The tyranny of television

By Vasile Dncu
When over that last two decades youve talked in front of your students about
television and its social influence it isnt easy to stop and write a short text which
would comprise everything that youve discovered, that youve read, and what the
subjects of your field research have told you explicitly or implicitly. The way you
choose your arguments will be influenced right on the spot and it may have a high
degree of hazard.
Television is an altar
Following the act of sleeping, watching television is the second activity also
preferred by the Romanian people, aside from the ones who work eight hours a day, in
which case sleeping is their third activity. The screen fills the central place in the
domestic space, but it already follows us everywhere, invading public spaces
(squares, means of transportation, airports, railway stations, shops etc.). Social time
organizes itself around the TV and family rituals take place also around the TV. We
arent aware of the tyranny (a sweet one?) not even when we answer the sociologists
questions that the TV, not the refrigerator, not the cupboard or the computer is the
object we couldnt live without in case it would suffer some damage (30% of the
Romaniansi). Without the TV, we enter into an actual withdrawal as 23% of the
Romanians admit that they couldnt live not even a single day without television. A
Romanian who lives beyond the age of 80 has the chance to spend over ten years of
his life in front of the TV.
The television is watching us!
The television is not an open window to the world, as weve been taught by its
operators and ideologists. It empties us from our own Self, it liberates us form the
pressure and the palpitation of our Ego, and while we watch, we liberate ourselves
from our thoughts, from our individuality. The great message of television is the
television, it becomes an ideal in itself, independent from what we watch, and it is a
drug which calls for permanent ingestion and which keeps us in perplexity. The real
becomes more real than the real itself, it creates a hyper-objectivity, one without

referees from the outside, but an objectivity which grows from the invasion of our
subjectivity. It gives us the impression of participation, of living, but it creates a
generalized confusion, a confusion where the news get mingled with movies or
political debates and all of it with our life, a life in which we are the audience, but
we consider ourselves actors. The magic of the screen is a one-way communication.
Humans who are conditioned by the television, act in life as they act towards the
characters they see on the screen. The TV means suppressed life ii.
Television is a river
We daily swim in the river of images, because television scatters a continuous
flow of images. Edmund Husserl iii once said that any video flow (as any musical piece)
is a temporal object. I am not myself anymore when I watch television, my conscience
is diluted on the flow of images: I become what I watch! Hence televisions capacity
to empty the mind: while Im watching TV, my conscience becomes that of the
successive moments which unroll on the screen iv. Same as a Jordan River, swimming in
the water of the image washes us from all of our existence, and it also comes into
discussion the brainwashing. In the 60s, Herbert Krugman explained that in case of
brainwashing, when the brain is deprived of sensorial perception, it accelerates and it
goes off the rails. In front of a television, we choose a channel, we laugh, we cry. The
viewers brain enters in an almost hypnotic receptive state. The presentation of the
programs is named today by some experts as being monoform to the central language,
used by the television to present its message, a torrent of images and sounds, with
uptight staging, a composite structure where the elements are being assembled
without apparent sutures, it seems coherent, but it is of maximal fragmentation and
ambiguity of sense. There are several monoform variants: the main one, the dominant
one, is the narrative, unilinear, traditional and classical structure of soap operas, of
police television dramas and more than 98% of the films which derive from the
structure used during the newscast; the one which we find in televised games and talk
shows. The flow seems coherent, but everything happens at high speed, the montage
creates effects of shock and the idea is not giving the audience the chance to reflect.
The lord of the rings

Television masters time, space, geography and history. A transnational study

carried out by UNESCO shows that more than 99% of the American households have at
least one television. A similar figure is present in France and in Romania. Even Africa,
which is a disadvantaged continent has an entering rate of 85%. Jo Groebel underlines
that the TV screen has become a major factor in socialization and rules childrens life
in urban and rural regions worldwidev.
Television has colonized our domestic space and has taken over our agendas. TV
channels are now capable to follow us everywhere through our portable computers,
mobile phones and through other specific terminals. Television, unrestrained by time
and space, is a perspective which should intoxicate the brain sellers. The drama,
definitely, is similar to the toughest drugs: the more we suffer the attack of its
flavors, the more we get our life used with its anesthetic presence and it becomes
difficult to extract our mind from its powervi.
Video-cracy
The world ruled through images is not only a dystopia, the television is already
The Big Brother. After television accomplished the tele-revolution in 1989, a long time
people addressed to television instead addressing to the state or to parties in order to
bring optimizations to their daily life. Today, when the justice process is being
followed step by step in what the media calls more and more often a tele-justice,
people still dont see an earthly justice, with real people, but an unearthly one, kind
of unreal, descended directly from the TV.
The ones who own the information and who are broadcasting it on television
have a great power and they are able, through images and words, to send messages
and therefore to control the world. The newscast is a good example for the insecure
limit between influence and manipulation. Firstly it has the tendency to underline the
emotional and to occult the rational, by dramatizing for example, each detail of the
damages happened throughout catastrophes, even if they are insignificant.
If we read over the work of M. McLuhan we will notice that many of those who
use television with political purposes, they are able to do it even by enforcing a
deafening silence towards the important problems of the day: In spite of the official
absence of censorship, the major networks are enforcing a silence which lets them in
total silence in front of the important daily debates vii. The society of generalized

communication presents itself as a world where the communication is not between

real people, but between the images of the people which have been created with
special purposes: the building of these images creates a social activity which has the
purpose to shape an image which has the power to convince and manipulate. By
producing stereotypes, television severely forges peoples encounter in social space.
Bourdieu explains how television, which animates the journalism world, has
profoundly altered the functioning of our universe, different from art, literature, and
philosophy and even from justice and politics.
Information is manipulated by television, is immediately broadcasted on large
scale, monopolized and reduced to what is shown on the screen and its power stays in
what Jacques Ellus calls as being creative and deformative power of information:
television does not convey any information, the information is the one which conveys
television. But Jean Baudrillard is the doctor who lays the finger on the wound: the
TV is, through its presence, the control itself. Television has reached its goal, it
lobotomized most of this worlds population because this instrument has spread with
the speed of light in very few years and now it affects almost the entire surface of
the Earth. The French philosopher is right: in the 20 th century weve witnessed the
perfect robbery: the reality was stolenviii.
Jean Leon de Beauvois reminds us some of the manipulative methods used by
television: by means of stimulus, which we tend to ignore, but which are processed by
our cognitive apparatus. The conscience and the psychic of one person usually arent
the exclusive result of the socializing process which has at the bottom a pre-existent
theoretical structure, such as language, education, information, but they are the
result of everything that combines the collective subconscious from semantical,
etymological, epistemological and semiotic stimuli, in which case television has the
most persuasive message among all means of mass communication.
The force of the small screen becomes greater as it rests on the credibility
offered by the image (everything that man saw on television with his own eyes is
considered trustworthy). Only some of the operations of manipulation: manipulation
through image, through filming, through montage, through off commentary, through
pagination, through omission, through media rumors, through censorship, through the

practice hiding by showing, through charisma, through journalists, through nonverbal means of communication.
The talk-show is not an arena for democracy
Manipulation of the public in a talk-show, debate, documentary, investigation
for the purpose of favoring one of the sides involved may take place by granting the
right to talk most of the time to the representatives of one of the sides, giving them
the right to intervene with longer arguments and offering them a larger space to
express, underlining their positive actions and minimizing the benefic acts of the
adverse side etc.
The hosts interventions are often compelling because he sets the topic of the
debate, he offers the right to talk, and he gives the guests different attention which
may be noticed through non-verbal elements of communication (tonality: respectful,
depreciative, polite or irritated tone etc.). Studies carried out by sociologist have
demonstrated that very often, the host, self-proclaimed as the audiencespokesman
asks questions only to satisfy his own curiosity or his own interests, most of the issues
in question being uninteresting for most of the viewers. The structure of the TV set is
another level where manipulation can take place as concerns the television
productions. The way in which the group of guests is formed influences in a subliminal
way the perception in the eyes of the viewers, the absence of one representative of
some of the sides invited on the set constitutes an essential part in the perception of
the viewer. The structure of the TV set should, theoretically, offer the image of a
democratic equilibrium between sides. Ultimately, the scenario which forms the basis
of the debate may be settled before the recording (in which case the quality of the
discussion may suffer, or may be restricted by the hardness of the script). However,
neither the other option is kept out from risks; if the host lays-out his script, on the
whole, following the preparatory discussions with presumptive participants, and that
way leaving enough room for improvisation and free verbalization during the show,
the discussion may divert in a dangerous way.
Television cultivates fear and violenceix
Globally, it has been proved that there are three major effects of the
audiovisual contents: desensitization- the viewer learns progressively to tolerate the

more and more marked levels of violence; the big bad world syndrome the viewer
gradually imprints the confidence that the outside world is hostile and dangerous;
aggression the viewer acts more violent and aggressive. Certainly, not only
television is responsible for all the violence which characterizes our society, but the
perception of uncertainty and distrust is mostly caused by the mediation of the social
reality achieved through the small screen.
The optimistic unsatisfied x ones whom weve discovered in our surveys reveal a
curiosity: people sense that things are going in a bad direction in Romania, but they
are optimistic with regard to the future as if a miracle is about to happen like in
happy ending movies. Nothing rational sustains this optimism, maybe only a magical
belief in Hollywood movies where the hero saves the day at the end. However, the
theories show also the backward process where television is also an agent of social
control and public order. Television cultivates mistrust, fear for action in case of
protests, mostly among women, old people or minorities, but in regard with other
categories too. Shaping social perceptions and ritualizing violence, the television also
has an ideological function: it preserves the status-quo and the relations of power,
keeping up the sense of the hierarchy and potentiating the effects of domination.
Even if it was associated with revolutions, television does not offer liberty. But
it has the potential to shape slaves, alienated and anomic people.

Bibliographic references:

Romanians perceptions regarding manipulation, carried out by the Romanian Institute for Evaluation and
Strategy (IRES), in 9-11 of June, 2015, on a representative sample of 820 adult individuals from Romania.
Margin of error 3,5%
ii

Cedric Biagini, Divertir pour dominer. La culture de masse contre les peuples. Offensive, Cassez vos ecrans,
la spectacularisation du monde, ditions L'chappe, 2010, p. 41, apud. Jean-Jacques Wunenburger, Lhomme
lge de la tlvision, PUF, 2000
iii

Edmund Husserl, Leons pour une phnomnologie de la conscience intime du temps, PUF, 1964

iv

Idem

Michael Desmurget, TV LOBOTOMIE, La vrit scientifique sur les effets de la tlvision, Max Milo Editions,
Paris, 2011, p. 50
vi

Ibidem, p. 92

vii

Marshall Mc Luhan, Pour comprendre les mdias, 1986

viii

Jean Baudrillard, The perfect crime, London: Verso, 1995

ix

George Gerbner; Larry Gross; Michael Morgan; Nancy Signorelli, Living with Television: The Dynamics of the
Cultivation Process n Jennings Bryant, Dolf Zillman (dirs publ.), Perspectives on Media Effects, New Jersey,
Lawrence Erlbaum Assoc., Inc., 198Gb
x

Neil Weinstein, Unrealistic optimism about future life events n Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,
vol. 39, 1980, p. 806-820
Neil Weinstein, Unrealistic optimism about future life events n Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,
vol. 5, 1982, p. 441-460
Leo Barille, Television and attitudes about crime n R. Surette, Justice and the Media, Springfield, C. Thomas,
1984
Bernard Stiegler, La technique et le temps, Ed. Galile, 2001
Pierre Bourdieu, Despre televiziune, Ed. Meridiane, Bucureti, 1998
Jean-Jacques Wunenburger, Lhomme lge de la tlvision, PUF, 2000
Peter Watkins, La face cache de la lune, Homnisphere, 2007