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Notes for an Epistemology of Television
| Article
# : |
20360 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
6 / 1992 |
7,876 Words |
| Author
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Derrick de Kerckhove
Derrick de Kerckhove is in the faculty of information studies
in the McLuhan Program at the University of Toronto. |
Stephen Kline is director of the Media Analysis Lab at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. He and his brother Rob have invented a sophisticated computerized system to analyze people's physiological responses to anything that they are being shown, anything, everything, and especially television. Kline's work on the impact of television advertising and programming is well known. Last year, Stephen and his brother invited me to try the system, or rather to be one of their guinea pigs. They wired me to a computer using four unobtrusive galvanized skin-response devices: They attached one to my left middle finger for skin conductivity, another to my forehead, presumably to probe my brain activity, a third to my left wrist to take my pulse, and the last over the heart area to monitor my bloodflow. Another device, a rather crude joystick, was placed in my right hand. I was instructed to indicate by pushing the joystick forward or backward whether I approved or disapproved, liked or disliked what I was about to watch. Then Rob and Stephen left the lab and the show began.
I watched a briskly paced jumble of video and TV genres, bits and cuts of violence, sex, advertising, news, talk shows, the occasional soft focus image of a mother holding her baby, some repeat segments, and some general tedium: our regular, or almost regular, TV fare, save the sex. The average length of the segments seemed to be no more than fifteen seconds. By normal TV standards, that speed does not appear to be excessive; however, in my new role as a knee-jerk critic, I found it very difficult to keep up the pace with the joystick. By the end of the twenty-odd minutes of the experiment, I was thoroughly frustrated at having failed to express any more than limpwristed approvals or disapprovals of the segments. For more than a few segments, I hadn't had enough time to express anything at all.
When Rob and Stephen came back to rewind the videotape and check the graphs on the computer, I told them about my feeling of helplessness. They laughed and invited me to watch the computer screen while they replayed the tape in sync with the data. To my absolute amazement, I saw that every cut, every jolt, every bit of image change on the video screen had been recorded by one or more sensors attached to my body and the reaction had been fed into the computer instantly. I could see the busy outlines of the graphs corresponding to my skin conductivity, my pulse, my bloodflow--and heartbeat--and whatever mysterious response my forehead had been giving to the show. I was flabbergasted: even as I was laboriously trying to express an opinion with my right hand, my whole body had been listening and watching and reacting on the
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