The Message is in Question
By Carol Hodgins
It is the medium that shapes and controls the scale and form
of human association and action.
- Marshall McLuhan - 1964
When television was introduced in 1950, the medium began to change the way that people viewed the world. In the forty-eight years since its inception, television has become a force with a dangerous element because of the way it has contributed to significant changes in the behavior of children. The amount of violence in the content of television has increased exponentially during the intervening years and is adversely affecting children around the globe. Surveys of this medium's content tell us that by the time a child reaches his or her eighteenth year, the child will have been exposed to more than 200,000 violent incidents on the television (approximately 10% of those are murders). With this evidence in hand it can be argued that the medium of television is negatively affecting this generation of society.
In the sixties, Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan developed a unique perspective regarding the effect television had upon children, which is very relevant to today's television viewers. In "Address at Vision 65," McLuhan articulated his ideology about the first generation of television spectators:
The young person today is a data processor on a very large scale. Some people have estimated that the young person, infant, and small child, growing up in our world today works harder than any child ever did in any previous human environment - only the work he has to perform is that of data processing.
(McLuhan 222)
McLuhan noted in this address that the television was generating vast amounts of information that had never before been experienced. Older mass media had previously impressed only one sense at a time. The young of the first TV generation had to develop new skills to deal with the new multi-sense medium. At that point in the medium's history, television content was more strictly controlled than it currently is. The amount of violence then was a fraction of what is shown now, thus the assault on the psyche by content was minimal. Today, there are on average twenty incidents of brutality on the screen every hour. How our children can process all the data that they view every day is a great mystery. The images of violence cannot all be filtered out; we can see the results in the games young people choose to play, and in the behavior exhibited at home and in the classroom.
Throughout his many written works, McLuhan asserts that every new medium extends human sensory organs and can throw the "human sensorium" (the relationship among the five physical senses) out of balance (Gordon 150). In The Gutenberg Galaxy, McLuhan writes:
Man the tool making animal, whether in speech or in writing or in radio, has been engaged in extending one or another of his sense organs in such a manner as to disturb all his other senses and faculties. (McLuhan 100)
McLuhan's thesis extends, of course, to the newer media of television, computer games, and the Internet. Concerns over the radical changes in the behavioral patterns of today's children have produced many studies to determine the effect of the television medium on the psyche of the world's young people. The question that may need to be answered is this: if a child has never experienced the beginnings of a new medium, can he/she find the necessary psychic balance to live a contented life and be a functioning member of society?
Marshall McLuhan came to the understanding that when a new medium is introduced, the conscious and unconscious mind--or psychic balance-- is sent into temporary dis-equilibrium based on what we perceive. McLuhan sent us this message, as perhaps, a warning of the dangers inherent to the medium:
For any medium has the power of imposing its own assumptions on the unwary. (McLuhan 157).
Children develop their personalities from experiences and interactions with culture, subculture, family, and peers. The process of modeling plays a fundamental role in a child's social development. If what the child models is seen on the television screen, then society has a big problem ahead. Due to the vast amount of harmful material in television content there appears to be a direct correlation between TV viewing and behavioral problems.
McLuhan points out the power of TV when he writes, "The television image requires of the eye a degree of involvement as intense as that of touch" (Gordon 328).
When a child is beginning to explore and learn about the surrounding environment, the use of touch is all important to the process. If viewing the television registers a similar learning experience the child's mind must be working over-time throughout the formative years.
The children of this generation have not been given the tools to cope with the excess of information. The young have no means of comparison since the information overload age is all they've ever experienced. McLuhan, once again, addresses the issue in the following statement:
The reason we are so privileged yet so confused today is ... that there are no historical or even archeological precedents for our state. If we are now beyond mechanization, we are also in a sense beyond history. We have stepped over all those familiar 'lines of development' which we have so long accepted as historical and cultural guides.
(Gordon 163)
The television medium was something that we had no previous experience with and therefore were unprepared for the consequences of its barrage on the senses.
References
Gordon, Terrence W. Marshall McLuhan. New York: Basic Books, 1997.
McLuhan, Eric and Frank Zingrone. Essential McLuhan New York: Basic Books, 1995.
Web sites on Children and Television Viewing
http://www.compusmart.ab.ca/jbrown/Violence.html
http://www.intergate.bc.ca/personal/twist/viol.html
http://www.uncg.edu/edu/ericcass/violence/digests/ed366329.htm
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