QUOTE
From a speech by Al Gore.
Radio, the internet, movies, telephones, and other media all now vie for our attention – but it is television that still completely dominates the flow of information in modern America….
Soon after television established its dominance over print, young people who realized they were being shut out of the dialogue of democracy came up with a new form of expression in an effort to join the national conversation: the “demonstration.” This new form of expression, which began in the 1960s, was essentially a poor quality theatrical production designed to capture the attention of the television cameras long enough to hold up a sign with a few printed words to convey, however plaintively, a message to the American people. Even this outlet is now rarely an avenue for expression on national television.
So, unlike the marketplace of ideas that emerged in the wake of the printing press, there is virtually no exchange of ideas at all in television’s domain.[…]
It is important to note that the absence of a two-way conversation in American television also means that there is no “meritocracy of ideas” on television. To the extent that there is a “marketplace” of any kind for ideas on television, it is a rigged market, an oligopoly, with imposing barriers to entry that exclude the average citizen.
And TV is a dying medium for exactly this reason. The “marketplace of ideas” and “TV” aren’t the same thing.
Television from its inception reduced the overall access of ordinary people to the marketplace, because by definition it is an elitist medium – only a very small bandwidth was available, and everyone looked at the same signals. This represented a shift away from democratization – in the era dominated by the printed word, it was substantially easier for a person to set up shop as a public intellectual and attract an audience, because there are thousands of newspapers, millions of books, and so on – compared to three TV channels.
Individual citizens now have far greater access to the marketplace of ideas than ever before. The rise of the Internet makes it once again possible for relatively ordinary people to have a voice. How many people read your blog? 1000? That isn’t a huge audience – but its a lot bigger than the audience you could reasonably expect to get in 1980, and you have the ready potential to increase it a thousandfold. Compare that to TV, where at most a few people can be on, at most a few voices can ever be heard.
The idea that television now dominates the information flow is absurd. Sure it does – in the same way that horses dominated the transportation market in 1920. Damn temporarily, in otherwords. My grandmother watches TV news religiously. My dad tunes it in every once in a while. I last watched it when they picked a pope because I wanted to see who it was for myself. This is the unmistakable trend, and it is very evident in looking at the viewership figures, which are in a steady downward spiral as the audience dies and the medium fails to attract new ones. TV is the tobacco conglomerate of the information marketplace: lucrative, powerful, and utterly doomed.
Be fair, bean. Al didn’t invent the demonstration, so he’s a little bit fuzzy about the details of its six thousand year history.
What a dumb shit.
What a jerk.
Who watches TV anyhow? And why? For me, just to make noise in the background.
Did this guy ever hear of the internet?
Network Television no longer dominates the information flow, but TV as a whole sure does. Temporarily? Sure, nothing is forever, but TV is dominant now and most likely will be for at least another couple of decades.
The large majority of American voters.
The large majority of American voters.
And what is the most common characteristic of American voters?
Hint: G-E-R-I-T-O-L
Hardly. A medium is like any other tool. They who wield it decide what it can and should be wielded for.
http://zena.secureforum.com/Znet/zmag/articles/feb95barsamian.htm
“… Both legislatively and constitutionally it [television] has been affirmed to be a public property. It is controlled by the Federal Communications Commission, which is supposedly the real estate agent, so to speak, for the people who own the public airwaves. The FCC then allocates space on the public airwaves to radio and TV stations and now other forms of cellular communications, etc. We own the public airwaves. We’re the landlords. The radio and TV stations are the tenants. They pay us no rent. They use our property free. They can decide who says what on our property which they control 24 hours a day…” –Ralph Nader, 1995
Robert, I already know that you can’t tell the difference between Nader and Stalin. So if the best response you can think of is once again along those lines, be so kind as to hold your tongue.
Ironically, Gore is making an argument that many conservatives also make about the TV news, although of course those folks see it as their voices that are not being heard on the networks.
Hardly. A medium is like any other tool. They who wield it decide what it can and should be wielded for.
OK. You’re in charge of television in 1950, as it is becoming popular. I imbue you with godlike power over people’s behavior, but constrain you to follow the laws of economics and physics.
Your assignment: create 50 million television programs, or one for every citizen of the world who wants one, whichever number is larger, and give each one of them a bona-fide shot at a global audience.
No? Why not?
Because television is an elitist medium, that’s why not. You’ve got just so much signal bandwidth. You’ve got just so much space and electrical power and talent that can be assigned to TV studios and broadcast facilities. You have a certain number of hours in the day in which broadcasts can be made and seen. By definition, your content production is going to be done by a limited set of people with high barriers to entry. As opposed to (say) Internet content provision – where those physical limits on participation still exist, but are higher than the number of people on the planet, thus becoming a non-constraint.
You can be the biggest democratic socialist in the world. You can use your godlike power to open the studio doors to as many people as possible. You can chop the frequencies as fine as you like – but of course, in so doing, you are trading off on the audience that each show can reach. You can do whatever is in your power to increase the democratic participation in the process – and this will, in fact, make a difference vis a vis having you instead limit TV production time to you and your closest buddies, and using the system to produce hagiographic biopics about how great you are.
But you will not have a democratic medium, because the physics and the economics say no. It’s an intrinsically elitist medium, not one that is elitist because the people in charge want it to be elitist.
If we had put Ralph Nader – or Stalin, for that matter – in charge back in 1950, we might (or might not) have better, more interesting, TV today. But we would not have democratic TV, because democratic TV cannot exist.
I’m not sure why you’re so pissed that my definition of hard-left includes people you don’t think of that way, or why that’s relevant here, but that doesn’t change physics.
See, when this is what you come up with, I don’t even bother to read further. There’s simply no reason to assume that the choice must be between three major networks and one TV show for each citizen alive then, or now.
Forget it. Just because I’m out of work doesn’t mean I’ve got unlimited time to run around in circles for your amusement. Try the next window.
There’s simply no reason to assume that the choice must be between three major networks and one TV show for each citizen alive then, or now.
Well, how else can you have a democratic medium? At the height of the dominance of the printing press (and, in fact, for most of the existence of the printing press) there was one newspaper for each citizen. I’m getting sick of your snide and useless retorts to Robert’s eminently reasonable & impeccably logical comments.
Dude, let ’em eat zines. :p
OK, Jake. Explain to me how, with the technology and economy we possessed during the heyday of television, it could have been made into a genuinely democratic medium.
Yeah, I’ll do that as soon as you explain how print was a “genuinely democratic medium.” Hell, explain to me how, with the technology & economy we possess now, print can be a “genuinely democratic medium,” and I will be genuinely impressed.
I’ll do that as soon as you explain how print was a “genuinely democratic medium.” Hell, explain to me how, with the technology & economy we possess now, print can be a “genuinely democratic medium,” and I will be genuinely impressed.
Print is a genuinely democratic medium because (a) the level of economic wealth necessary to mass-produce a printed work is generally within the reach of an ordinary citizen and (b) the nature of the communication bandwidth being used by print is essentially infinite.
You want to make available to the public the Squidian Manifesto. To do it in print, you need a floppy disk (cost: $1), a computer (cost: $300, or free if you don’t mind sitting in the library), and a Kinko’s (cost: $2 per 50 page manifesto you want to run off). Can every single American afford this? No. Can most any American who is really motivated to get their manifesto out there afford this? Sure; work at Burger King for a month while living in a field and eating Ramen, and you can save up $500. Once you print your manifestos, can you hand them out on street corners, sell them in bookstores, put ads in the New Yorker to sell them for $3 apiece? Yes. Can you take all the time you want? In other words, having printed your copies of the Manifesto, can you stick them on a shelf and continue doling them out to your adoring public over time? Sure. Can you scale up if people actually are interested in your delirious ramblings? Trivially easily. Net result: you have the ability to get your message out there. Most likely, nobody cares, because most likely, you have nothing particularly interesting to say and/or you can’t say it well. But you have the freedom to try, and there are plenty of examples of folks who tried and succeeded.
As compared to: You want to make public the Squidian Manifesto. To do it on TV, you need a video production studio (cost: $200 an hour), actors, producers, technicians, and crew (cost: free if you are very lucky in your choice of friends, $1000s per hour if not), and broadcast time (cost: at minimum, maybe $50 per minute, to get worthless time in the middle of the night on K-LAME, or $1000s per minute to actually have an audience). Once this is done, can you promote this effectively yourself? No. Can you store your TV broadcast and resend it when there’s demand for it? Marginally, but you’ll again have to pay a massive premium for the use of the very limited bandwidth that the TV system has available. Can you get your message out? Sure, if you’re a station owner or very wealthy individual. Realistically, you don’t have the freedom to try.
TV can be more or less democratically-oriented, but it can never get very far in that direction. The spectrum is finite. There’s only so much time in the day. Print has none of those limitations, and thus, can be (in a country with freedom of the press and the economic prosperity that lets ordinary people have disposable wealth) a democratic medium. With print, if you can find 1000 people who care about your words, you can pay for the cost of getting them out there without much problem. With TV, you have to have an audience of millions to break even.
To put it in much simpler terms: Thomas Paine didn’t need to be Rupert Murdoch to have his say. He just had to be interesting to his fellow citizens. That’s democratic – access to the institution by the motivated public.
Sure, bean, there’s some room at the margin for fiddling; that’s what I meant when I said that the decisions by the people running the system could push it in a more or less democratic direction. But how far can it go?
IOW, how many public access TV shows can there be? In democratic-socialist paradise, maybe a couple hundred in a given town, if you kick all the commercial programming off the air (and also wipe out your audience).
How many zines can there be? How many blogs? Six billion, that’s how many.
I’ve never understood why the only way you can get public access viewing in this town is to buy cable. Isn’t that pretty much an oxymoron ??
Public Access !! Now brought to you exclusively by Comcast[tm] !!
Phooey. :/
I have to agree with Robert. If you provided state sponsored recording studios and allowed anyone who wanted it a 1/2 hour show each week, on any one of the perhaps 15 stations you can squeeze into the tv range, you still can actually only provide time to 5,040 groups of people with their own shows, only 800 of which are in desirable time slots. And this still doesn’t recognize that some shows are going to be of cross-area interest, etc.
Meanwhile, if there are state-sponsored printing presses (or state subsidies to publications), then the number of publications is limited purely by how much public interest there is.
If everyone in New York wants to publish a ‘zine, then it is possible to accomodate that desire. If everyone in New York wants a broadcast half hour weekly tv show, this is simply impossible.
Furthermore, because tv broadcast time is a fundamentally strictly limited resource, if someone’s half hour show becomes immensely popular, and people want it broadcast in their town too, then one of the half hour shows in their town will have to go off the air to add the new show. If Brad’s zine becomes hugely popular and has a million copies printed each issue, this does not inherently require that anyone else’s zine not be published. If needed, a new printing press can be built and devoted to printing Brad’s zine. If Brad’s tv show becomes hugely popular, there is no equivalent way to create a new tv channel (without impairing the quality of the neighboring tv stations). A country could, if the desire existed, have one published zine per citizen, and each of those zines could actually have a huge distribution. At some point, you’d run into the limits of paper and ink production, but those limits are huge. A country simply could never provide everyone with a half hour weekly tv show with a nationwide broadcast.
The difference between the 5000 or so nationally-broadcast, half-hour, weekly shows possible (even distributed in as egalitarian a manner as possible) and the number of books and magazines and authors with nationwide distribution currently in the US, much less the maximum number of books and magazines and authors with nationwide distribution, is so huge that it is very hard to see how anyone could argue that television is not a fundamentally more restrictive and elitist medium.
Thank you for that precisely comprehensible rendering, Charles.
Charles, even what you describe would be a vast improvement over what we’ve got now. I doubt that every citizen needs, or wants, to get on the air for half an hour, but I’m guessing that there’s a signifigant number for whom makeover shows and what not aren’t really filling the bill.
As for the internet, I doubt that we’re even close to getting every citizen in the world a computer, or even a public library in which they could spend a half hour on one. Besides, I’m sure that if we wait around long enough, either Robert or Ron will rush in to breathlessly announce that libraries should all be privatized because gummint sucks anyway.
Besides, I’m sure that if we wait around long enough, either Robert or Ron will rush in to breathlessly announce that libraries should all be privatized because gummint sucks anyway.
I think that the atmosphere should be privatized. (Dibs!) But since I normally inject the view that things should be privatized in a context where that would make sense, and since you object to the introduction of “let’s privatize it”, it seems odd that you’re bitching about me introducing it, by introducing it. So why don’t we just drop the “privatize it” motif for this thread, where it isn’t particularly relevant?
Having everyone having at least periodic access to a computer isn’t a particularly difficult goal. Give it a decade or two. Considering that within living memory there were no computers, that we don’t have universal broadband in the Australian outback is not all that surprising.
Fine with me. I think that citizens can be adequately served even if every last one of us doesn’t have our very own laptop, TV, automobile, phone.
I think that it’s legitimate to fear that media consolidation may come to hinder access online, however. Much as media consolidation has worked to hinder access to other forms of public discussion already. :(
BTW, Robert, the reason public libraries are important to this discussion is precisely because of access. You don’t need to own a computer to blog, and it’s safe to say that not everyone who might want to blog (or read up/comment on their local parties’ antics, debate about a pending bond measure, etc.) can buy one.
You do need access to one. Not sole ownership of. Access to. You get why the existence of common space where even the less affluent can get to a computer is therefore relevant to questions of access– Right ?
I’m afraid to even touch the issue of how time away from work would also have an impact on the quality of access, but…
Everyone has the right to an opinion. Everyone has a right to express their opinion. But there is no right to have anyone listen to your opinion.
Consider all the opinions you read on any blog, left or right wing, that is based on emotion, mis-information, predjudice, etc., or are expressed so that they are difficult or impossible to understand. If you want to hear something that’ll present you with information that might make you change your own opinion, or at least inform it better, then the majority of people in this country don’t have opinions worth listening to.
Now, if your job is to garner votes, or sell products, then sure; you don’t care if someone’s opinion is based on emotion or lies or is incoherently expressed. You just want to tick off on your spreadsheet the factors in that opinion that affect what you’re trying to get done. But that adds little to the public debate.
People decry all the crap that’s on TV, and rightly so. But remember that TV is selling what people are willing to buy. Here in Chicago a few years ago, Channel 5 (NBC) went out on a limb locally. Carol Marin, an anchor for the local news, quit her job at the local news operation at Channel 2 (CBS) (I think it was Channel 2) because they had brought in Jerry Springer (!) to be a regular commentator on the news. Some time later, Channel 5 hired her to take over their local news show. Carol made the changes that I loved. No more “movie star A is fucking movie star B and is pregnant by movie star C”. No more stories on fires unless they had a strong secondary component (a factory that released pollutants, etc.). No more robberies or murders. No more “human interest” stuff about cute puppies, etc. Lots of stories on hard news; wars, politics, corruption, etc. “If it bleeds, it leads” was out the window.
They carried this for about 3 months, which was about 2.5 months longer than they needed to figure out that people wouldn’t watch it. It wasn’t Carol Marin; her personal numbers were high, and she is now a commentator on the local news. People just didn’t want to hear all that; they weren’t willing to pay attention. So don’t blame the TV folks; they have to make money, and people buy crap, not quality. No news to Sam Walton’s kids, I’m sure.
A. J. Leibling said it best; “Freedom of the press belongs to the man who owns one.” Now, there’s women who own presses these days, but the point stands. The great thing about the Internet is that now an enormous number of people can either own or at least borrow a press (I’m stretching the definition of a press here, I know, but bear with me, please). The awful thing about the Internet is the noise:signal ratio is higher on the Internet than in any other media. But real information is out there, if you’re willing to look, and so are intelligent commentators.
…on any one of the perhaps 15 stations you can squeeze into the tv range…
Well, you’ve got the 12 stations on VHF & the 50 or 60 on UHF if you’re talking about broadcast only. So increase your 15 stations to 65 or 75 & you come out with 25,200 shows.
I agree with bean wrt public access cable.
And as long as we’ve gotten into the realm of cable… the number of stations becomes more or less infinite when you move out of the realm of traditional “broadcast” television and move into the world of cable & satellite. So, as long as you’re going to have big government sponsored printers, why not government sponsored studios and stations? You can even run it in an “on demand” format & then the only restrictions you have are the same as for print – that is to say time.
The assertion that print is intrinsically more democratic than television is false. It all depends on how your culture/society/government decides to format/distribute/control its media.
The more I think about it, the more absurd it is to say that one medium is more “democratic” than another. What you are saying is that one is more accessible or cheaper than another. That is hardly the same thing as “democratic.” By your definition of “democratic” a vegetarian diet is more democratic than an omnivorous diet. By your definition, health care is more democratic in Cuba than it is in the US. (look, bean, analogies!)
In many ways, television is more accessible to an audience than print. You don’t need to be literate to understand television.
Access is not democracy. Economic cost is not democracy.
If you want to argue that print is cheaper than television, I’m with you. If you want to argue that print is more accessible than television, I have to say that it depends on how your government regulates/subsidizes television.
I’m curious. If you’d all indulge me, I’d like to know what your TV watching habits are.
I watch mostly news and sports. I’m a sucker for cop and courtroom shows like Law and Order. I also drop in on the History Channel and that kind of thing, and sometimes the SciFi channel.
I actively cannot stand most situation comedies; exaggerated stereotypes don’t make me laugh. Everyone Doesn’t Love Raymond in my house, although Frasier was tolerable; there was occasionally some wit to the farce. And I don’t think that gay stereotypes are any cooler than straight ones, so Will and Grace doesn’t make me laugh, either.
I get this weird mental image of a TV sitting in the corner, looking guilty after tearing up the newspaper and getting scolded by the owner.
Jake,
Actually, on-demand cable is a radically different creature than broadcast television. On-demand cable is not (as a technology) radically different than the net. Although the back-end infrastructure would have to change, and the access times might be affected (so there might be a download time), I don’t think there is any fundamental reason that on-demand cable could not be configured to allow any video anywhere on the net to be downloaded and viewed.
I still don’t think 25,000 shows is a very large number. Particularly in a pre-VCR age, where shows at night would be seen by very few, and shows in mid-day couldn’t be seen by people who worked outside the home during the day, etc.
Obviously, a medium does not have an inherent democraticness. However, taking democraticness to mean ” How many and how wide a variety (along whatever axis) of people are able to speak through this medium? Once they do so, how possible is it for others to respond?” Some media are better suited than others. Broadcast tv loses to radio loses to cable/satellite loses to print loses to the net. Within the range of possibility for a particular medium, other factors control how democratically the medium is deployed.
Media that are cheaper and more accessible are easier to democratize. There is a reason that Russian dissidents distributed print samzidat rather than running pirate radio stations. There is a reason that pirate radio stations are illegal in the US, but the concept of pirate book publishing houses here makes no sense. There is a reason that labor unions have their own newspapers (and have for more than a century), but not their own tv stations or radio stations. There is a reason that there is a magazine called “Lies of our Times” detailing biased stories in the New York Times, but no TV show “Lies of Frontline.” Broadcast TV is more expensive and inherently limited in amount, and therefore much easier to control (indeed, because of its very limited quantity, it functions better if controlled, so that your city-wide broadcast on channel 11 is not swamped by neighborhood wide broadcasts on channel 11, or a new channel trying to fit itself in between channel 10 and 11), and much more likely to end up entirely in the hands of the powerful (either the wealthy, as here, or the state (as in much of Europe).
Could TV have been structured so that every union in Portland had its own TV show? Possibly, but it would have required a government that actively intervened to support that happening, and it would have had to happen at the expense of all of the writers who wanted to produce soap operas (or whatever). Every union in Portland can have its own newspaper, and it doesn’t interfere with anyone else having their own newspaper too.
RonF,
US broadcast TV does not actually sell content to viewers, it sells viewers to advertisers. PBS stations are somewhat an exception to this.
Also, although this may be an elitist position itself, there is a value in requiring TV stations to broadcast news that is actually news, rather than infotainment and repackaged infomercials, even if the viewership is smaller. There are various ways of paying the costs of this (including the ones traditional in the US: “You’re getting a limited resource for free to make a profit off of, so you have to do so many hours of broadcast for the public good. Can’t make a profit off of those hours? Too bad!” and “Once again, we’re here for aour biannual begathon”), so it is not some fundamental unbreakable rule that TV can only broadcast what gets it the maximum number of the most valuable eyeballs to sell to advertisers.
Actually, on-demand cable is a radically different creature than broadcast television.
I agree with that statement. But, when we talk about television in the present, I feel we need to include broadcast, cable, satellite and on-demand. The method of delivery is different, but the object that makes the content available to the end-user is the same for all 4 methods.
I still don’t think 25,000 shows is a very large number.
Really? I think that is a huge number of shows in a week. In fact, I think that 5,000 is a huge number of shows in a week. Would you consider 5000 or 25000 newspapers or articles a week to be not a large number? I don’t have the time to read 5000 articles per week, just as I don’t have the time to watch 5000 shows per week.
Broadcast tv loses to radio loses to cable/satellite loses to print loses to the net.
I’m not sure that I agree with your hierarchy. I don’t think that your hierarchy of media is inherently true. There is no reason (unless I don’t know enough about signal requirement) that more bandwidth couldn’t have been made available for tv signals and less bandwidth made available for radio signals. I’m not sure why cable/satellite loses to print. Sure, the hierarchy may be valid for the way things have turned out/currently exist, but that could be changed (and I’m not even sure that, in today’s world, cable does lose to print).
But, other than those few quibbles, I think that you make a lot of good points. You are arguing about accessibility not some nonsensical “inherent genuine democratic” aspect. And I think that there is a long discussion to be had about what would make each medium most accessible and, having maximized each, which winds up being the most accessible of all. (Remember, for print or internet to “win” you need to have an overwhelmingly literate population – something that didn’t exist in the US until fairly recently).
In “The Creation of the Media” by Paul Starr, he points out that while the new Soviet Union was investing in loudspeakers, the US was developing telephone technology. Obviously these were reflective of the countries differing values, but do they also in turn impact those values? Starr says yes, and I agree. Which makes me wonder about television, and it’s one way transmission of ideas. (the book ends at 1941)
Newspapers have concentrated ownership as well (although not to the same extent), but at least when you write back, or just complain about them in your own paper, blog, or daily conversations, you are able to respond in kind. You are at least minimaly trained in that particular form of communication, and have the ability to analyze and refute the technique as well as the message, even if only privately.
The problem with TV is that the average person can’t do even this. Few people are trained to analyze or make simple films, or even pictures that contain meaning, the way everyone is taught to read and write. (Jake, Niel Postman talks about how literate American was during the 1800’s in “Amusing Oursleves to Death”.) You can’t really equate public access TV with zines or blogs because the contrast between the overall quality of the latter in comparison to it’s corporate counterpart may be large, but it’s nowhere near the the vast differences between public access and network TV. Plus, one can choose when to read a book or newspaper, stop and think about a written argument, or interrupt or change the flow in a conversation, but one cannot do that with TV.
Or at least, one used to not be able to do so. We can now pause and rewind even TV shows, not just movies, and even skipping around home movies is easier now than it used to be. Now editing equipment, not just video cameras, are available for sale to the general public. High school students in my town are now being required to make a powerpoint (ie visual and oral) presentation before graduation. A far cry from requiring a course on some form of visual media, but a step in the right direction. To me, having the ability, especially in terms of basic knowledge and experience, to manipulate the dominant medium through which most people get information is just as important as lowering economic, political, and physical barriers to being heard through the same medium on a large scale.
Interesting stuff, Jenny. It will be fascinating to see what happens with video technology now that the Internet makes delivery of small-scale content economically practical. Video democracy now!
I ran some numbers last night; the bandwidth cost to deliver a half-hour of adequate-quality video over the Net is about two cents per viewer. That makes commercial web broadcasting potentially very lucrative, and noncommercial broadcasting very viable. Spend $100 on bandwidth, and you’ve got 5k potential viewers. That vaults the Net ahead of print as a small-mass medium for ordinary people, as Charles noted; you can’t get your newsletter to 5000 people for $100.
Interesting days ahead.