The Poison Pill of Un-Reality Part I

“One of the few good things about modern times: If you die horribly on television, you will  not have died in vain. You will have entertained us.” -    Kurt Vonnegut

“Virtual Reality is like mainlining television.” – William Gibson

T.V. and Ad-infinitum... 

A study conducted by the cable television industry in February 1996 found that 57 percent of television programmes contain “psychologically harmful” violence. The findings, the largest profiling of its kind, were taken from over 2,500 hours of television programming, carefully tracked and analyzed. This research does not necessarily cause children to act more violently but it can contribute to conditions whereby violence is seen as a normal part of life.

Childhood obesity, apathy, passivity, compliance, earlier sexual activity, attention deficit, impaired cognitive ability, hyperactivity, depression and aggression are all increasing in children. Television is contributing to this global malaise. 1 It is not difficult to see why the child’s ability to actually learn is impaired. It is not the quantity of programmes that is at fault, but the quality. Given that the quality of television is tied to the market place, then it stands to reason that television will project these ways of being straight into the waiting brains of the young. Children aged 6 to 8 now respond to the image of a television as alcoholics do to pictures of drink.  2

It is not the content of the programming that is doing untold damage, though that is contributory. The child’s brain is under attack from a deluge of images at the precise time that the mind/brain matrix is attempting to build neural fields that are healthy and stable, with images sourced from within rather than implanted by negative anxiety and adrenalin-drenched images from without. Quick camera switches, rapid image movement, computer generated objects, computer generated morphing and other technical events are called “jolts” or “technical events”3 which induce the hormonal “fight or flight” response  together with the accompanying adrenal rush. It is an addictive habit that forces the mind to latch onto firm ground that is forever being snatched away. This mind/body addiction means a near catatonic state; the glassy-eyed child fixed to the induction of alpha waves, ensures a hypnotizing effect that is most damaging to the neural circuits still being formed in small children with the placement of artificial images into the mind's eye. With these artificial images comes a habitually false sense of reality – hardwired:

Television feeds both the stimulus and response into the infant-child’s brain as a single-paired effect and herein lays the danger. Television floods the brain with a counterfeit of the response of the brain is supposed to learn to make to the stimuli of words or music. As a result much structural coupling between mind and environment is eliminated; few metaphoric images develop; few higher cortical areas of the brain are called into play; few, if any symbolic structures develop. 4

Divorced from measured and contextual response the media shovels on fear and insecurity, pumping international horrors into our living rooms and already tired minds. Of course, there is always a variety of ways the consumer culture can allow you to buy back that security however fleeting. Instinctual sex and violence ensures a “dumbed down” populace while ensuring ratings increases more of the same.  In other words:

Since there is no way to stop the images, one merely gives over to them. More than this, one has to clear all channels of reception to allow them in more cleanly. Thinking only gets in the way." […]  Every advertiser, for example, knows that before you can convince anyone of anything, you shatter their existing mental set and then restructure awareness along lines which are useful to you. You do this with a few very simple techniques like fast-moving images, jumping among attention focuses, and switching moods…  5

Our potential brain becomes imprisoned by the lower limbic brain and is sedated by the habitual and familiar: it is safe, comfortable, passive and devoid of the subtle nuances of creativity. Drop in doses of random violence and meaningless sex into the pliable mind of the child and a progressive normalisation of a pathological world view begins to take place. The child’s highly emotional mind ensures an easy state for conditioning. It is literally contoured towards states of acceptance. Babies and toddlers are unconsciously shocked into submission and programmed into mediocrity even before they can rationalize and conceptualise. Whether they will be able to think critically and discern truth from fiction later in life in combination with other environmental factors - is the key question.

Unlike radio, the T.V., by replacing storytelling and other shared activities, may have contributed to the loss of societal communication and cohesion. Eventually, this has devalued physical and community play in all its forms, while distancing parenting and inducing ignorance towards the idea of parenting itself. The art of storytelling allows archetypes and motifs to be gently planted in the mind of the child, so that his/her development can begin from an emotionally nourished foundation. However, television, as a primary tool of the advertiser, has now replaced this deeply-rooted tradition. Children are not bound by exclusive logic and rationality in early life. They are emotional beings soaking up, sponge-like, what is offered to them. 

This comfortable box in the corner of our living rooms stands as a monument to the comprehensive extermination of metaphorical thought which could have birthed new directions for creativity. Symbols, myths and the genuinely sacred are discarded in favour of a consumer addiction so dire, that it reduces all significance, all meaningful events, feelings and ideas down to a passive, one-way street of desensitization and attention defecit. Values, ethics, morality are merely “clicks” on the remote and mean nothing more than the time it takes to change the channel and absorb more projected ideas of mass consumption.

Advertising uses shock tactics to penetrate further into our being. Once we are sufficiently anaesthetised, they sell the tawdry and tedious by absorbing social issues and ethics, humanitarian, environmental and spiritual concerns, reducing them down to new products to buy. They effectively hi-jack conscience and turn it into a selling opportunity. Perhaps the colonization of our minds can be extended into space by using electronic billboards? Perhaps even beam adverts onto the moon? Well, even this was not beyond the bounds of the admen. Their lofty ambitious were, for the moment unsuccessful. 6 Indeed, advertising panders to the same chemicals of porn or as social commentator Philip Slater mentioned: “If we define pornography as any message from any communication medium that is intended to arouse sexual excitement, then it is clear that most advertisements are covertly pornographic.” 7

Game on

 From the mass programming of movies, magazines, T.V. and highly realistic computer gaming, they cannot by themselves be considered threatening to the psychology of children and young adults. All research studies to date cannot give definitive data either way. It is unlikely for example, that playing extremely violent, hyper-realistic, computer games such as Grand Theft Auto or Mortal Kombat is going to irreversibly damage children. However, taken together and with the emphasis on the type of content being absorbed, one can make such a statement with assurance.

At the age children begin to play video games they have not sufficiently developed the ability to distinguish between what is reality and what its not. It is little wonder that such games are coming under repeated suspicion when we read the following reviews from online gaming sites: “Hit man: Blood Money delivers the most brutal and realistic simulation of life as the world's deadliest assassin.” In this game you must eliminate your opponents using a variety of weapons and killing techniques. One scene depicts a basement shootout where several bikini-clad, Halle Berry look-a-likes must be blown away to progress to the next level. In the opening start-page one can see the hit man holding a buxom woman by the throat sporting skimpy bikini and thrusting breasts with the implication that he intends to use her as a shield. You can imagine what follows.

 Another game describes a futuristic battle where: “…three nations with opposing political views have erupted in an all-out war. From the cockpit of a giant metal ‘HOUND’, you must power your tower of heavy artillery through giant war zones while backing five others on your squad and dodging the firepower of six other live players via Xbox Live.” And further: “In Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter you can play as a Ghost, the best trained and equipped soldier the US Army has to offer. The year is 2013 and an insurgency has broken out in Mexico City, and it is your job to infiltrate the city and attempt to restore order.” That of course, means wiping out as many folks as you can. Or if a more gory enterprise is more to your taste: “Ninety-Nine Nights is a pure hack-and-slasher, brought to you by both Mizuguchi’s Q!”

There is no limit to the number of weapons you can conjure and use nor the amount and variety of people you can kill. No irritating shades of grey here. What about some good old fashioned propaganda?

 You need not look far for a double helping of repellent “fun” in the guise of FA-18 Operation

Desert Storm where, as an intrepid US pilot in the Allied Coalition, you must fly your FA-18 Hornet across enemy lines to bring down Iraqi forces for the ultimate glory that was Operation Desert Storm in the 1991 Gulf war. Then there is Conflict: Desert Storm II Back to Baghdad where one on-line reviewer seemed to epitomize the disassociation involved with the reality of war versus the de-sensitization of real life:

“there’s one thing that makes Conflict Desert Storm so engaging, and that’s the feeling you get when you’re all alone, your companions' dead bodies scattered all around you, hiding behind a couple of clay pots to avoid the tank that’s just feet away. Finding yourself in this position just illustrates the sense of loneliness on the battle-field as you have no one to watch your back and success from this point becomes even more rewarding. The fine line is, that Conflict Desert Storm is simply better than any other war game that I've ever played and well worth the 10 quid that I paid for it…”

One wonders what the dead US soldiers and the thousands of dead and mutilated Iraqi civilians would say to such “entertainment.” Such is the price of suffering that is reduced down to teenage computer games and a “ten quid” tension ride.

 Is there really such a difference between the programming of “Shock and Awe” pop video coverage courtesy of Fox T.V. and the gaming consoles in most American and European homes? And yes, if you were thinking that “shock and Awe” sounded like a perfect computer game title then it will come as no surprise that the company’s US computer game office asked the US patent office to let them register the words as a trademark. Sony backed down from plans to use the phrase as a title for its game about the war with Iraq. This was due to customer and gamers distaste at such a move, especially as the patent was applied for only one day after the war started. How’s that for marketing?

The studies that found violent video games had long term effects were given a further boost of credibility when in 2001, Japanese Professor Ryuta Kawashima, a brain imaging specialist, decided to investigate the levels of brain activity in children playing video games. He was hoping that his research would benefit game manufacturers, and thus possibilities for his own funding. His findings however, did not please the games manufacturers. The professor was convinced that children who play computer and video games excessively will not develop their frontal lobes and may therefore be more prone to act more violently as they grow up. 8
 As well as a clear correlation between watching violent video games and increased aggression, poor academic performance has also been repeatedly found to be a consistent result of prolonged gaming. 9

Researchers in 2005 also found a new perceptual effect they labelled “attentional rubber-necking” which appears to mimic the “Jolts” and “shocks” we have from the dynamics of visual pollution. The Vanderbilt and Yale University study found that when people are exposed to erotic or violent images they often fail to fully process what they see immediately after. 10 It seems the mind’s capacity to absorb information - and perhaps crucial data - can switch off like a light bulb in a darkened room, or in the researchers words, an “emotion-induced blindness.”

 New research also suggests that young adult brains continue you to be malleable to new thoughts and ideas (especially when fused with a highly emotional content) up until age 18 and beyond though the areas of the brain affected tend to change. This organizing and re-integrating of new sensory information shows such a “synthesis helps shape the kinds of emotional and behavioural responses they have to new experiences.”11 It is these experiences that dictate exactly how a personality and its brain responds and perceives the outer world and whether it attains a creative or entropic response. How can an individual learn to understand himself and his psychological “wounds” if he is distracted and buffered by chemical inducing technology; where feelings, thoughts and dreams are fused with artifice?

With a diet of gratuitous violence – whether comic book or ultra-realism – the child is habituated to a glut of sensation and the neurological stunting that eventuates. Anything less than this is “boring”. A spiritual vacuum of hypocrisy condemns our future adults to a “filthy tide” of cheap thrills and superficiality. We are in danger of letting the endemic nature of violence become normalised where the damaged care for the damaged and perpetuate the legacy. 

In writer Eli Khamarov’s words: “Most people are awaiting Virtual Reality; I'm awaiting virtuous reality.”

Notes

1  Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine (vol 159, p 607, p 614, p 619, p 687) quoted from NewScientist.com news service ‘Watching TV harms kids’ academic success’ by Anna Gosline July 4, 2005.
2  “Lure of Televison is stronger than a smile” by David Lister, The Times, November 7, 2006: “Previous research into the behaviour of young children and babies has shown that they prefer to look at faces and do so instinctively in order to learn and to communicate. This was borne out by an initial experiment on 34 five-year-olds, 25 eight-year-olds and 34 adults, in which they were each shown a photograph of a face alongside either a doll’s house, a toy boat, a toy train, a tap, a teapot or a wall clock. The overwhelming majority looked at the image of a face before the competing object.
In a second experiment, however, 143 children aged 5 to 8 were seated in front of a computer screen on which the image of a blank television screen was shown next to a face for less than a second. The children were told to press the spacebar as soon as they saw a bar of chocolate appear on the screen. Most of the children aged 6 to 8 pressed the spacebar fastest when the chocolate bar appeared behind the picture of the television and not the face, suggesting that they were already looking at it. Only the five-year-olds responded fastest when the chocolate was behind the face. Martin Doherty, a lecturer in psychology at the University of Stirling, who carried out the research with Dr Bindemann, said: ‘One of the interesting things is that five-year-olds still have a face bias but six-year-olds don’t.’”
3  Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television by Jerry Mander, published by William Morrow, (1978) 

ISBN: 0688082742.
4  p.166, Evolutions End: Claiming the Potential of Our Intelligence By Joseph Chiltern Pearce Published by HarperCollins 1992, ISBN 0-06-250693-5
5  Ibid.

6  ‘City Lights and Space Ads May Blind Stargazers.’ By Malcom W. Browne, The New York Times, May 4 1993: “ A major uproar followed the announcement last month that Space Marketing Inc. o Roswell, Ga; in cooperation with Livermore National Laboratory in California and the University of Colorado planned to launch a one-mile wide display satellite into orbit around the earth. The spacecraft, made of thin plastic film, would reflect sunlight to Earth from aluminized letters or symbols.”
7 www.philipslater.com/

8  ‘Heavy Video Game Use by Kids May slow Brain Development - Game industry disputes findings of Japanese study’ - The Observer August 19, 2001.
9  Video games 'increase aggression', 23 April, 2000, BBC News.
10  ‘Researchers explore a perceptual effect called ‘attentional rubbernecking’ by Melanie Moran, August 2005 Vanderbilt University, Nashville USA.
11  ‘Brains of Young Adults Not Fully Mature’ By Ker Than www.livescience.com February, 2006.