The Teleban - The Ban TV Blogroll

"If suburbs are capitalism's ideally separated buying units, and suburbs can be built profitably, then we must create humans who like and want suburbs: suburb-people. Since before the existence of suburbs there were no suburb people, advertising had the task of creating them, in body and mind.

Since before the creation of electric shavers or hair dryers or electric carving knives people felt no need for these things, the need was implanted into human minds by advertising." (Jerry Mander, in Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television, pg 135).

You'll notice on the left hand side of this site (or the right hand side if you reside in the Southern Hemisphere) that I have joined the Teleban Blogroll, a group of bloggers who believe that TV should be banned. Now let me start off my saying that I don't believe in banning TV anymore than I believe in banning alcohol or chocolate chip cookies. Bans don't work. They never have. You can put as many laws into the books as you see fit, but people will still engage in whatever activities they want. No ban, whether it was on alcohol in the 1920’s, or on First Nations spiritual ceremonies from the late 19th or early 20th C, has ever worked and they never will. Plus, I believe in freedom - I believe that we are free to do whatever we want to ourselves, even if it is harmful to ourselves. If we are to change, it will not be through legislation, but because we truly want too.

Now some of you are probably wondering - if Peter doesn't want to ban TV, then why is he apart of the Teleban blogroll? Simple. While I don't believe that TV should be banned, I believe that we need to be much more aware of the effects TV has on our society. My hope is that by joining the group and showing the blogroll on my site it will get people to think about what TV has done and continues to do to us. Of all the conversations we need to have about civilization, the first is about TV - it is the dominant institution of our time and central to the perpetuation of our dysfunctional way of life. If we are to ever change the way we live and stop destroying the planet, as well as ourselves, we must first and foremost start to watch less TV.

At its core, TV as an institution/medium sells and glorifies the materialistic way of life. Advertisers and marketers attempt to sell us products by convincing us that we need them in order to keep up with the Jones’ (or as it has become recently, Oprah Winfrey) and to have a good life. The basic message of TV is that money will buy you happiness, as well as acceptance and prestige in your community. This is, however, totally untrue (well, stuff does buy your prestige and standing, but I think that in itself says something about us, don’t you?). Most research suggests that people’s happiness does not increase with a rise in income, and that in fact, the more materialistic one is (that is, striving for more and more consumer goods), the more susceptible they are to physical and mental ailments such as depression and back aches. The reason for this is because when someone believes that money buys happiness they spend all their time trying to find happiness through buying stuff, usually to the detriment of other activities that actually make human beings happier, such as spending time with other human beings (those other two legged creatures). Studies show that the more TV you watch, the more materialistic you will be. So, the first reason to stop watching as much TV as we do (in 2004, Canadians averaged 21.4 hours a week) is because the message it is selling us is false and can be, extremely harmful to our personal well-being.

Not only does TV present a material ideal, but also a physical one. People on TV, both in shows and commercials, are beautiful. Women have white teeth and big, firm boobs. Men have full heads of hair, six packs, and 9 inch penis’ (well, to be fair, that is in porn). Few of us can match up to those ideals, but this has not stopped many from trying. Women starve themselves and men take steroids in order to live up to the artificially created ideal, and I am sure that more than enough people feel bad about themselves because they don’t physically match-up to those we see on TV. Perhaps if we watch less TV, as well as all other media, people will stop comparing themselves to the Jennifer Lopez’ and Brad Pitt’s of the world (Kasser's research showed that the more one watched TV, the worse you felt about yourself), and stop spending all their time and money trying to look like them, and we can all start remembering that it is what is in the inside that counts (said the ugly person with three chins). We have to remember that advertisers purposefully want to make us feel bad about ourselves so that we will buy their products.

While the TV-perpetuated materialistic lifestyle is harmful to us on a personal level, on an environmental level it has been suicidal. Our endless consumption of material goods has resulted in the warming of our atmosphere by ghg’s from factories, vehicles and power plants. Our quest for resources to build those goods is destroying ecosystems. And we are using what resources we have left, unsustainably. Add to all this the fact that the world’s population is 6.5 billion and growing, rapidly, and many of them are trying to emulate our hyper-materialistic society, and you have a bleak environmental condition that is only getting worse. But most of us don’t care because mainly because A) we have no idea it is happening (advertisers and producers have no interest in telling us our materialistic way of life is environmentally destructive because they are the one’s benefiting the most economically from this way of life) because we watch too much TV, and B) even if we do realize it, we have been so conditioned to believe that our short term material needs are primary, that we just don’t give a shit.

If we are to ever start taking better care of the planet, we must first rid ourselves of our belief that money and stuff buys happiness – the main message we get on a daily basis from the good people on TV. If we watch less TV, a lot less, perhaps attitudes will start to change and we will become better stewards. The problem is, however, that watching TV is a normal part of our cultural experience. It is just what most normal people do when they go home at the end of the day. In the end, as authors like Thom Hartmann and others have pointed out, TV is an addiction, one that is very tough to break (I am sure some of you remember my pitiful attempt to quit TV for a month).

"One measure of a drug's addictive potential is what percentage of people can take it up or put it down at will and with ease. This behaviour is called chipping a drug – occasionally using it, but also walking away from it without pain or withdrawal for months or years at a time…imagine a “drug” that fewer than even 5 percent of Americans could walk away from for a month at a time without discomfort. Such a drug, by the definitions of addiction, would be the most powerfully addictive drug ever developed…Far more seductive than opium, infinitely more effective at shaping behavior and expectations than alcohol, a used for more minutes every day than tobacco, our culture’s most pervasive and most insidious “drugging agent” is television” (From The Last Days of Ancient Sunlight, pg 130-1).

In the end, it is not about banning TV, but being more responsible in our watching of it by watching less, being aware that it is the job of advertisers, marketers and everyone else on TV to sell us stuff, and realizing that they will do anything in order to do so including making us feel bad about ourselves and distracting us from the more important issues in life. If we watch TV, we can spend more time with our families, buy less shit (which puts less of a strain on the environment), and who knows, we might actually sit down and ponder what the fuck is going in this world. But as long as we continue to watch perverse levels of TV and buy into it’s main message nothing will ever change for us and the inevitable consequence of how we live will come to fruition.Recommend this Post