The Contradiction of Vegetables

“If you watch too much TV you’ll become a rutabaga,” I frequently threaten my children with. They laugh and ask, “Mom, whatza a rutabaga?”

In popular culture the image of a couch potato has become a metaphor for someone who vegetates in front of the TV for hours on end. Another popular fact is that a person has more brain activity while they sleep than when they are watching television. So what exactly does it mean to be a couch potato? And is the lack of brain activity an urban myth?

According to Neil Postman television creates “the ways in which people perceive reality, and that such ways are the key to understanding diverse forms of social and mental life” (1992, p. 21). However, given the importance and dominance of certain sitcoms, dramas, kid shows, so-called reality shows, and news channels, this diversity no longer exists. Instead, conformity to the behaviors, values, and morality exhibited and promoted by these shows has subsumed individuality. For example, in the early nineties, a primetime show, “Friends” was the number-one rated comedy show. Suddenly women wanted to have the same hair style as Rachel, one of the female co-stars. But for some, their hairstyles express their subconscious desires. Or, in the eighties, the number-one rated tv show, “Miami Vice” defined the male roles for men to emulate; men started wearing pastel t-shirts with suit coats and posturing behaviors that corresponded to their TV heroes. These examples demonstrate that our society, or the TV viewing audience, had wanted to conform to Rachel’s or Tubbs’s personality and unpredictability; demonstrating our dissatisfaction toward our average and predictable life. Todd Gitlin describes this type of modern individual as “a role player who is also a part-time adventurer and stimulus seeker, trying frantically to find himself [or herself] by abandoning himself [or herself]” (2002, p. 39).

This tendency to want to escape the monotony and ordinariness of life is not unique to contemporary society. We have been doing this for centuries. The development of stories, whether oral or written, the stage, and/or music can provide an outlet for this desire. However, as Gitlin pointed out, these experiences, “once reserved for exceptional occasions has become an everyday matter as continuous as –or more continuous than—one likes” (2002, p. 31) has become a continuous stream of images, stories, and sounds that constantly bombards the brain. We have learned how to remove ourselves from our natural environment in order to enter into a virtual reality, one that we believe we can control through the click of a remote or the adjustment of volume. We have developed a god-like belief of “I saw it was good, so I decided to watch.”

But have we?

In 2001, The Journal of Cognitive Liberties published Wes Moore’s article, “Television, the Opiate of the Masses.” Moore’s article summarizes, among other disturbing phenomena, the psychophysiologist Thomas Mulholland study documenting the effects of watching television. Apparently, after watching 30 seconds of television, our brain begins to produce alpha waves, “which indicates torpid (almost comatose) rates” of activity. When this occurs, we are in an “unfocused overly receptive state of consciousness.” Hypno-therapists intentionally try to produce this torpid nature for suggestion therapy when hyptomizing their patients.

Mulholland’s research redefined the goals for advertisers and marketers. Rather than trying to appeal to our rational and conscious minds, marketers redesign commercials to “produce unconscious emotional states or moods.” For example ,the “Priceless” campaign by MasterCard suggests that family, fun, being the hero because s/he can charge whatever adventure by producing images, using music, changing of images in a variety of settings. Each technique used by MasterCard intends to hypnotize and use the power of suggestion to control us; they are implanting “moods that the consumer will associate with the product when it is encountered in real life.”

Frequently television critics use commercials, soap operas, “reality” shows, and primetime dramas for their examples to demonstrate their conclusions that TV offers nothing but mindless dribble. They often ignore or downplay the preponderance of the educational programs and channels. Sesame Street has been accused of creating a demand in children for the unreal expectation that education should be constantly entertaining. It has also been accused with a rise in hyperactivity and a reduction in attention spans. Other channels, such as the History Channel, the Discovery Channel, Animal Planet, and National Geographic, are accused with providing and reinforcing the dominant constructs of contemporary society. Nickelodeon, a channel dedicated to 3 to 13 TV shows, has been accused of promoting obesity by broadcasting unhealthy cereal commercials during their morning programming.

The main argument against television, it seems to me, is the amount of time we dedicated to it. Plus our willingness to tune-out when we watch it. We openly acknowledge that we chose to watch some show not because we want to but because “there’s nothing else on.” We forget that we could find something else to do. Thereby we are responsible for the decomposition of our brain. But, like vegetables, our brains can be rich in vitamins and not inert since vegetables develop from the integration and synthesis of its external environment. Extending this metaphor, television can be compared to fertilizer. Too much or not the right kind, it can kill or cause deformities. However, used properly, fertilizer can encourage exponential growth, stimulating latent processes that would otherwise been overlooked or not used to its full potential. Thomas McKibben sums up this idea when he wrote, this “having immense amounts of technology available to us, this society could pick and choose those things that would create a life both sustainable and rich” (1993).

Works Cited

Gitlin, T. (2002) Media Unlimited: How the torrent of images and sounds overwhelms our lives. New York, New York: Owl Books.

McKibben, B. (1993). “Daybreak” The Age of Missing Information. Plume Publishing.

Moore, W (2001). Television: the opiate of the masses. The Journal of Cognitive Liberties, 2, Retrieved October 4, 2007, from http://www.cognitiveliberty.org/ 5jcl/5JCL59.htm.

Postman, N. (1992) Technopoly: The surrender of culture to technology. New York, New York: Alfred A. Knopf Inc.