The line, as a means of social organization, is being replaced by acoustic space principles. The “Party line” no longer explains patterns of voting behavior. The railroad line no longer explains transportation patterns in our society. Even the lines or rows that organized seating patterns in schools, churches and theaters are giving way to new patterns.
Theater-in-the-round has returned. Conference tables and classroom desks are organized in circular patterns. And recently, the governor of a large eastern state defined his role as “Trying to tune government to the needs of citizens.”
The Auditory Base of Electronic Media
Television and film, as well as radio, tapes, and records, have contributed to a radical transformation in our perception of the world—from a visual, print base to an auditory base. Each of these media conditions the brain to receive and process all information in the same way it has always processed information received via the ear. The ear receives fleeting, momentary vibrations, translates these bits of information into electronic nerve impulses, and sends them to the brain. The brain “hears” by registering the current vibration, recalling the previous vibrations, and expecting future ones. We never hear the continuum of sound we label as a word, sentence, or paragraph. The continuum never exists at any single moment in time. Rather, we piece bits of information (millisecond vibrations) together and perceive the entire three-stage process as “hearing.”
The dispersal pattern of a radio signal is circular. Thus, while we pay taxes and vote within the irregular boundaries of city and state lines, we are united to those who share electronically mediated information with us by a circular pattern, the limits of the radio station’s audience. This experience has fostered a sense of community that resembles the days before print, when the circular dispersal pattern of a person’s voice, or drums, determined social patterns of interaction.
In auditory- based cultures, the flow of information is analogous to the dispersal pattern created by dropping a pebble in a bucket of water.
As a wider range of new material reached the public through telephone, radio, film, records, and television, we developed a stronger orientation toward the auditory mode of receiving and processing information. A greater percentage of the information that affected our lives was reaching us in auditory form. This was true not only for sound, but also for electronically mediated visual information, which is patterned like auditory information. Man had never before experienced a world of visual sensation patterned in an auditory mode.
Film transmits visual information by projecting a series of still pictures in rapid succession. Each still frame is projected for approximately one fiftieth to one seventy-fifth of a second. Following each frame, the screen is black for a nearly equal length of time. The same frame may then be projected a second time, or the next frame may be shown—depending on the projector. But in any one-second period, the screen is black approximately half the time. The brain “sees” motion by registering the current still picture, recalling previous frames, and anticipating future frames that will complete the movements. This differs considerably from visual experience in everyday life, where the eye is bombarded with a continuous stream of information, which is always emanating from the sources we are observing.
On film, the everyday visual experience is fractured, and the brain must function in a new way to “reconstruct” a continuous visual image. On television, the real-life visual image is fractured in a far more radical way. If we were to set up a series of two thousand still cameras focused on a TV, each shooting at one two-thousandth of a second and firing sequentially (so that we would cover a one-second time span completely), no single camera would record a picture. The image we “see” on television is never there. A still camera, shooting at one two-thousandth of a second, will capture only a few dots of light or perhaps a single line across the television. In everyday visual experience, of course, a still photograph of a landscape shot at one two-thousandth of a second will capture a complete visual image of the landscape.
A television set creates a visual image by projecting dots of light, one at a time, onto the front screen. The succession of dots moves across the screen and down alternate “lines.” In all, there are 525 such lines on American television sets. During each one-fifteenth of a second, the scanning process will have completed two sweeps, once on each alternate set of lines.
In watching television, our eyes function like our ears. They never see a picture, just as our ears never hear a word. The eye receives a few dots of light during each successive millisecond, and sends these impulses to the brain. The brain records this impulse, recalls previous impulses, and expects future ones. In this way we “see” an image on television. The process differs from film in that it requires much faster processing of information and more visual recall:
1.With film, the brain has to process twenty-four distinct inputs per second. With television, the brain has to process thousands of distinct inputs per second.
2.On a film screen, we always see a complete visual image, even if only for a brief instant (one fiftieth to one seventy-fifth of a second), but the presence of a visual image alternates with periods of nearly equal length in which no image is present. On a television screen, we never see a complete image, since there is never more than a dot of light on the screen at any one time.
3.With film, the brain does not “fill in” the image on the screen—it fills in the motion between the images. With television, the brain must fill in (or recall) 99 percent of the image at any given moment, since the full image is never present on the screen.
Watching television, the eye is for the first time functioning like the ear. Film began the process of fracturing visual images into bits of information for the eye to receive and the brain to reassemble, but television completed the transition. For this reason, it is more accurate to say that television is an auditory based medium. Watching TV, the brain utilizes the eye in the same way it has always used the ear. With television, the patterning of auditory and visual stimuli is identical.
Media and Violence
There has been great concern about the effects of TV on children. If we found more violence only by children against other children, or by children against adults, there might be reason to investigate the harmful influence of TV on children. But the increased violence in our world is among all groups, including adults to other adults, adults to children, and by our society toward other societies. If there is a relation between TV and violence, it must be on a broad societal level, not just in relation to children.
Specific content on TV, in itself, does not foster violence. There has been a good deal of research attempting to show a stimulus-response relation between seeing an act of violence on TV and imitating that behavior in real life. Although some psychologists have managed to create this effect in a controlled laboratory situation, there is no evidence in society’s laboratory that supports such a conclusion. There is no increase in the number of gasoline stations robbed the day after thirty-six million people watch such a robbery on “Ironside.” And the news coverage of a skyjacking or murder does not cause others to imitate this behavior.
TV fosters violence, first, by conditioning people to respond instantly to stimuli in their everyday lives, and by focusing people’s attention on the current moment. On TV, the only thing that exists is the current, momentary dot of light or sound vibration—each exists for a millisecond. People develop