Writer's Block: Revolutionary Thought

[eumelia]

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Teevee.
Television.
As a sampler and some-times addict of that potent drug I can't help but try and explain.

Commencing academia babble now:
Benedict Anderson wrote about Imagined Communities, the idea that through a non-existent or imagined commonality we establish the community in which we live.
He speaks mainly about the print and literature in order to exemplify this, because News papers are the most reproduced form of literature in the world today - think of those scenes in 1940's and 50's movies in which the frame is filled with men in fedoras and all of them reading the New York Time or the London Times, etc. Are they looking at one another? Do they communicate with each other? Most likely they can barely recognize each others face, but they are reading the same thing and they imagine or consider what they think about they are reading to be social consensus, despite the fact that they most likely would never talk about what they are thinking to another person.
That's an imagined community.

Television takes it one step further in my opinion.
News papers are relevant until the next edition and it takes conscious thought to read and absorb the information and data printed on a page.
Television by its nature, allows you to switch off your cognitive operations and just sponge in what is going on as you watch the screen.
Television has replaced religion when it comes to values as well.
Once in order to know what was right and wrong you listened to pulpits to tell you who was good, who was evil and what one should believe.
Now television tells us who is vilified, what is beautiful, how we ourselves can be like the idols which we worship on the flat screened alter.
Instead of family prayer, a family will congregate around the television and watch the episode of whatever programme we are addicted to at the moment.
And we obsess about it, no less than people used to obsess about god while those who control and create the discourse make some kind of profit off us "sheeple".

Comments

[lilacsigil.livejournal.com]

And this is why I love fandom. It takes that mind-numbing opiate and turns it into community. There is certainly a degree of Imagined Community in fandom - every time there's a fandom controversy we find out that we don't all agree after all - but some genuine community and analysis too.

[gonzo21.livejournal.com]

Some television still engaged the brain, and invites you to think and be part of it. But increasingly yes, over the last 10 years, (and Big Brother was quite a good example of this), it has embraced the lowest common denominator. Particularly in the way news coverage has been turned into entertainment, and factual programming, also has been turned into entertainment.

Still, at least fewer people are killed over arguments about who Buffys one true love is, than over whose God is best.

[sabrina-il.livejournal.com]

Without going into my own thoughts on the subject, I'd simply like to pipe in and highly, HIGHLY reccomend to you the book Lullby (http://www.amazon.com/Lullaby-Chuck-Palahniuk/dp/0385722192/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1226142353&sr=8-1) by Chuck Palahniuk (author of Fight Club), because it's specifically his answer to the question "is TV and media in general the new opium of the masses?" and besides, is a pretty awesome-wonderful book. Just saying, in case you ever come acorss/get the chance to read it.

[mao4269.livejournal.com]

So true! (Sorry, this is going to turn into me geeking out monologue-style; I hope it's also engaging what you were getting at and/or interesting!)

Religion is defined (well, by Otto anyway) as that which provides a numinous experience, that lets us get outside ourselves. As a result, it can function as an opiate - if we can escape beyond ourselves, there's less incentive to fight being oppressed. With the written word, however, people started articulating and recording their individual experiences, and this created a fundamental shift in how they thought about the world (think of the secularization hypothesis), and they started sharing their individual experiences. A big part of what I got out of Anderson's work was that widespread literacy allowed for the formation of communities because people who couldn't communicate orally in the past were now able to do so verbally. Television retains that quality partly because body language and vocal tone communicates a lot even without words, and partly through dubbing and subtitles. At the same time, t.v, particularly reality television, goes back to much of the role played by religion - viewers can identify with the people on screen and thereby both escape themselves and bond with a larger community of viewers. Reading, for all that it can foster "imagined communities" and/or be a form of escapism, is a decidedly individual activity, whereas both religious observance and television watching, even if done alone, are all about feeling something other than your individual emotions.

[bitter-moss.livejournal.com]

True. Thanks for posting was an interesting read :).

[ephraim-oakes.livejournal.com]

i think that may have been true of television 10 years ago, there is now so much television and so much other media that now people aren't watching/doing the same thing (steven colbert called this phenomenon 'crumblicious'). i see this among the undergrads that i teach - everyone has their own custom blend of music, podcasts, tv that they download or netflix or tivo, that it's rare to have the kind of situation where someone references a tv show and have the majority of the other students get the reference. that kind of thing was common, when i was in high school in the late 90s. so, people break off into ever smaller subniches ('microcultures' to be technical about it) where do they have common reference points - so the communities seem to be getting less imaginary (and less opiate-like) by virtue of that.

[ninboydean.livejournal.com]

You can see my response at my LJ

[aesiron.livejournal.com]

I would say it's the internet, or soon will be, instead.