Zen-TV Experiment
opening speech
Initially, I just wanted to translate the article by The Bernard MacGrain " The Zen TV Experiment ", but in the process I realized that the text, to put it mildly, needs to be adapted. As a result, the translation corresponds to the original forty percent.
In the first half of the article, an attempt is made to realize the process of watching television, and in the second, how does the mass participation of people in this TV experiment affect it.
I do not always agree with the chosen tone and even some conclusions, but in general I find the article extremely interesting. I also want to note that the article provides not one but several interesting ideas; Some of them were not new to me, but the article helped me to finalize an opinion on this matter. Yes, article assumes performance of some task, I think, habrasobschestvennost can quite manage thought experiment.
')
In general, this time I recommend coffee, 10-15 minutes of rather fascinating reading are waiting for you.
Do you know how to watch TV?
One day I asked my students: "Who among you knows how to watch television?" After some hesitation, each of them gradually raised his hand. Thus, everyone considered themselves experts in the subject of television viewing.
The purpose of the experiment is to consider the process of watching TV as a certain phenomenon, and to use a more or less scientific approach. The fact is that when watching television, a person watches the narration of the program and at the same time does not give itself an account of what processes initiate this activity.
When we watch TV, we pay little attention to the details of the phenomenon. In fact, we pay little attention at all.
Counting Techniques
The experiment consists in calculating the techniques that were used in the transmission. Have you seen how a stationary surveillance camera works? It simply shows what is happening in front of her, let's call this “pure TV”. Everything that is different from pure TV is technical methods: approximation, change of plan, superimposing one video on another, and so on. During the experiment, it is necessary to count how many times within 10 minutes there is a smooth change of video, approach or removal, change of plan, the appearance of the accompanying text or voice, and so on.
After this, the experiment is complicated as follows:
The time required to complete each step of the experiment is crucial. I highly recommend doing the experiment on your own, instead of just reading about the results. In order not to be in a stupid position, do it when no one can see you. It's worth it.
Why is all this necessary ?!
Always, always doing this task leads to a wave of anger and indignation. Students are extremely dissatisfied with the fact that they were forced to engage in so useless work. Moreover, this indignation is very different from that which appears as a result of an increase in the burden of reading or fulfilling written assignments for the course. However, this anger is quite useful - not by itself, but for the reason that it helps to focus on the causes of its occurrence.
When studying society, we always mean that we study “them” of some kind, but this is not so. We study ourselves, and we do not like what we learn. It makes us feel uneasy, it makes us angry.
“I wasted 30 minutes of my time!”: Almost literally repeats the report of each student. Can you still get the benefit of this half an hour?
When discussing inevitably it turns out that all the students spent much more time in front of the TV than half an hour. So why so much indignation because of these 30 minutes when the TV is off?
Work during the holidays
Turning on the TV - you turn off the real world. The TV is only half a meter high, but we fool ourselves, and we think that we are looking at real life. Why does everything seem so real and similar to reality?
Techniques produce the illusion of naturalness and reality. As TV reporters say: good editing is when you do not notice it. Completing the task of counting techniques makes you pay attention to the fact that watching a television program is a kind of activity that requires effort. Along the way, it becomes clear how complex a television program is.
In the process of counting techniques it is impossible to concentrate on the plot. It quickly becomes clear how difficult it is to divide attention: it remains to either count the techniques or follow the transfer. This is a fairly well-known effect of human perception, usually it is demonstrated with the help of this picture . You can see either two faces or a vase, but not both the plot at the same time.
When performing a test, a person notes segments of unrelated shootings that are cut off from each other, which replace each other with the speed of a machine gun. In the process of watching TV, a person continuously connects passages, synthesizes, integrates and extrapolates scenes and plans. From all this kaleidoscope a person must distinguish the line of narration. The mind does this work while the person is relaxed and absorbs information. This high-speed synthesis of a whole from a disconnected mass (corners, scenes, people, voice-over, music, screensavers ...) takes place against the background of supposedly passive contemplation. Thus, the brain performs significant work as if without the knowledge of the person.
Any rest implies restoration. But when watching television, the human mind is not at all in a state of rest. Information continuously flows into the mind: it is not calm and not free. The mind is occupied by this stream and is rather in a state of hypnosis, zombie. Of course, there can be no restoration of such a state of speech. To restore, the mind must rest and after that proceed to the stimulation of another kind of new activity. Television does not give any rest or stimulation.
Television actively uses a person's ability to think, but does not lead to thinking, rest, or recovery. It leads to exhaustion. The mind is constantly busy, and worst of all, it is occupied by someone else's thoughts and fantasies.
Hypnosis without borders
With the beginning of long-term space flights, the effect became known as a result of which the astronauts' muscles, left without their usual load, atrophied in a relatively short period of time. Having lived for several decades under conditions of gravity, in a matter of weeks the muscles lost a significant amount, since the need for effort seemed to be gone.
Watching television produces a kind of weightlessness for the human mind. Normal, omnipresent, but invisible and imperceptible "gravity" for the mind that a person experiences in everyday life ceases to act when watching TV.
TV is often seen as a rest, although the brain does a lot of work. The brain, unprepared for the load, receives a dense stream of information consisting, on the one hand, of techniques and, on the other, of the contents of the TV program. The result is a cumulative effect, or in other words: beer with vodka.
Television and social reality design
Analysis of the process of watching television dramatically reveals the following social aspects of television:
Focus reduction
The most probably obvious and dangerous factor. In the context of competition between channels, television is constantly fighting for its audience. What is simpler: to reduce the focus of attention with bright short flashes of plots or to struggle to increase the focus of attention, concentration and calmness, trying to captivate the viewer with a complex plot?
Television is the quintessence of the short-term medium. Television lives in seconds. The relationship with the viewer is measured in the shortest fragments. One percentage point of the rating can cost up to 30 million dollars a year. The result is a program policy that is aimed at instantly grabbing attention, and not some kind of humanistic, useful substance that would stay with the viewer. This leads to a continuous reduction in the ability of viewers to focus their attention for some considerable time. The race of program directors serves advertisers, not the viewer.
There is an old Zen analogy: clearing the mind is like clearing a pool of muddy water. Active action only leads to disturbance and lifting silt from the bottom. Only by leaving the process to itself, the pool will calm down and gain transparency.
Imposing reality
Modern culture and education are structured in such a way that we constantly compare our actions, sensations and perceptions with the media space. But after all, if we are looking for confirmation somewhere else, then we thereby assess our own existence as an insufficiently reliable version of reality. We lose the desire to acquire direct life experience and to participate in the creation of real reality. We no longer do, we look. We look at the result of the work of some strangers.
A phenomenon does not become an event and does not exist at all until it was shown on TV. And there is a certain threshold of sensitivity of the media, events that do not reach it are not covered. The world, as it were, becomes covered with a membrane that clearly divides it into real reality and a proven, proven reality; reality shown on tv. But we do not know exactly where this border passes, it is impossible to understand that the media did not consider it necessary to inform.
The nature of news programs
Daily practice is to report on tragedies and triumphs, normal normal life is beyond the scope of news. In the news, as a rule, less technical methods are used and there are reasons for this. With a smaller number of technical devices, the news gives the impression of being closer to reality than other programs.
The problem is not that television provides entertainment, the problem is that television presents any topic as entertainment. As a result, it goes beyond the TV and reflects on real life. Television inclines us to treat everything in the world as types of entertainment: to any activity, events, people. We rather pay attention to how entertaining the subject or phenomenon is, than to its quality, depth, social significance, spiritual qualities, beauty, and so on. Television no longer imitates life, life begins to imitate television. What we sometimes call the “box effect”: now the viewer is creating a demand for what the television has originally taught him. A vicious circle, but it was initiated by television.
We gradually become greedy. But greedy is not the traditional understanding of the desire for material goods, we are experiencing greed for entertainment. This is not just a desire, it is the greed of entertainment, it becomes a 24-hour obsession.
In the absence of entertainment, we entertain ourselves with entertainment plans.
Deformation of social skills
TV has become a sort of mechanical friend, a substitute for social interaction. If someone stays in the room alone and turns on the TV, he will immediately be in the company. And he feels this interaction as two-way. Many students complain: "But this is just an object when it is turned off." Well, of course! After all, when it is turned off, it is much more obvious that this is a thing, not a friend. Shocking, after so many years of friendship, right?
This phenomenon is well described by Mander:
The interior of the room, which has a TV, is almost always organized around it. As the gym is organized for training on the simulator, our rooms are organized for training on the TV. The furniture is arranged in such a way that everyone can comfortably watch TV, and not so that it is convenient to communicate with each other. You can draw a certain analogy between the organization of rooms with a dominant TV and the organization of the interior lines of the church around the altar.
Illusion of knowledge
Television limits reality to itself.
The most effective way to stifle a social movement is to present its goals as already achieved. This problem is often faced by the feminist movement. Television limits knowledge of the reality of the illusion of such knowledge.
But instead of turning away from the gloom of ignorance and seeing reality, instead of leaving the darkness of this cave and getting out into the light, we barely look at the dull picture of how we do it.
We only fantasize about doing something, and we think that it is the same.
upd
Of course, I understand that many here, like me, do not watch TV. That's why I think the article should meet with understanding. But firstly, the article personally helped me to understand some additional aspects of this business, and secondly, there are many people around who continue to look and who can be advised to read this text for review.
Initially, I just wanted to translate the article by The Bernard MacGrain " The Zen TV Experiment ", but in the process I realized that the text, to put it mildly, needs to be adapted. As a result, the translation corresponds to the original forty percent.
In the first half of the article, an attempt is made to realize the process of watching television, and in the second, how does the mass participation of people in this TV experiment affect it.
I do not always agree with the chosen tone and even some conclusions, but in general I find the article extremely interesting. I also want to note that the article provides not one but several interesting ideas; Some of them were not new to me, but the article helped me to finalize an opinion on this matter. Yes, article assumes performance of some task, I think, habrasobschestvennost can quite manage thought experiment.
')
In general, this time I recommend coffee, 10-15 minutes of rather fascinating reading are waiting for you.
Do you know how to watch TV?
One day I asked my students: "Who among you knows how to watch television?" After some hesitation, each of them gradually raised his hand. Thus, everyone considered themselves experts in the subject of television viewing.
The purpose of the experiment is to consider the process of watching TV as a certain phenomenon, and to use a more or less scientific approach. The fact is that when watching television, a person watches the narration of the program and at the same time does not give itself an account of what processes initiate this activity.
When we watch TV, we pay little attention to the details of the phenomenon. In fact, we pay little attention at all.
Counting Techniques
The experiment consists in calculating the techniques that were used in the transmission. Have you seen how a stationary surveillance camera works? It simply shows what is happening in front of her, let's call this “pure TV”. Everything that is different from pure TV is technical methods: approximation, change of plan, superimposing one video on another, and so on. During the experiment, it is necessary to count how many times within 10 minutes there is a smooth change of video, approach or removal, change of plan, the appearance of the accompanying text or voice, and so on.
After this, the experiment is complicated as follows:
- watch for 15 minutes any TV show without sound;
- watch the news program without sound for 15 minutes;
- watch TV for 30 minutes without turning on the TV.
The time required to complete each step of the experiment is crucial. I highly recommend doing the experiment on your own, instead of just reading about the results. In order not to be in a stupid position, do it when no one can see you. It's worth it.
Why is all this necessary ?!
Always, always doing this task leads to a wave of anger and indignation. Students are extremely dissatisfied with the fact that they were forced to engage in so useless work. Moreover, this indignation is very different from that which appears as a result of an increase in the burden of reading or fulfilling written assignments for the course. However, this anger is quite useful - not by itself, but for the reason that it helps to focus on the causes of its occurrence.
When studying society, we always mean that we study “them” of some kind, but this is not so. We study ourselves, and we do not like what we learn. It makes us feel uneasy, it makes us angry.
“I wasted 30 minutes of my time!”: Almost literally repeats the report of each student. Can you still get the benefit of this half an hour?
When discussing inevitably it turns out that all the students spent much more time in front of the TV than half an hour. So why so much indignation because of these 30 minutes when the TV is off?
Work during the holidays
Turning on the TV - you turn off the real world. The TV is only half a meter high, but we fool ourselves, and we think that we are looking at real life. Why does everything seem so real and similar to reality?
Techniques produce the illusion of naturalness and reality. As TV reporters say: good editing is when you do not notice it. Completing the task of counting techniques makes you pay attention to the fact that watching a television program is a kind of activity that requires effort. Along the way, it becomes clear how complex a television program is.
In the process of counting techniques it is impossible to concentrate on the plot. It quickly becomes clear how difficult it is to divide attention: it remains to either count the techniques or follow the transfer. This is a fairly well-known effect of human perception, usually it is demonstrated with the help of this picture . You can see either two faces or a vase, but not both the plot at the same time.
When performing a test, a person notes segments of unrelated shootings that are cut off from each other, which replace each other with the speed of a machine gun. In the process of watching TV, a person continuously connects passages, synthesizes, integrates and extrapolates scenes and plans. From all this kaleidoscope a person must distinguish the line of narration. The mind does this work while the person is relaxed and absorbs information. This high-speed synthesis of a whole from a disconnected mass (corners, scenes, people, voice-over, music, screensavers ...) takes place against the background of supposedly passive contemplation. Thus, the brain performs significant work as if without the knowledge of the person.
Any rest implies restoration. But when watching television, the human mind is not at all in a state of rest. Information continuously flows into the mind: it is not calm and not free. The mind is occupied by this stream and is rather in a state of hypnosis, zombie. Of course, there can be no restoration of such a state of speech. To restore, the mind must rest and after that proceed to the stimulation of another kind of new activity. Television does not give any rest or stimulation.
Television actively uses a person's ability to think, but does not lead to thinking, rest, or recovery. It leads to exhaustion. The mind is constantly busy, and worst of all, it is occupied by someone else's thoughts and fantasies.
Hypnosis without borders
With the beginning of long-term space flights, the effect became known as a result of which the astronauts' muscles, left without their usual load, atrophied in a relatively short period of time. Having lived for several decades under conditions of gravity, in a matter of weeks the muscles lost a significant amount, since the need for effort seemed to be gone.
Watching television produces a kind of weightlessness for the human mind. Normal, omnipresent, but invisible and imperceptible "gravity" for the mind that a person experiences in everyday life ceases to act when watching TV.
TV is often seen as a rest, although the brain does a lot of work. The brain, unprepared for the load, receives a dense stream of information consisting, on the one hand, of techniques and, on the other, of the contents of the TV program. The result is a cumulative effect, or in other words: beer with vodka.
Television and social reality design
Analysis of the process of watching television dramatically reveals the following social aspects of television:
- reduced focus;
- imposing reality: normal life seems boring;
- deformation of social skills.
Focus reduction
The most probably obvious and dangerous factor. In the context of competition between channels, television is constantly fighting for its audience. What is simpler: to reduce the focus of attention with bright short flashes of plots or to struggle to increase the focus of attention, concentration and calmness, trying to captivate the viewer with a complex plot?
Television is the quintessence of the short-term medium. Television lives in seconds. The relationship with the viewer is measured in the shortest fragments. One percentage point of the rating can cost up to 30 million dollars a year. The result is a program policy that is aimed at instantly grabbing attention, and not some kind of humanistic, useful substance that would stay with the viewer. This leads to a continuous reduction in the ability of viewers to focus their attention for some considerable time. The race of program directors serves advertisers, not the viewer.
There is an old Zen analogy: clearing the mind is like clearing a pool of muddy water. Active action only leads to disturbance and lifting silt from the bottom. Only by leaving the process to itself, the pool will calm down and gain transparency.
Imposing reality
Modern culture and education are structured in such a way that we constantly compare our actions, sensations and perceptions with the media space. But after all, if we are looking for confirmation somewhere else, then we thereby assess our own existence as an insufficiently reliable version of reality. We lose the desire to acquire direct life experience and to participate in the creation of real reality. We no longer do, we look. We look at the result of the work of some strangers.
A phenomenon does not become an event and does not exist at all until it was shown on TV. And there is a certain threshold of sensitivity of the media, events that do not reach it are not covered. The world, as it were, becomes covered with a membrane that clearly divides it into real reality and a proven, proven reality; reality shown on tv. But we do not know exactly where this border passes, it is impossible to understand that the media did not consider it necessary to inform.
The nature of news programs
Daily practice is to report on tragedies and triumphs, normal normal life is beyond the scope of news. In the news, as a rule, less technical methods are used and there are reasons for this. With a smaller number of technical devices, the news gives the impression of being closer to reality than other programs.
The problem is not that television provides entertainment, the problem is that television presents any topic as entertainment. As a result, it goes beyond the TV and reflects on real life. Television inclines us to treat everything in the world as types of entertainment: to any activity, events, people. We rather pay attention to how entertaining the subject or phenomenon is, than to its quality, depth, social significance, spiritual qualities, beauty, and so on. Television no longer imitates life, life begins to imitate television. What we sometimes call the “box effect”: now the viewer is creating a demand for what the television has originally taught him. A vicious circle, but it was initiated by television.
We gradually become greedy. But greedy is not the traditional understanding of the desire for material goods, we are experiencing greed for entertainment. This is not just a desire, it is the greed of entertainment, it becomes a 24-hour obsession.
In the absence of entertainment, we entertain ourselves with entertainment plans.
Deformation of social skills
TV has become a sort of mechanical friend, a substitute for social interaction. If someone stays in the room alone and turns on the TV, he will immediately be in the company. And he feels this interaction as two-way. Many students complain: "But this is just an object when it is turned off." Well, of course! After all, when it is turned off, it is much more obvious that this is a thing, not a friend. Shocking, after so many years of friendship, right?
This phenomenon is well described by Mander:
TV is usually watched in dim light ... this is one of the requirements for watching television so that it is the brightest image in the whole environment, otherwise it is hard to see. To increase the effect, background sounds are also muffled. The point, of course, is to concentrate even more on the TV. Any concern for the rest of the world goes by the wayside. The human body is also “muffled”: we adopt such a pose in order to provide maximum comfort and minimum movement. Muffled and thought processes. While watching TV, the body experiences the most peaceful state, which only happens, except for sleep. This is true even for eyes that move when watching TV in less than in any other occupation.
The interior of the room, which has a TV, is almost always organized around it. As the gym is organized for training on the simulator, our rooms are organized for training on the TV. The furniture is arranged in such a way that everyone can comfortably watch TV, and not so that it is convenient to communicate with each other. You can draw a certain analogy between the organization of rooms with a dominant TV and the organization of the interior lines of the church around the altar.
Illusion of knowledge
Television limits reality to itself.
The most effective way to stifle a social movement is to present its goals as already achieved. This problem is often faced by the feminist movement. Television limits knowledge of the reality of the illusion of such knowledge.
But instead of turning away from the gloom of ignorance and seeing reality, instead of leaving the darkness of this cave and getting out into the light, we barely look at the dull picture of how we do it.
We only fantasize about doing something, and we think that it is the same.
upd
Of course, I understand that many here, like me, do not watch TV. That's why I think the article should meet with understanding. But firstly, the article personally helped me to understand some additional aspects of this business, and secondly, there are many people around who continue to look and who can be advised to read this text for review.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/82856/
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