More persuasive to me is the research into what happens when people watch TV. For example, as TV spread north in Canada back before the days of satellite, the crime rate increased and then leveled off. The availability of TV signal to a community correlated directly with the increase. I'd agree with you that it's not due to the content of the programs simplistically considered, but to something about the experience of television. I suspect a lot of it has to do with the simple solutions quickly arrived at leading to clear morally superior winners and evil losers.
Research on attitudes of heavy TV watchers have found that they over-estimate the crime rate and in fact all the dangers of modern life. They believe more strongly in heavily punitive criminal sentences. They have more negative attitudes towards the sick and elderly. Now obviously TV watchers aren't passive vessels into which propaganda is poured; they choose to obsess over stories of abducted children and to avoid material on the unattractive. There's a sort of "Day of the Locust" phenomenon. When your life is dull, you experience feelings and thrills vicariously, and TV offers overwrought excitement to the bored, tired, and unimaginative. Content may not be the primary means of propagandizing, but it's pretty important.
I keep getting the feeling that we're back at McLuhan's "The medium is the message." Nonetheless, I'm going to squawk a little about TV ads -- they give people who have too many failed toys something else to desire, and the constant desiring is crucial to the capitalist economy.
________________________________ Carrol Cox (Tue, September 7, 2010 5:42:25 PM):
O.K.
I think that both Dennis and Joanna are letting their moral sensibilities blot out their political thinking. If you see the problem as propaganda, then indeed as Castro says all is loist in the United States. Let us sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the death of kings.
Anything that happens can be called "everyday practice," but it is still worth while to make some distinctions.
Sitting in front of the TV in the evening (regardless of what is the content on the screen) is part of the daily practice of anyone who is exposed to TV ads; the ads are not in any significant sense part of tha practice.
And the person sitting in front of the TV is acting as an isolated individual, not as part of any collective. He/she is all alone, even if others are in the room. In other words, to some extent TV as such (regardless of what propaganda it spreads or doesn't spread) individualizes, even within the household unit. The household member who interferes with focus on the screen is apt to get snarled at it. Almost everyone who has ever watched TV has participated in this ritual. Thus TV makes its important contribution to bourgeois ideology quite independently of its ads or its other content. A focus on the ads is, I repeat, obscurantist, from the perspective of serious political analysis. Focus rather on the action of sitting there, not on what is being seen, and you will make progress in your political analysis.
Why is he or she sitting thee?
The answer to this question must apply to something like the totality of TV viewers, not just the viewers of one particular program or one particular category of TV viewers. Why do they sit down and turn on the set?
I'm not prepared myself to answer this, never having given it much thought, but it is the queston anyone seriously invlved in political organizing or in theorizing the conditions of political organizing will focus on. The ads, the propaganda, are trivial in comparison.
Some preliminary and quite speculative beginning on this question.
First of all, the most important social relation, the most important social prqctice, that brings them to the tv set, is the relation of those who produce the household income to their employer, and increasingly over the last 40 years that also has been a wholly individualized relatinship, even in the shrinking number of unionized enterprises. The job defines the fundamental meaning of the TV viewing: it is "leisure time" (which Tom Walker differentiates from free time). It is a time, the cliche goes, to "wind down." And as leisure time it defines work time: the two make a (sort of) whole.
And what can the individual do during this leisure time: she/he can consume of course. What else is there to do? And the world presents a rather bewilderingly large pile of consumer choices to fill this time; no one can know about all the "choices" which have to be made day after day. And this endless confrontation with occasions of "forced free choice" is fundamental to the ideology to which the propaganda that comes over the TV.
So no, I'm not kidding. I'm deadly serius. If we want to change the consciousness of a few million Americans, we have to provide a contrary _practice_, and we son't do that if we fuss about the trivialities of TV advertising and consumer choice.
A few years ago on another list to which I only rately posted, another subscriber posed for me the question (vaguely remembered) "Who the hell are you and where do you come from?" (Not direct quotation but I think true to the tone.) After some deliberation I answered somewhat as follows: "I'm a local activist drivewn to theorizing a context for it since no one elkse ssems to be doing it."
Squawks about TV ads don't help me.
Carrol
Dennis Claxton wrote:
>
> At 11:56 AM 9/7/2010, 123hop at comcast.net wrote:
>
> >Carrol writes:
> >
> >"Propaganda does not exist in a vacuum. In fact, it only works with those
> >who already accept its premises -- i.e., who have 'learened' those
> >premises through their won everyday practice within a given set of
> >social realtions. Put otherwise, propaganda cannot itself create the
> >terrainon which that propaganda makes sense."
> >
> >Are you kidding me? Propaganda (in the form of TV commercials/billoards/etc)
> >begins with consciousness (toddlerhood) in the U.S.
>
> Which means that in the U.S. advertising is part of everyday practice
> within a given set of social relations.
>
> When's the last time you watched tv Carrol?
>
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