What will happen if commercial television takes hold in a serious way in Austria? By serious commercial television, I mean a system that is largely supported by advertising revenues, and that has a minimum of government regulations about what can be broadcast and when. Should anything like this come to Austria, here’s what I predict: number of hours of television broadcasting each day. There is simply too much money at stake to allow any part of the day to go unused. Where there is one fully functioning commercial channel, there will be pressure for others to emerge. When there are two or more, the channels will compete with each other for the audience’s attention, and for advertising money. This will lead to an increase in American-style television programs -fast-paced, visually dynamic programs with an emphasis on interesting images rather than serious content. This means an increase in comedy, car chases, violence, and sexually oriented material. To hold their audiences, state- controlled channels will be forced to compete with commercial-style programming, and will also become similar to American television. This is exactly what has happened to the BBC in England and the Public Broadcast- ting System in America. As audiences come to expect fast-paced, visually exciting programs, they will begin to find issue-oriented public-affairs and news programs dull. To compete with entertainment programs, news and public-affairs programs will become more visual and more personality- oriented. As a result, there will be a decline in the public’s capacity to understand and discuss events and issues in a serious way. Of course, television advertising will draw advertisers away from newspapers and magazines. Some newspapers and magazines will go out of business; others will change their format and style to compete with television for audiences, and to match the style of thought promoted by television. They will become more . picture-oriented and will feature dramatic headlines, celebrities, and sensational stories. Of course, there will be less substantive and complex writing. For some idea of what I mean, I suggest you look at America’s newest, most successful national newspaper, USA Today; you ought also to take note of the fact that one of America’s oldest and most distinguished literary magazines, Harper’s, has found it necessary to substantially reduce the length of its articles and stories in order to accommodate the reduced attention span of its readers. The uses of books will also change. I suspect there will be an erosion of the concept of the common reader, the type of person who gets most of his or her literary experience and information from novels and general non-fiction books. There will almost certainly be an increase in both illiteracy and aliteracy (an aliterate being a person who can read but doesn’t). It has been estimated that in the United States there are now 60 million illiterates, and according to a report from our Librarian of Congress, there may be an equal number of aliterates. In any case, a general impatience with books will develop, especially with books in which language is used with subtlety to express complex ideas. Most likely there will be a decline in readers’ analytical and critical skills. According to the results of standardized tests given in schools, this has been happening in the United States for the past twenty-five years. I suspect concern for history will also decline, to be replaced by a consuming interest in the present. The effect on political life will be devastating. There will be less emphasis on issues, substance, and ideology, an increase in the importance of image and style. Politicians will have greater concern for moment-to-moment shifts in public opinion, less concern for long-range policies. Unless the use of television for political campaigns is stricly prohibited, elections may be decided by which party spends more on television and media consultants. Even if political commercials are prohibited, politicians will appear on entertainment programs and will almost certainly be asked to give testimonials for non-political products such as cars, beer, and breakfast foods. The line between political life and entertainment will blur, and movie stars may be taken seriously as political candidates. Once the population becomes accustomed to spending much of its time watching television —in the United States, the average household has television on about eight hours a day—there will be a decrease in activities outside the home: fewer and smaller gatherings in parks, beer halls, concert halls, and other public places. As street life decreases, there I am a conservative. From my point of view, Ronald Reagan is a radical. How the idea originated that capitalists are conservative is something of a mystery tome. may well be an increase in street crime. Young people will, of course, become disaffected from school and reading. Children’s games are likely to disappear. In fact, it will become important to keep children watching television because they will be a major consumer group. In the United States, children watch 5,000 hours of television before they enter kindergarten and 16,000 hours by high school’s end. Commercial television does not dislike children; it simply cannot afford the idea of childhood. Consumerhood takes precedence. Naturally, family life will be significantly changed. There will be less interaction among family members, certainly less talk between parents and children. Such talk as there is will be noticeably different from what you are now accustomed to. The young will speak of matters that once were confined to adults. Commercial television is a medium that does not segregate its audience, and therefore all segments of the population share the same symbolic world. You may find that in the end the line between adulthood and childhood has been erased entirely. Since Austria already has some television commercials, you have seen how commercials stress the values of youth, how they stress consumption, the immediate gratification of desires, the love of the new, a contempt for what is old. Television screens saturated with commercials promote the Utopian and childish idea that all problems have fast, simple, and technological solutions. You must banish from your mind the naive but commonplace notion that commercials are about products. They are about products in the same sense that the story of Jonah is about the anatomy of whales. Which is to say, they aren’t. They are about values and myths and fantasies. One might even say they form a body of religious literature, a montage of voluminous, visualized sacred texts that provide people with images and stories around which to organize their lives. To give you some idea of exactly how voluminous, I should tell you that the average American will have seen approximately 1 million television commercials, at the rate of a thousand per week, by the age of twenty. By the age of sixty-five, the average American will have seen more than 2 million television commercials. Commercial television adds to the Decalogue several impious commandments, among them that thou shalt have no other gods than consumption, thou shalt despise what is old, thou shalt seek to amuse thyself continuously, and thou shalt avoid complexity like the ten plagues that afflicted Egypt. Perhaps you are thinking that I exaggerate the social and psychic results of the commercialization of television and that, in any case, what has happened in the United States could not happen in Austria. If you are, you overestimate the power of tradition and underestimate the power of technology. To enliven your sense of the forces unleashed by technological change, you need only remind yourself of what the automobile has brought to Austria. Has it not changed the nature of your cities, created the suburbs, poisoned your air and forests, restructured your economy? You must not mislead yourselves by what you know about Austrian culture as of 1987. Austria is still living in the age of Gutenberg. Commercial television attacks such backwardness with astonishing ferocity. For example, at the present time, less than 20 percent of the Austrian population watches television in the evening. A commercial television system will find this situation intolerable. In the United States, about 75 percent of the adult population watches television during evening hours, and broadcasters find even those numbers unsatisfactory. In Austria, such commercials as you have are bunched together so that they do not interfere with the continuity of programs. Such a situation makes no sense in a commercial system. The whole idea is precisely to interrupt the continuity of programs so that one’s thoughts cannot stray too far from considerations of consumership. Indeed, the aim is to obliterate the distinction between a program and a commercial. In Austria, you do not have many advertising agencies, and those you have are small and without great influence. In America, our advertising agencies are among the largest and most powerful corporations in the world. The merger of Doyle, Dane, Bernbach with BBD&O and Needham Harper will provide the new company with the possibility of $5.5 billion in billings each year, and possibly $500 million per year for American network television alone. This is serious money and these are serious radicals. They cannot afford to permit a culture to retain old ideas about work or religion or politics or childhood. And it will not be long before they and their kind show up in Austria. If, like me, you claim allegiance to an authentic conservative philosophy, one that seeks to preserve that which nourishes the spirit, you would be wise to approach all proposals for a free-market television system with extreme caution. Indeed, I will go further than that: it is either hypocrisy or ignorance to argue that the transformation of Austria or any other country from a print-based culture to a television-based culture can leave that country’s traditions intact. Conservatives know this is nonsense, and so they worry. Radicals also know this is nonsense. But they don’t care. Neil Postman is a critic, writer, communications theorist, and professor of communication arts and science at New York University. His sixteen previous books include Amusing Ourselves to Death, Teaching as a Subversive Activity, The Soft Revolution, and The Disappearance of Childhood. This excerpt is from Conscientious Objections just published by Alfred A. Knopf. Ann Morgan is a Twin Cities artist. Designer Connie Gilbert is a regular contributor to the Clinton Street Quarterly. Clinton St. Quarterly— Winter, 1988-89 9
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