By Myron J. Pereira
Shakespeare, I remember, said it differently: all the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players. But that was 400 years ago.
Today all the world’s a screen — a TV screen, flickering at you, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, 50 channels at your fingertips…
Or a computer screen, activated with a click — iconic, laconic, your expressway into the spider-web of news, numbers, networks … the nervous system of the civilized world.
All the world’s a screen, and all the men and women merely voyeurs.
When historians of culture write about the latter part of the 20th century, they will probably be astonished at the role of the two small screens found today in virtually every urban home: the TV screen which brings the world into my bedroom; and the computer screen which connects my work to the distant world.
The primacy of the eye
The word “screen” is significant. A screen conceals, as when I “curtain off” a certain part, so that what is hidden remains “off-screen,” obscene.
But a screen also presents and reveals, as cinema does and as billboards do, overpowering us with their huge images. Hence the ambivalence often felt towards these two instruments of culture.
For they concentrate on just one of our many senses: the eye. Video,ergo sum. I see, therefore I am. I watch, therefore I become.
Traditionally, children watched their parents, apprentices observed their mentors. Learning was by doing, imitating, and assimilating. “Book learning” changed all this for certain cultures, but even here a “hands-on” experience is deemed necessary in many fields.
Television however has increased the potential of “observational learning” almost exponentially. Through TV we watch everything as if it were actually there, as if it were present here and now.
“The overwhelming cultural transformation by television has changed the world,” wrote Nadine Gordimer, the Nobel laureate writer from South Africa, “and has made watching the most important form of comprehension.”
Any surprise that one of the most popular programs of yesteryear was Baywatch?
The totality of the visual
And what do we watch? Basically, everything — and the same thing.
Everything — because TV’s camera eye is ubiquitous. TV is a window to the universe, even if it is a clouded window, blurring our perceptions.
Through it, we see family life, sports events, national pageants, travel to exotic places, food, drink, fashion, adventure, romance, comedy — and in between those little snippets of hype and hard-sell: the commercials.
TV makes of all the world a stage, and of every person an actor. “In the future,” said pop artist Andy Warhol, “everyone will be famous for exactly fifteen minutes.”
Yes, this is what TV does, and all we ask is that we shouldn’t get bored watching.
TV democratizes experience
But because of TV we also see the same thing. “The book democratized learning,” said the American historian Daniel Boorstin, “television democratizes experience.”
Because of the availability of books, everyone who could read had access to knowledge. Because of the omnipresence of TV, everyone can see and experience — there are no controls. Vicarious experience has taken over.
Our TV experiences are now more equal and more similar, no matter how different and separate our real worlds may be. Because of TV, every young man imagines himself as a Sachin Tendulkar (Indian cricketer) or Salman Khan (Indian film actor), and every young girl a future Miss World.
All ancient cultures inhabited a rich environment of the senses. Seeing led to touching, listening invited speaking. Human interaction was a combination of the whole sensorium, each one revealing its characteristics — the ‘outer’ senses of seeing and hearing gradually leading to an exploration of the ‘inner’ layers of touch and smell and taste.
This was true of virtually every social situation, be it as mundane as traveling or physical labor, or as intimate as eating or making love.
Today the visual is sovereign
Today the eye is sovereign. Yet not just the human eye. The camera has supplanted the naked human eye and has created its own patterns of perception and meaning.
No longer, as said in the cinema of yesterday, the slow dissolve, the long gaze of the lover which inspired romance.
Today, “montage is everything” (Truffaut) — we see quick “fixes” of a scene in rapid succession — close-up, distorted, immediate. Swift cuts overwhelm us, zapping us with a package of impressions, calling forth a “gut reaction,” demanding involvement, immersion, and total surrender.
Total surrender before the screen? Why not?
If television is a screen, it is also in a sense, a “sacred screen,” an iconostasis (the screen of icons in a church, dividing the sanctuary from the nave). We spend so much time in front of it as devotees in a holy shrine, rapt in adoration of what we contemplate. Ultimately we become what we adore.
I watch. Therefore, I become what I watch. I am reminded of that little exchange between the artist Picasso and the writer Gertrude Stein. On seeing her portrait by the artist, Stein protested: “But that doesn’t look like me at all!” “Don’t worry, said Picasso, “it will.” – UCA News
