When it was commercialized, television was the perfect weapon for the wealthy: it sets the political agenda, establishes public figures (who it feels is worthy of recognition), and defines society and culture. As Pierre Bourdieu and many other modern philosophers have posited, television works to promote the status quo. It conveys sensational, banal images which possess no value, but which are attuned to the innate desires of all humans. It produces the most accessible images of the roles of women, of the roles of minority groups, images of the self and of others, and very strong images of country and nationalism. Before anything else, television creates the America that America wants to see. It disciplines its constituents into self-serving, nationalistic, consumers willing to do almost anything for money and country.
As Marshall McLuhan noted, “the medium is the message,” and television is a powerful one. People are silenced, asked to listen, and positioned to observe. They are made passive. As such, McLuhan found that television was a technological advance that structurally and permanently changed society. It realigned the senses, making sight the preeminent sense. Television also gave people communities of fan cultures, brand loyalties, sports lovers, movie watchers, band groupies, and everything in between. It created masses that were superficially united and yet physically and intellectually divided. It progressed Durkheim’s ideas of solidarity to the extreme, but it reconstructed the individual in society such that social bonds were too easy to make. The ease created a numerosity of social bonds that rendered any individual bond almost meaningless: essentially the individual now had to maintain a significant number of these easy bonds (similar tastes in music, fashion, art, etc.) to develop any sort of meaningful bond. So how does this all relate to technology policy?
95% of what we see, hear, and read is owned by five major international conglomerates (although the internet is changing this dynamic somewhat). All five have extremely similar views on politics and society. Further, because all 95% of those outlets are in the business of making a profit, the images we get are predominately capitalistic, democracy-promoting advertisements. The long-term effects of this technology may be more deleterious than governments could have ever imagined, but while television grew in popularity and power, governments mostly stood by and allowed the technology to develop itself in accordance with social tastes and market mechanisms. Surely there are many positive things that have come from television, not the least of which is a greater ability to communicate with the rest of the world. However, we should learn from the shortcomings of technology policy associated with television.
Any policy we develop for dealing with new like-kind technologies, especially those technologies that arise through or in conjunction with the internet, should be a strong, goal-oriented policy. Technology policy is not a means to an end, it is itself the end. The internet will grow more quickly than any policy which attempts to guide its growth, and consequently, we must determine what role we want the internet to play in our society: if we are ambivalent and believe that the internet technology should run its course, than we can adopt a policy similar to the one we developed for television; if however, we believe that the internet should serve specific functions in society at the expense of others, then we would have to adopt a policy that is tailored to that objective. Personally, I believe the internet is the freest place in the world today, and as such, it should be protected from any policy that constrains its ability to serve a democratic function
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