Tt
Talking Heads
Television

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TALKING HEADS

More to come, but the Talking Heads track "Nothing But Flowers" is an excellent example (at least I think so) of hyperreality, or the idea that people have become so used to "strip malls, televisions, and Seven-Elevens" as their sole conception of reality that they would sorely miss all these accoutrements if everything was to revert back to "roses and cornfields" tomorrow. This is just the sort of thing Borges was talking about in his story of the map.

To hear an AIFF clip of the track
"Nothing But Flowers" click here (1.3 MB).

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TELEVISION
aka the telly,
the box,
the tube, TV ...

It's all around us, but how do we deal with it. Is it just entertainment, or does its existence profoundly alter the way we view the world?

Marshall McLuhan, for example, argues that television does not simply present a picture of the world to its audiences -- it fundamentally alters the way people think about the world. Its role in determining what audiences see and how they make sense of what they see is central. However, overall, McLuhan is very optimistic about the change from a print to an electronic culture that television heralds: "The Medium is the Message," he says, suggesting that the nature of the communications medium has a direct impact on how society and its members think and operate.

Others, such as Jean Baudrillard, have a much more negative view of television. They see its influence and ubiquity as part of the process whereby "reality" no longer has any meaning outside television, i.e., if it's not on TV then it never really happened in any meaningful way for any of us. Television defines how we make sense of the world. Hence Baudrillard's famous claim that the Gulf war never really happened. (It was just a TV war.)

On balance, most media critics and researchers view television as a fairly negative influence on our lives, if for no other reason than its very ubiquity -- especially in the United States. Sherry Turkle, in many ways echoing Baudrillard, talks about television as part of the postmodern "culture of simulation," where we learn to identify with the simulated world of television more readily than we do with the "real" world around us. To wit:

The bar featured in the television series Cheers no doubt figures so prominently in the American imagination at least partly because most of us don't have a neighborhood place where "everybody knows your name." Instead, we identify with the place on the screen, and most recently have given it some life off the screen as well. Bars designed to look like the obe on Cheers have sprung up all over the country, most poignantly in airports, our most anonymous of locales. Here, noone will know your name, but you can always buy a drink or a souvenir sweatshirt (Turkle, 235).

Interestingly, Baudrillard would probably call the fake airport Cheers a fine example of a fourth order simulacrum, a pure simulation of something without an original.

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