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Introduction: TV or not TV?
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20357 |
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MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
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6 / 1992 |
1,034 Words |
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Nearly every aspect of the human landscape--living and dating and mating patterns, politics, the arts, education, child rearing, human self-perception, culture, business and the economy and so on--has been changed and altered by two or three technological developments of the twentieth century in ways so profound and vast as to be nearly incomprehensible: The first is the automobile, the third possible candidate is the computer, and the second is television.
Television is such a ubiquitous and powerful force in our lives, our economy, and our culture that we do well to pause from time to time to attempt to understand and perhaps even control it, if control of such a force is indeed possible. Our theme this month attempts to do this.
From the time of the ascendancy of written language, our human notion of learning and the learned person has been essentially tied to the written word and to literacy. A learned person is a literate person. To say of someone that he is illiterate has meant that he is unlearned (and possibly even morally and socially deficient or objectionable). Today, that notion of learning is being challenged by the move from a literate to a visual culture. Have we now moved through or by means of pictures--especially television--to the postliterate culture? Is this new postliterate culture, if indeed there is such, also an illiterate culture? Do we need new or transformed notions of learning to deal with what television has wrought? Some have proposed terms such as visual literacy or media literacy for this situation, but those are, of course, oxymorons. The problem is that attempting to comprehend one medium through another can yield, at best, only imperfect and quite partial results. All this has enormous implications for the process of education and for existing educational institutions and establishments.
One of the unforeseen results of Johannes Gutenberg's invention was to free writing and books from scarcity, high cost, and the control of powerful religious and political persons and institutions. Ultimately, this helped bring about the coming of the Renaissance and the Reformation, and later on the Enlightenment, the rise of democracy and of political and economic freedom and independence, the breakdown of existing institutions and ideologies, and the widespread dissemination of learning. Up to recently, as with the written work before Gutenberg, television has been largely controlled by powerful political, economic and ideological forces, But new television technology--videocassette recorders (VCRs), cheap portable cameras, cable television, satellite television, and a coming marriage of
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