TV is Bad (part 3)

In part 1 I like tv and movies which are powerful mediums for storytelling. In part 2 tv compresses the range of our emotions and keeps us safely inside.

If stories are how we learn (without the pain of experience) and modern cinema is the most powerful story medium then you can be sure we are absorbing all sorts of information about how to live.  Particularly we learn social skills through watching people, including the people on tv. Which isn't bad in itself.  But what if characters are written (intentionally or unintentionally) unrealistically?  And what if we lack the real world experience to recognize it. We're in for a surprise when our learned social interaction doesn't get the response we were taught to expect.  (What if you got your social skills from Star Trek? Explains a lot doesn't it?) Worse, because we all watch the same tv shows the real world conversation might follow the faulty model completely and while this wouldn't cause the cognitive dissonance problem both participants are left wanting despite following the script. The magic words that get the tv character to the act break somehow miss the heart issue entirely.  I wonder if this is why so many relationships are so dysfunctional. Are we all operating under false premises and faulty social conventions? Have we gotten to the end of our lines wondering why we haven't lived happily ever after yet?

Eventually if dysfunctional behavior is widespread enough it becomes self-reinforcing.  Poor screenwriting is now true-to-life screenwriting.  The meme becomes culture and functional behavior becomes weird.  I bet you can come up with your own examples of this effect.

Screenwriters and actors have a responsibility to culture to display an accurate picture of human nature.  But we as consumers should refuse to be passive. We can learn useful social skills from tv but we have to be careful to fact check.  For instance, I know all sorts of things about being married from reading books and comics and watching movies and tv despite never having experienced it.  I know all the right and wrong things to say and I figure I would never make those rather obvious mistakes. Of course I'm in for all manner of surprises as a real relationship isn't subject to the rules of tv comedy.  On the other hand, if I ever get beamed up to an alien spaceship I'll probably say something smart alecky because that's what Col. O'Neill would do.

TV is Bad (part 2)

In part 1 I like tv and movies, they are a powerful medium for storytelling but they tend to surpress the imagination and turn us into emotionally regulated passive zombies.

As a generation we would rather watch tv than actually do anything we see on tv (or perhaps something genuinely out of the box). This addiction like symptom is because tv gives us maybe 50% of the emotions of real life with none of the risk.  We can feel a little sad without tasting real sorrow and with the knowledge that the credits will roll in about 7 minutes so we never have to deal with it again (well, I'm still upset about Wash dying but you know...).  We can feel the exhilaration of flying a banshee without the risk of breaking our necks in a fall from Pandora's floating unobtainium mountains.

The result is our life's emotional experience is compressed into a narrow range where we are safe from failure but also safe from ever doing something. But we are able to delude ourselves with simulated ups and down at the click of a button. If stories teach us anything they should teach us that adventure is worth the risk and discomfort and painful emotions.  It's time to stop watching other people's stories and start living our own stories.

Tv has also substituted for human interaction to a great extent hindering our attempts to venture into the world. Robin Dunbar theorized that the brain has a limit to the number of relationships it can maintain (somewhere around 150). I would be interested in seeing research on this but it would seem like the complicated relationships we absorb from the ensemble of a tv show would count against this limit bumping off real people whom we could be building relationships with. For instance, if you've watched a season of The Office you can tell me how Jim feels about every other person and how they feel about him (if you haven't seen The Office, pick your favorite show).  That's brain space that could have been used for real people.  (I would think that once you stop watching a show you brain archives everything making room again but how many shows are you watching at one time?)

Tv teaches us functional and dysfunctional behavior and shapes culture in part 3.

TV is Bad (part 1)

I love tv and movies. And you probably do too. I love the medium, the technology, the technique, the stories. I'm a content creator and consumer.  So this isn't an anti-tv scree. I'm not going to tell you to boycott anything or try to convince you that good Christians don't go to movies. But we can't afford to be ignorant of the far reaching power of the medium.

The "talking pictures" are the most sophisticated form of storytelling to date. Storytelling is essential to human culture. Knowing they affect us so powerfully, most of what Jesus taught was in the form of stories.  Stories are powerful because they fit the way our brains work.  They use the same capabilities that are critical for maintaining relationships. Verbal and written storytelling (the earlier forms) require the participation of the imagination by co-opting the audience to be co-creators. But as performance art has progressed from stage play to feature film the audience becomes a passive consumer.

Once upon a time your Minas Tirith looked very different from my Minas Tirith but now they both look the same (despite this I still love the LotR movies btw). Characters no longer exist in the imagination but inhabit the pixels they have been captured on with no curtain call to shatter the illusion.  The imperfections of reality are swept away and now everyone is perfectly lit with a flowing soundtrack in the background to put you in the right emotional state. But the most imagination-destroying part of modern storytelling is cinematography.  Even in a stage play you control what you see but when every frame is a Rembrandt even that simple act of volition is replaced with blissful passive perfection.

The result is a brain subdued, unable to imagine beyond the limits of the frame, dependent on the steady pattern of stimulation provided by the three act structure. Ever watch a tv marathon? You know that zombie feeling afterward?  The problem isn't just intellectual--it's emotional.

Tv compresses our emotions replacing the real thing with a zero-risk substitute while occupying limited relationship space in our brains in part 2 and teaches us functional and dysfunctional behavior while shaping culture in part 3.