There is a thriving critical literature about television, which can be divided into two types. Most often the critical approach taken focuses on the content of media. In television criticism the content is examined with a view either to its effects on viewers or to the economic and social background of the content. With political interests including Marxism or ethnic or gender liberation, programs and commercials are criticized for their texts and subtexts.(1) Somewhat less frequently, television is criticized as a medium which changes how content is presented, and thus how viewers receive information in general. Such criticisms claim that television constitutes an epistemological or ontological category - the televisual - within which all ideas are transformed into simple, glaring, overbright and amplified televisual ideas.(2) Socio-political critics simply assume that television transmits ideology; critics of the televisual assume that television translates ideas and transforms consciousness. It is not too surprising, then, that both camps discover in television just what their analyses seek.
There are at least two problems with these views. First, their interpretive schemas can be dismissed as politcally motivated attacks, which often enough they are. If a criticism of the ideology of television relies on the acceptance of another political position, the criticism loses explanatory power. Second, these analyses make a set of unfounded and unadmitted general assumptions about television: that viewers are affected by what is presented as ideas, as political speech, as representations of extra-televisual reality where this can still be distinguished.
What is missing from either of these critical stances is an explicit determination of what television is. By bracketing theoretical presuppositions, a field of phenomena is opened for description. As a cultural artifact, television leads us to account for it in reference to a social dimension, constituted by and perhaps also constituting intersubjective relations and a sphere of meaning. Out of the description a set of general structures can be formulated, then checked against the varieties of the phenomena or phantasy variations.
The problem at the start is how to delimit the scope of the investigation while presupposing as little as possible about what television is. The term television is ambiguous: it means an electrical appliance, the signal that the set constructs as light and sound, the forms of the signals as deliberate productions with an intended sense, and the culture-bound sense applied in phrases like "television show," "television commercial," "television station," etc. Again, this ambiguity is a matter rarely if ever addressed in the usual run of critical literature. Most often critics write about the most general and most vague level of the meaning of the term, hence they presume a great deal about television that they cannot address.
Also left ambiguous in most approaches is the researcher's position with respect to TV. It is probably true that most of us encounter television with very limited knowledge of the process by which a signal reaches us. That process is almost entirely invisible to a viewer, but often carefully investigated by critics. Such expert knowledge is not funadmental to the phenomenon of watching television.
Even some phenomenological analyses are based on an unquestioned assumption, namely, that television is a form of communication.(3) If it is a form of communication, one should be able to clarify the sense in which it is communicative. Phenomenologically, this clarification should not depend on a received theory of communication (which could only count as yet another unquestioned assumption), but instead should begin descriptively. Furthermore, descriptions are contextual, which makes it all the more necessary to presume as little as possible.(4)
Keeping these difficulties in view, my goal here is to come to a description of television that can undergird interpretations of its cultural meaning. First, I describe the experience of television as a mode of perception. On this basis, I will identify the purpose of TV.
1. Experiencing Television
A television set is an irregular box with a curved glass side. When the set is on, it emits colored light and noise. The glow and the noise attract perceptual attention. The physiognomy and functioning of the set emphasizes a single side as its "face." This side is pointed into the room in which the set is placed, to make the screen visible. Otherwise, the significance of the light and sound transcends the physical; that is, from the point at which light and sound are emitted by the set, their meaning is a matter of constitution and interpretation by viewers.
The perceptual experience of television ranges from deliberately focusing attention on the light and noise the set makes, to paying no attention at all. The functioning of the set helps to indicate a normal mode of this experience. Since the light and noise come from one side of the set, the normal condition is to face the set. Since the set produces sound as well, the normal perecption includes being able to hear the sound. The optimum condition of watching television, assuming that one pays attention to the set, would be what makes this attention easiest. For instance, if a viewer is engaged in the activity of watching television, a bright light in the room may be turned off to eliminate a glare on the screen. Other sounds in the room may be hushed, or the volume on the set turned up, should the viewer wish to pay attention to the sound.
I emphasize the assumptiveness of these aspects because they are only pertinent in encounters in which someone deliberately watches TV. It seems reasonable to consider this case the typical encounter, provided that for the moment no further presumptions are made concerning the motivation for watching. In other words, in the order of phenomenological clarification, watching television must first be described as a mode of perception rather than a rationally chosen activity of a person. Obviously, no one may watch TV without encountering a set. The normal and typical mode of the perceptual activity of watching television is to sit at a certain distance in front of the set with the set turned on and displaying a recognizable image.
Yet it is important to point out that this is by no means the only mode of this activity. One may, and many people frequently do, turn on a set and leave the room, or ignore the images and possibly also the sound. One may fall asleep while the set is on. One may sit very close to the set, such that the pictures assembled on the screen fill the visual field with a blur of tiny glowing dots. These abnormal encounters are common, which presents a problem for any analysis of television: the typical encounter outlined here is only a generally normal experience. While a normal experience of TV is built into the set, the set's limitations are transcended in these variations. In other words, the variations in perceptual modes of encountering television lead to questions about what it is users of television sets are doing when they use them.
2. The use of television
It is too great a leap to say that the purpose of TV is to entertain or to inform; it is even too large a step to posit as a universal definition that television is something to be watched. The phenomenon of switching on the set in an empty room for no one to watch is common enough to show that if TV is a tool, it is not limited to its most typical use. Nevertheless, as the focal point of the constellation of purposes of TV, this typical use - to be watched by someone facing it directly - can serve as a provisional starting point.
When I watch television, I sit facing the screen more or less directly, taking a near-optimal position with reference to the business end of the set. (Often this leads to my 'facing' the televised faces on the screen, as of newscasters.(5)) If I am operating the set, I will concern myself with adjusting the volume and changing channels.
There are two extreme variations in the modes of watching television. In one case, there is a specific program one watches intently; in another case, one switches channels repeatedly. In the former case, the act of watching TV is for the sake of perceiving what is presented, and presumes an interest directly focused upon the content. Only under this circumstance is media related to information, as its purpose or object. In the terms of Alfred Schutz, the "in-order-to," inauthentic motivation in this case could be expressed: "I am watching TV in order to be entertained." This motivation entails a presumption on my part, that TV will provide entertainment. In the latter case of channel "zapping," the in-order-to motive is something like "to see what's on," without the presumption that any of it will be entertaining or informative. Since the activity of watching TV includes both these variations, the phenomenological interpretation of the meaning of watching TV must take both into account. Furthermore, since the "in-order-to" motivations are not genuine, a second level of clarification is needed. To understand the action of watching TV genuinely and authentically, we need to inquire into what Schutz called the "because" motivation. According to Schutz, the because-motivation can only be established in reflective consciousness, by an examination of what genuinely impels me to a certain act. Following the completion of the act, we can ask what caused us to act in such a way. For watching television, the genuine because-motivation cannot be entertainment or information, since (1) not all watching is so motivated, and (2) the inauthentic "in-order-to" motivation might or might not be fulfilled. In other words, the question is not why I will watch TV, but why TV is watched.
Consider the extremes of the "in-order-to" motivations for watching. Sometimes watching is motivated by an intention to see a specific program (to be informed, in a broad sense, including to be entertained by the perception of the signal); but watching thus motivated always requires and presupposes watching in the more general sense of sitting in front of the set with the set turned on. This is not to say that what a viewer chooses to watch is unimportant, but that it is less important than the simple act of watching. The same set of requirements pertains equally to the other extreme of switching channels: one must be sitting looking at the set. Another clue to the because-motivation is the fact that turning on the set is for a huge number of people simply the normal action at certain times of the day. TV watching is a pattern of behavior and the programming available has less to do with it than what Gregor T. Goethals calls the TV "ritual."(6)
TV's typical function, then, is to be an appliance in front of which one sits, the signals of which to perceive, regardless of their content. The because-motivation of this act is rooted in this function. Without lapsing into loose psychological generalizations about viewers (or without attempting an impossible statistical survey of the mental attitudes of viewers), phenomenological rigor demands the limited claim that TV is watched because it is there to be watched. Its meaning as an artifact depends utterly on this essential fact.
The contrast between phenomenological analysis and the more usual critiques will underscore this point. Statistical social sciences attempt to measure the impact of television by quantifying viewers and program content. At the lowest level, organizations like the A.C. Neilsen Company do nothing but interpolate the TV viewing habits of all Americans on the basis of sample groups. Assuming Neilsen's methods are accurate, the statistical fact that 18 million households are tuned in to 60 Minutes would not indicate how many are watching, nor with what kind of attention, nor with what motivations. How many are watching and how many have dozed off? How many are motivated by the conviction that Mike Wallace identifies important scandals in the government or corporate world, and how many by the desire to yell expletives at Andy Rooney?
A semiotic analysis attempts to take this variation in motivations of watching into account by interpreting the act of watching as the individual viewer's effort of decoding the ideology expressed in the content of TV images and scripts. The pleasure of watching involves the use of freedom to respond to ideological messages in the TV "text" in a range of more or less submissive or critical ways. But what counts as an act of decoding or "reading"? There are degrees of attention in addition to degrees of free interpretation, but semiotics ignores this ambiguity of situations in which televisions are encountered.
In short, paying attention to television is a free act of an individual viewer. If our analysis of the experience of television ignores this, we end up assuming that every set in operation at a given moment is delivering a message to a viewer who receives it. The truth is that counting sets in operation only tells us how many sets are receiving messages, and tells us nothing at all about what happens after the electrical impulse is transformed into the glow and sound of the machine. Reading the coded message only tells us how some artifice of a viewer could interpret the images, and nothing about why one would bother, or what else could be done with them.
The general presumption of nearly all such naive analyses is that television is an electronic communications medium. But in its most essential features, television is a household appliance used in various ways. Former Reagan administration FCC Chairman Mark Fowler may have said it best: television is "a toaster with pictures."(7)
3. Re-interpreting Television Viewing
All of this is not to say that a critical examination of television is a dead end. Without making the unjustifiable presupposition that television communicates, interpretation is free from the impossible demand of explaining viewers' mental states (a demand that most often leads to guesswork concerning psychological impact).(8) The essential function of TV, a box that shows pictures and makes sounds, indicates a different course for research and interpretation of television.
What viewers see can be contrasted with what viewers do not see. The production of the programs is masked - indeed, this it is a primary goal of production to mask itself. But even a program which showed itself to be a program, revealed what lies behind its thin veneer, would necessarily mask itself as a produced program. It would always be filmed or broadcast from a certain camera angle, which cannot be presented along with the perspective it shows. The transmitted signal of television contains a gathered set of perspective shots, a set of pre-formed perceptual data, in a constant stream. Viewers see none of this perceptual and production activity, but the stream itself (which producers do not see in the same fullness while they are engaged in the very different perceptual activity of producing one element of that stream). Further complicating the relation between production and viewer is the freedom viewers have to change channels, altering the stream of perception along an axis that varies outside of the control of producers of specific programming.
There is a disjoint, a gap, between the production side of the television and the audience's experience of television. In addition, there is a gap between the technical aspects of transmission (including the decoding of the signal inside the set) and the viewer's experience. Naive analyses smudge these distinctions, and fruitlessly seek a causal relationship between the production or technical side and the audience side. Semiotic analysis does permit an understanding of the audience as active, but active in relation to a set of data which are presumed to be experienced in just the way they are produced - ignoring any action of viewers except watching programs.
Instead, the gap, which I would like to situate at the surface of the screen, is essential to the experience of television. Watching TV means watching the set, focusing perceptual attention, to one degree or another, on the screen's surface. In other words, the experience of watching TV is essentially an experience of perceiving just this surface. At the level of viewers' perception, the experience is flattened out on the screen's surface. Depths are reduced to a (nearly) two-dimensional image.
The significance of this aspect of the experience can be illustrated by the example of Ronald Reagan. Reagan was widely criticized by political writers for staging himself in almost all his public appearances. Entering Air Force One, Reagan would wave as if a crowd had gathered to see him off, when usually there were only press people with cameras (often by arrangement).(9) This empty gesture is truly made for television, not because there are viewers at home considering the wave directed at them (the empty tarmac was often filmed as well), but because, like television images, the gesture was essentially superficial: Reagan's wave ended at the tips of his fingers. Whether or not that wave is interpreted to communicate a salutation depends entirely on whether a viewer actually does interpret it as such. The mere image of the wave need not bear this intention. Likewise, television images extend no further than the surface of the screen. The possible intention of a broadcast to communicate does not penetrate, but is left to be met by a viewer's intention to perceive the images as communicative. The images cannot cause viewers to attend to them as expressions. In themselves, the pictures and sounds coming from the television set are only indications which must be taken up in the perceptual activity of the viewer. That activity must be clarified in its own terms, by its own modes and motivations. Television is simply a special kind of perceptual object, presenting a stream of nearly depthless images the meaning of which viewers constitute for themselves.
1. See, e.g., Paul H. Weaver, News and the Culture of Lying (New York: Free Press, 1994), Peter Vanderwicken, "Why The News Is Not The Truth," Harvard Business Review March/April 1996, pp. 144-151, Cheryl Russell, "The True Trend Test," American Demographics, January 1996, pp. 8, 55. All of these critics accuse the press, especially television news, of distorting the facts it is charged with presenting. There is a range of levels of sophistication to these kinds of critiques, but overall they make a naive assumption (even naive in the mundane sense, not just the phenomenological) that the purpose of news is to utter objectively established truths, as a means of informing the public. If this were the function of the news, and if this were the motivation driving viewers to watch, it would be an extraordinary situation of continuously unmet expectations that nevertheless remained the criteria for judging the news.
2. This notion was made prominent by Marshall McLuhan in The Gutenberg Bible and Understanding Media. McLuhan predicted the rise of a "global community" formed through electronic media, in which the needs and demands of consumers were so perfectly coordinated by advertising and media images that the means of production could be adapted perfectly to suit them. In different ways, Neil Postman and Jean Baudrillard both follow McLuhan's premise. In Amusing Ourselves to Death, Postman assumes something like McLuhan's prediction, and on this basis examines the impact on political speech. His conclusion is dystopian. In a brief essay, "The Masses," and in the book Simulacra & Simulation, Baudrillard discusses the problematic status of meaning, will, and desire in the context of what we might call the media event horizon. If media form ideas and form consciousness, as this theory holds, then there is no extra-media sphere of meaning, etc. Baudrillard concludes that media "devours" the social, and therefore advertising is the ultimate form of culture.
3. See Nelson, Jenny, "Television and Its Audiences as Dimensions of Being: Critical Theory and Phenomenology," Human Studies Vol. 9 (1986), pp. 55-69; von Eckartsberg, Rolf, "The Television Experience," Humanitas, Vol. 3 (Spring, 1967), pp. 67-92.
4. The phenomenologist is bound to a certain set of perspectives that are culturally and bodily imposed: I can only describe my experience (in this case, of TV) from the point of view of a white, middle-class heterosexual male born in the United States and living entirely during the period of wide-spread television broadcasting, one who is able-bodied and has good senses of hearing and vision. These limits of my perspective are not necessarily genuine limits of my phenomenological description, since to count as phenomenological, that description must be brought to an essential level by means of the familiar techniques of phantasy variation, etc.
5. In Television Culture (London: Routledge, 1987), John Fiske explores this aspect of the presentation of visual images on the set, using the techniques of semiotics. The TV 'text' is read for its ideological clues, which Fiske examines in depth. The presumption of the viewer's taking the seat directly facing the set is built into the production of programs and commercials. It is used as a reference-point for direct and indirect camera angles, for giving a view of the dramatic action taking place. The construction of the viewpoint, an act that is hidden from viewers of the final TV broadcast, is the source of a great deal of ideological coding. The sheer number and ubiquity of semiotic meanings is overwhelming, yet the transmission of ideological cues through texts is essentially open. Viewers, like readers, freely construct the meaning of the TV text, so that, like the grade-school game Telephone, the meaning that a viewer 'reads' in the program is really a unique interpretation of the meaning intended by the producers. Phenomenologically, viewers do not see this coding, and more typically interpret what they see without explicitly relating it to the code.
6. The TV Ritual (Boston: Beacon Press, 1980). Goethals claims that TV, like religion, refers mundane experience to an iconography that gives an ultimate meaning to experience. "A football game, a political convention, and a Christian mass are vastly different, but they all register the organic thrust to survive and to survive in meaning." (p. 125) The weakness in Goethals' analysis is his insistence that TV, like these other rituals, has a "nomic" function, meaning that it establishes and maintains loyalty to a common set of beliefs. This may indeed be true, but Goethals does not give a clear account of what the beliefs of American TV culture are, nor what it means to be loyal to them. Here, I side with Baudrillard's contention that culture as absolute advertising does not require loyalty, only repetition, in order to reproduce itself. There's no other game in town.
7. Quoted in Engelhardt, Tom, "The Shortcake Strategy," in Gitlin, Todd (ed.), Watching Television (New York: Pantheon, 1986), p. 77.
8. Two examples of this use of statistical approximation to produce an unverifiable hypothesis of the influence of television on viewers concern recent controversies about whether TV violence promotes or inures children to violent acts, and whether television programs create unrealistic expectations and standards of the good life, of beauty, etc. For the first, see, e.g., Potter, W. James, "The Problem of Indexing Risk of Viewing Television Aggression," Critical Studies in Mass Communication 14 (1997), pp. 228-248. For the second, see, e.g., Sandeen, Cathy, "Success Defined By Television: The Value System Promoted by PM Magazine," Critical Studies in Mass Communication 14 (1997), pp. 77-105.
9. Cf. Virilio, Paul, The Art of the Motor, trans. by Julie Rose (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), p. 58.