As Seen On Tv

As Seen on TV
Zygmunt Bauman
In ten years, says Jacques Attali1, more than two billion TV screens will be switched on at any given time. I suggest that it is primarily in this massive, ubiquitous and obtrusive presence of TV-transmitted images that the true impact of television on the way we act and think ought to be sought. Television has conquered the Earth and its inhabitants. What, though,is the outcome of that must successful of known invasions? Since the beginning of the invasion evaluations of the new medium's impact on human lives and on the fashion in which they are shared oscillated between cassandric and panglossian. The Cassandrians saw the medium as a next gigantic stride on the road to the totalitarian rule which society has travelled since the beginning of modern times:a Wunderwaffe of Big Brother and his henchmen, the unsurpassed and irresistible weapon of intellectual disablement, brainwashing, indoctrination and imposition of thoughtless conformity, wielded by those placed in front of the TV cameras against those sitting in front of the TV screens. The Panglossians welcomed the medium as a next gigantic stride on the road to emancipation which humanityfollowed since that great awakening called Enlightenment: knowledge being power, and the screen being a glass window through which the crown jewels of human wisdom can be contemplated. TV in the Panglossians' portrayal is, or is bound to become, a most powerful weapon of individual freedom of selfconstruction and self-assertion. Cassandrians and Panglossians go on picking bones with each other, andtheir querelle is restaged and given new vigour with each successive computing invention and the supply to the shops of every new or newish medium. But on one point the antagonists saw eye to eye: TV, just like the rest of the new media, is primarily a way of doing what humans, singly or collectively, strove to do all along — only they had no time, money, tools, or know-how to do it on such a scale oras fast and with effects as great as they wished their actions to be. As a matter of fact, one can be a Cassandrian or a Panglossian only in so far as one believes that the ends are given and only the means are missing — and so the significance of any change consists in affecting the facility with which objectives (which have been already known) are pursued and attained (by the means heretoforeunknown or unavailable). One possibility which seldom appeared in the disputations swayed by the cassandrian-cumpanglossian obsessions was that television did not so much change the hands of the players as the game itself; that in the case of the media, as in so many other cases, it is the means that seek the goals to which they could be applied, or through their sheer presence conjure up new endswithout seeking them; that new means tend to set new objectives as well as a new game whose objectives are most important stakes; and that the failure to remember that few if any consequences of the new departures are anticipated, let alone designed in advance, results in the memory-induced blindness to the true nature of new realities which follow. I suggest that the paramount effect oftelevision has been the slow yet relentless cancellation of the objectives which used to give sense to the cassandrian vs. panglossian querelle. To Marshall McLuhan goes the credit for the first breach in the cognitive frame jointly fixed by the antagonists in that querelle. The discovery that the `media are the message' shifted attention from the contents of scripts, from their perception and retention,from things planned and controlled or controllable in principle, to the irreversible transformation of the ways scripts are scripted and staged, images are perceived and retention operates — things neither planned nor fully controllable. It was as if the drug's ostensible targets had changed

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