Television

I don't watch a lot of t.v, or maybe I watch to much.  Its hard to gauge against another person, who can talk to you about all the characters on various vapid shows designed solely to titillate and arouse the public, to my own watchings; which are restricted to just watching every episode, in order, of every season, of a television show within the course of a couple of weeks.  Though I don't have the television on simply for noise, but for a reason.  That reason, I assumed up until now, was because I liked the show, or the actors, or the writer.  But for now, I'm going with the theory that its for socialization.  While I cannot get my hands on current material, I can still assess the norms and morals of the past few years, and since societies change so slowly, this is still a pretty good map. 

Socialization is defined as a process of acclimating ones self to the surrounding cultural environment which persists from birth, until death.  This gives me great hope of one day, being able to understand people, or at least get really good at guessing at their motives.  A lot of people think that socialization occurs within person to person communication.  This is partly true, as for the first years of any of our lives we interact with very few people.  However, as we age, the sphere of those we see and talk with expands, both in quantity and in quality.  But socialization for humans isn't just the words people say, there are all sorts of nuances to communication.  Body language, inflection, context, tone of voice, and prior attributions.  So even though a television show, or magazine ad, or even a book, doesn't provide you with interactive face time with the subjects, it allows messages far more powerful than whats funny or what deodorant to buy.  It shows the concept of truth and obfuscation in language, appropriate physical responses, to recognize facial reactions.


I often mock people for citing T.V, (I also like to just mock people), for the basis for their observations about reality.  Mostly because its the only compelling piece of commentary they can relate to the subject being discussed.  But sometimes I over look the fact that while television is structured specifically to convey a message the writer or producer wants, that doesn't mean it lacks humanity.  We have a tendency, as a species, to equate dislike with non-human, which makes judgements like these easy.  If you don't like someone, it makes it easier to take advantage of them, or degrade them, or manipulate them into doing what you want.  But with television, while the messages are designed by people you never see, they are still attempts at human communication.  So while it might be repugnant to acknowledge the fact that watching television may teach you something, it isn't necessarily false.  You just have to make sure that you take away the human lessons, and not the social, cultural, or economic lessons (i.e. the ideological ones this particular group holds).

But in this case there is another reason why sometimes citing television is stupid, and why it may also not be.  Television doesn't always reflect reality.  Sure there are the laws of gravity and physics maybe even thermodynamics, but the way people interact is not there.  Most shows are constructed so that the watchers can feel superior, laugh at the incompetence of people who don't know how to deal with their feelings or miss obvious verbal and facial clues the studio audience clearly didn't.  Things like that are traps for the imagination.  We begin to feel better about our selves, because we would never be that stupid.  So we continue to watch, to continue to feel superior, and it gets popular, so more shows just like it are made, and so on in a happy death spiral.  Though, sometimes, it can reflect reality, because the writers who made the dialogue, and the actors who show it to use, even the director of photography frames it in just the right way to share something with us, the audience.  These are all people, trying to get a message across to us (but these guys I'm talking about positively right here, they're on good t.v. shows).

So sometimes I go on a t.v. binge.  And I start to thinking, am I feeling the way I do because the t.v. is telling me this is how I feel?  Not really, certainly I'm reacting to it, but it doesn't have the ability to permeate every thought.  And even if I am, I'm being informed but real people.  They are trying to convey emotion, pain, hurt, anger, love, and to not react to that would be worse.  And besides, if reality is constructed solely within our minds, any outside stimuli which influences our perception of reality, and is part of that reality because of its origin, is a reflection of that reality (optical illusions not withstanding).