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Toward a Communication of the Masses

by Tom Appleton

I think hardly anybody finds it surprising that a magazine such as the Listener — which specialises in a particular brand of "intelligent topicality" that stays nowhere but doesn't go anywhere either — should actually, by definition, be a radio and television accessory, because it is probably quite an accepted notion that the television aspect of that paper is a mere functional one, a "hoax", a circulation-basis, an excuse for advertisers and publishers alike to run a mass-circulation, "quality" paper on. Well, and that's fine, of course, because what else can people who think read in New Zealand?

And it is equally unsurprising that such a publication should pay no more attention to television than to run a regular little review among reviews of some programme or show that somebody felt mildly inclined to say something about.

To draw attention to television as a medium (if it is done at all) is done only in McLuchanesque terms of "hot vs cool", "electronic global village", and similar subsense, which gives people a terrific awareness of McLuchanism, when they — as part of a thousand million spectators — watch the soccer world championships at three a.m. in the morning, but explains very little.

Television, then, is an unknown medium despite the fact that billions of people watch it every day. It won't yield its secret, it cannot be understood by watching a tv-set. McLuhan is doing no more than that — pulling television electronics apart and translating it into society. Which reads as fizz, crackle, spurt. What we must do is pull society apart and translate it into television and then it's beginning to make some sense.

Television is a product of the worker's struggle for an eight-hour working day, because without the concept of leisure time, or rather: spare time, there would be no television. Nobody would have time for it. Spare time is a social category. Television is an industrial phenomenon.

It isn't very surprising therefore, that highly industralised countries like the US, Western Europe, or Japan should have a proliferation of television programme companies, and that their products should be consumed by, or perhaps more correctly: should consume, some forty percent of the available spare time, i.e. of the spare time available to the individual members of those societies. For every half hour off work people watch half an hour more t.v. It is obvious that in a highly industrialised country, and that, generally, means a capitalist country, where people are alienated from their work — (most people do their jobs only for the money; and then they don't even get that) — all their thoughts should circle around that part of the day, when they can do what they want to, i.e. the time off work.

Now, to say this somewhat simplistically: the first step toward the development of mankind was signalled by the employment of tools; and work, as a philosophical and anthropological concept, is still the foremost characteristic of man's humanity. If, by economic necessity, people are forced to work under such circumstances as to lose their human dignity, you would expect that they would use the time off work to salvage that remainder of their humanity, which has not yet been left on the sacrificial altar of the work bench. Perhaps, one might assume, they would use the rest of the day at their leisure, playing piano (Huitzinga's concept of homo ludens), writing letters, reading a book, dancing, gathering with friends, going to parties or political assemblies.

From where I am writing this, "metropolitan" Auckland, it cannot be denied that chances are much greater to go to the beach after work, than say, in New York or Paris or Tokyo. Still, because New Zealand is rather small, in relation Auckland or Wellington are very large cities, and because of the condensation of capital in relatively few hands, those industries that take care of our leisure time have a much tighter grip around our heads. In the US these industries may be much larger and produce a greater variety of facilities. But, to take Auckland as an example, the tightly knit network of newspaper, movies and broadcasting companies makes it almost impossible either to not rely on their services or to escape them. In other words, just having one tv programme (and by making that one artificially more desirable via colour rather than offering an alternative one) creates in effect a situation in Auckland that media-wise is fully comparable to that in other, highly industrialised countries.

One might perhaps, innocently think that if more and more people spend more and more time watching television they would so in order to pursue their civic duty of getting more and better information.

However, because television has become such an everyday matter, people watch more television but with less fascination. They spend more and more time in a state of reduced attention. They're dozing off. But are they? In reality, they dozed off, drugged. Because what appears as an individual pattern of behaviour is in reality a product of the medium. A good many programmes are so designed as to be absolutely unpalatable in an attentive way; they must be consumed while "dozing", at a reduced level of consciousness.

This is equally true of radio, Most of the "bubble gum" music is so designed as to lower intellectual resistance, i.e. attention, and then to infiltrate the mind with advertising I'll never forget the sensation of disillusionment that I felt a few years ago when Ray Charles, whose "truthfulness" and "emotional sincerity" — as expressed in his earlier songs — I had felt great admiration for, and identification with, suddenly and with as much "truthfulness" and "emotional sincerity" in his voice, sang about Coca Cola, which I was led to believe had become the "real thing" for him.

And recently I heard Arlo Guthrie singing a song about Nixon, the Watergate and the tapes, and so forth. I felt genuinely surprised that after almost two years' solid Time & Newsweek coverage the son of Woody Guthrie — who wrote and sang easily a dozen songs about Sacco and Vanzetti in his time, when this was not a very "popular" issue — would now have dared to populate bubble gum radio with such a controversial political statement. What does it feel like to play a violin in a string orchestra that is backing such a song? Whose interests are at work when such a record is promoted around the world? I'm almost beginning to feel something close to pity for Nixon who more and more appears to be a pawn in the larger, behind-the-screen battle between "old money" (of the old robber barons on the East Coast) and "new money" (of the Southern and Western oil magnates, et al). But let me get back to television.

Television is made a part of the world of dreams, and of play, where nothing is impossible, because nothing is real. The whole gigantic apparatus of tv production is only geared to secrete thin liquids, materials without contours without resistances. The tough bits are eliminated. Not by way of open censorship. What is so scandalous is television's normal, unnoticeable and unnoticed censorship, which guarantees the banality of its productions. The very mode of tv production is censorship.

Television is censored by the morality of the junk-pusher, whose standard excuse is that it is the addicts who want a fix. Supply accuses demand; and reality seems to provide an alibi. Indeed, empty entertainment is so massively being consumed that it almost seems there is a demand for it. And entertainment is an ointment for the wounds received in a capitalist society. People experience estrangement at their jobs, where they produce their own exploitation; in politics, where their engagement can do nothing against the "real politics" of the ruling class; in an environment that is so polished and "beautified" by advertising that they experience their own existence as constantly inferior and less desirable than the standard set out for them.

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In this seemingly impenetrable wall of a world television is like an emergency exit. Through it the individual hopes to escape the social antagonisms. For these seemingly unsolvable contradictions television produces sham solutions. It produces an addiction to entertainment that it claims to satisfy. But it does not so out page 7 of meanness" — although in the US there is certainly a possibility, even a fair chance of a large scale capitalist conspiracy. The situation in New Zealand is somewhat different; it is the result of "natural growth", limited resources, and, of course — who is it that pays for it?

Entertainment is not made to satisfy the addictive need for it. Rather, the real needs of people, their need for reality, can, in a capitalist society, only be expressed in terms of marketable commodities — and cannot, therefore, be realised. The need to solve the antagonisms of society can only enter the market (because people relate to each other over the medium of the market, in a capitalist society) as a demand and is countered by the television producers with a supply: which is a sham solution to the real problem. However, the contents of our television programmes are not a hoax, they are actually the real answers to real questions that our mediaproduction, induction is willing to give its spectators.

In a capitalist society the interests of the producers and those of the consumers are 'as is well known, in opposition to each other. The consumer who buys things is primarily interested in how well he can use them, i.e. their utility. The producer doesn't care whether he produces hot snow or rubber cigarettes, as long as there is a market. He is mainly interested in a thing's exchangeability (for money). The higher developed a capitalist economy becomes, the less interested producers are in the utility of their products; they just want to sell. And so they invest more money into a favourable, "beautiful" outward appearance of their products (industrial design, marketing). The less useful a thing is, the more beautiful it has to become. (One of the phrases often heard by "Rolling Stone" type of rock "critics" is: "The cover alone makes it well worth buying this record")

This mechanism also applies to tv productions. The spectators give their spare time — and get amusement, entertainment in return for it. But their interests, as members of the working class, are not gratified with a worthwhile reality; television, the class medium, can offer only distraction from a non-worthwhile reality. The monopolies that conquered the economy now try to conquer the brains: the number of laughs per minute, the greatest suspense, the most pleasant presentation — in short, entertainment is what they're about. Entertainment as a quality, as a dominant and overpowering imperative that relativizes everything, whether it be sports, news, politics or culture. It doesn't matter what it is, it's got to be entertaining, if it's not, it's not going to be featured.

The masses that have a genuine interest in communicating with each other are now circuited into mass-communication, which, gliding smoothly on the greased surface of entertainment, distracts, singularizes, and scatters the masses into provatistic, individualised, easy-chaired, beer drinking, drugged dividuals, to the point where one million tv viewers find it "jarring to the ear" to have themselves referred to as "masses" The masses who formerly did their own communication now get it made for them by the holders of the brain washing license. The masses who look at television as a mirror of society only see the reflections of inactivated scattered individuals on the screen. The real interest of the masses in television can only be to use this medium as a medium of communication between themselves, and not to be communicated at. The masses can only utilise television as an instrument of self-realisation. Television must become the class-medium of a different class.

The class enemy, who occupies the head of television production, or for that matter of all leisure time industries, is of course more interested in perpetuating the status quo. His servile cooperators in their tightly-assed boutiquey fashions and crew-cropped brains readily produce pure entertainment, pure fun, pure rubbish unperturbed by any filth of reality. They produce programmes with built-in audience reaction, thus frustrating the audience and castrating their sense of solidarity In this way the need for action becomes the need for action-laden entertainment, the need for contact is turned into brutality and violence, the need for explanation into admiration for the experts, the need for sentiment into sentimentality, the need for reality into realism, Barlow-style.

Hardly any programmes show the reality of work — it's not very entertaining. Woman's Lib, Homosexual Law Reform. If so they're reduced into a style, to a new "wave", into a fashion. On the surface that seems to satisfy the need for such programmes, but in reality it is only a way of reducing them to entertainment, and thus to suck every ounce of reality out of them. The British Empire in thirteen instalments.

It has always struck me that we in NZ could, by the very size of population (4ft 2; larger with hat) have the most fantastic democracy in the world. I have no access to figures of just how much money NZBC is spending on American and British tv serials annually, or on those plays, films, documentaries, and what-have-yous that everybody keeps complaining about. I have myself "participated" at one time or other (as part of a wind-up audience) on one of those musical productions with plastic stars and invisible strings; the sheer costs of just one such moronic show must be absolutely staggering and certainly ten times over enough to send video-tape equipped groups out to do all sorts of communally and socially relevant programmes.

I'm certain that all this money combined would probably suffice to establish an over-all assortment of programmes that would help the masses to develop a universal interest in their own situation and its betterment. In a future issue of Salient I will try to sketch some general outlines of what such progressive concepts of television might have to look like.