours out opinions over a public thought of as passive. Seduced, unsuspecting viewers are won over by the wire-pullers, without actually realizing what is happening to them.</p>
<p>The imitation thesis argues primarily in moral terms. According to it, television consumption leads above all to moral dangers. Anyone who is exposed to the medium becomes habituated to libertinism, irresponsibility, crime and violence. The private consequences are blunted, callous and obstinate individuals; the public consequences are the loss of social virtues and general moral decline. This form of critique draws, as is obvious at first glance, on traditional, bourgeois sources. The motifs that recur in this thesis can be identified as far back as the eighteenth century in the vain warnings that early cultural criticism sounded against the dangers of reading novels.</p>
<p>More recent is the simulation thesis. According to it, the viewer is rendered incapable of distinguishing between reality and fiction. The primary reality is rendered unrecognizable or replaced by a secondary, phantom-like reality. </p>
<p>All these converge in the stupefaction thesis. According to it, watching television not only undermines the viewer’s ability to criticise and differentiate, along with the moral and political fibre of their being, but also impairs their overall ability to perceive. Television produces, therefore, a new type of human being, who can, according to taste, be imagined as a zombie or mutant.</p>
<p>All these theories are rather unconvincing. Their authors consider proof to be superfluous. Even the minimal criterion of plausibility does not worry them at all. To mention just one example, no one has succeeded in putting before us even a single viewer who was incapable of telling the difference between a family quarrel in the current soap opera and one at his or her family’s breakfast table. This doesn’t seem to bother the advocates of the simulation thesis.</p>
<p>Another common feature of the theories is just as curious but has even more serious consequences. Basically, the viewers appear as defenceless victims, the programmers as crafty criminals. This polarity is maintained with great seriousness: manipulators and manipulated, actors and imitators, stimulants and simulated, stupefiers and stupefied face one another in a fine symmetry.</p>
<p>The relationship of the theorists themselves to television raises some important questions. Either the theorists make no use of television at all (in which case they do not know what they are talking about) or they subject themselves to it, and then the question arises – through what miracle is the theorist able to escape the alleged effects of television? Unlike everyone else, the theorist has remained completely intact morally, can distinguish in a sovereign manner between deception and reality, and enjoys complete immunity in the face of the idiocy that he or she sorrowfully diagnoses in the rest of us. Or could – fatal loophole in the dilemma – the theorists themselves be symptoms of a universal stupefaction?</p>
<p>One can hardly say that these theorists have failed to have any effect. It is true that their influence on what is actually broadcast is severely limited, which may be considered distressing or noted with gratitude, depending on one’s mood. On the other hand, they have found ready listeners among politicians. That is not surprising, for the conviction that one is dealing with millions of idiots “out there in the country” is part of the basic psychological equipment of the professional politician. One might have second thoughts about the theorists’ influence when one watches how the veterans of televised election campaigns fight each other for every single minute when it comes to displaying their limousine, their historic appearances before the guard of honor, their hairstyles on the platform, and above all their speech organs. The number of broadcast minutes, the camera angles, and the level of applause are registered with a touching enthusiasm. The politicians have been particularly taken by the good old manipulation thesis.</p>