The television experience supplies the developing personality with the cultural mythology it instinctively seeks. The assorted tales and fantasies of broadcast programming take on the significance of actualization myths as the subject of the nightly viewing ritual. Every evening the American people gather around their televisions. The television's glow is like a hearth fire that warms the tribe with a sense of belonging.
The collective viewing experience and the momentum of a continuous stream of programs and products keep the television mystique intact as the vehicle of a cultural actualization myth. Lacking the transubstantial experiences of the relatively unchanging Greek myths, or even the reassurance of a hands-on knowledge of the world, the television-dependent personality continually reevaluates the relevance of its ideals and values through the medium of television. TV personalities provide 'a way to be.' Broadcast programming reveals a kind of tribal totem that guarantees entry into society. The Nielsen rating system establishes a hierarchy of ethical codes for integration into American society.
The viewer does not necessarily emulate the value systems represented in broadcast programming. Absurd actions reveal how not to act. Television entertainment offers the vicarious fruit of knowledge without active participation. By itself, this would be interpreted as affecting individuation in a positive way. But as the number of hours dedicated to television viewing increases, television entertainment displaces the experience of the actual as the principle source for developing cultural values. At this point the television experience takes on a greater role in the socialization of the viewer.
With an increased viewing schedule the young become particularly vulnerable to the perverse biases of television programming (attitudes toward life and death in particular). After the guidance of the family and peer group pressure, the television-dependent youth works out solutions for adapting to the social environment by watching television. Weaned on broadcast programming and advertising, the child learns to relate socially by identifying with the banal aggressions of television's pseudo-heroes. Can there be any question as to the influence of television on the young, or on society in general?
The young person identifies with the struggles of the hero as part of an actualization process. The hero is the symbol of ego-consciousness. Consciousness develops in the path explored by the hero as the individual identifies with the injustice of the hero's plight and his heroic action. The child 'feels' his way into the value systems of society through his identification with its mythological heroes.
Broadcast programming offers dismal substitutes for hero myths and rites of passage. For the television audience, the myths are seldom complete or fully realized. The sacred element, sacrifice, follow through and confirmation associated with transformation mythology have become self-serving plot devices. Programming's predilection for image over substance and form over content drains complexity and richness from understanding. Homogenized information is spoon-fed to the viewer. There is no soul searching and no urgency. Commercial broadcasts provide weak, incomplete models for individuation and cultural integration. The distorted shape the myths take for ratings and profit fuels the listless amoral attitudes developing in America.
Given the economic motives and sensationalized nature of broadcast programming, it seems unlikely that television will ever provide many of the exemplary figures and models for psychic transformation necessary for producing ethical codes of mutual respect and coexistence. The television audience absorbs cultural directives manipulated to increase audience share. There is no moral imperative. Today's mythic hero, if there is to be one, must battle the spectre of media coercion, and resist economic and political pressures to conform to the consumer model portrayed in the media.
As evidenced by the increase in gang murders and teenage suicides, the young are literally dying for cultural experiences that provide relevant directions for involvement and belonging in society. The graffitied screams of the postmodern trickster are for cultural values that have been gutted by duplicity in the media and displaced by consumer ideals and participation in the television mystique.
When the mythological hero vanquishes the dragon he symbolically attenuates the maternal bond. Without heroes this generation slays no dragons. Typical of American society, and exemplified by the gang member, the trickster personality is poorly actualized and narcissistically bound to his group. The television mystique suppresses the spirit and inspires a brutal, lawless society. Without the reassuring resonance of the hero myth, the trickster personality has difficulty finding his way into adulthood.
Electronic Synchrony
Duped by media advertising into the vanities of image achieving and product consumption, and alienated from one another by reactionary politics, the television-dependent personality endures boredom, unrealized potential and pent-up emotions. America has suffered a deafening of its subjectively realized values. Even as the developing ego guards its tenuous existence against disruption, the habituation of the television audience threatens its existence. In the face of the information age, the individuation process goes on, but the resulting personality is crippled. Consciousness atrophies from the mindless addiction to television.
In its preoccupation with television, Western society parallels ancient Greek culture in its period of moral decline. In the transition from classical mythology to our unified worldview, the Greeks lost the transubstantiating experiences of epic poetry and tragic drama, and identified instead with the theatrical personalities of comedy and the logic of dialectic prose. This was the final stage in the transition from synchronic phase consciousness, with its external spirits and delocalized self, to diachronic consciousness, with its unified worldview and knowledge of consequence. Today, we may be experiencing another shift in the nature of perceived reality as television viewing preempts the experiences of 'real life' as the source for acquiring ethical values.
Television offers mindless involvement and formula entertainment. America is lulled and dulled in the security of a slow-changing predictable medium. The tendency is to disengage diachronic consciousness for an unfocused television-dependent state. Broadcast programming and advertising seduce the viewer into a type of phase consciousness. The conscious mind is stupefied by mundane programming and charmed by canned laughter and mood music.
In apathetic suspension, the participant does not have to think. His attentiveness is reduced to a near dream state as situations are resolved without his active involvement. The combination of television technology and profit motive has spawned a new mythic state -- electronic synchrony. The audience suspends the conscious decision-making function as unnecessary. Consider the importance of the apathetic drift of television viewing to the nightly unwinding of a high-strung America, exhausted from the rigors of image-achieving and the obligations of the American dream.
For the television-dependent personality, electronic synchrony is feeble replacement for transcendent renewal. Electronic synchrony, as experienced by the television audience, does have parallels with the synchronic perception of the mythopoeic mind. But where earlier mythic states offered heightened ontological awareness, electronic synchrony desensitizes the life experience and alienates the participant from the involvements and consequences of reality. The hypnotic affect of electronic synchrony leaves the television-dependent personality poorly actualized.
The implications of electronic synchrony and the television totem do not suggest there will ever be a lack of information or a loss in our ability to assimilate facts and figures. But information is not knowledge. At best information is a component of knowledge. The computer contains information, not knowledge. Knowledge is conveyed by language, but remains hidden behind the word. It breaks through the word as understanding. Ironically, Western society produces reason without understanding and facts without knowledge. It creates great computers but few great minds.
R. Cronk, 2004