Around here we say, “Happy New Year!” [semi-long]

I hope that’s still politically correct to say.

Okay..so I’ve had MAJOR workings for holiday entries.  All sorts of ideas, hither and to.  And I’ve just not had any ambition.  So, the holiday entry will come in three parts…over different days…because I’m lazy.  This first entry is going to be the first foray into my thesis as well.  As you may know, my thesis is essentially the effects of a tv nation on our children and their education.  I’ve come across some really great stuff during my research and still haven’t found everything that I’m looking for.  I imagine Bono still has this same problem.

Anyway, so one of my sources has been this really great book, Can’t Take My Eyes Off Of You: 1 Man, 7 Days, 12 Televisions by Jack Lechner.  It has actually inspired me to conduct my own experiment similar to his, but geared toward children’s and adolescents’ programming.  Anyway, the guy set up twelve televisions in his NYC apartment and watched them from morning till late night for seven days straight.  He had specific programming schedules and watched all the channels he could…including public broadcasting and Playboy.

Lechner followed in the footsteps of Charles Sopkin, who had three televisions and only major network broadcasting…long before the days of cable television.  My experiment will be a reduction of both.  I have cable, but I’m only using my one television…unless I get brave and bring the one from the bedroom in and attempt to watch two at once.  I’m also reducing my programming schedule to children and adolescent-geared channels and shows like Nickelodeon, Disney, ToonDisney, Cartoon Network, FoxFamily, MTV, VH1, Saturday morning cartoons on the major networks, etc.  I’m doing this for some research on what our kids are watching and what is actually available on their major networks.  It’ll still be seven days, though.  I imagine my brain will be fried when I finish which is why I need to do it soon because if it’s too close to my presentation (MARCH 28th!  Mark it down and come!), I won’t have any faculties left to present.

Anyway, that long introduction for this, some of the interesting insights I found in Lechner’s book:

…I can hardly believe the intense mean-spiritedness of the WWF action on the set before me.

It’s supported by HealthTex, "Viewers Like You," and McDonalds…This is what PBS calls "enhanced underwriting," and I call a commercial.

Could it be that the ultimate subject of television is television itself?

You couldn’t get away with this blatant T & A stuff only ten years ago – but now they  just call it postmodern.

"How did this happen?" I yell, surrounded by the evidence of my folly.  [This was after only a few hours in front of television.  Lechner was completely fed up in just the first day.]

We see a hunky flyboy bantering with a bony blonde in a negligee.  She coyly offers him a Pringles chip from a carefully displayed can.

Inreasingly, commercials seem to take place in some cybernetic netherworld that has little or nothing to do with life as we know it.

…that’s one of my biggest frustrations with television: however impressive anything is, there’s always something else coming up, and soon the wondrous becomes commonplace.

Anything is possible in the world of corporate synergy.

It’s bizarre to hear two celebrities on television talking about television as consumers rather than as the consumed.

It’s nice to know that even long after a fad ends, the subject of the fad can still get a berth on afternoon TV.

So I shut off all the sets and feel better instantly.

Yesterday’s drama is today’s melodrama, and tomorrow’s sitcom.

That seems to be the news-channel experience in a nutshell – people spinning the spin itself, while the substance sits somewhere in the distance.

…it seems implied sex is acceptable on a kids’ channel as long as it’s between married people.

Crime statistics are down all over the country, but people seem more afraid than they used to be.

…in a twenty-four-hour television universe, you can say that about any day.  You’re always missing something before you turn it on, and something else after you turn it off.

It’s a useful reminder that the America I glimpse through my TV window is often quite different from the unmediated reality.

Someone once compared this kind of pornography [Playboy] to watching people chewing, and that’s not far off.

I must admit that a day of watching people having sex, even out of the corner of my eye, is starting to wear on me.

But I still wonder if the omnipresence of sexual content on TV might be most harmful to young people not because it may affect them strongly…but because it may cease to affect them at all.

Real sex has consequences, while porn sex has none.

…the extreme escapism of Playboy is almost a microcosm for all of TV, in its concentration on physical beauty and sensation at the expense of all else.  Again and again, TV brings up strong emotions only to toss them aside…

I would kill for a rerun of Moonlighting right now.

TV takes it as a given that you’re going to keep watching, and the only thing to determine is which channel you’ll watch.

They say that at the bottom of every human brain is the lizard brain that controls automatic reactions, and it feels as if that’s what I’m reduced to now.

It feels as if this entire week has been an SNL marathon, so deeply has the show permeated TV culture.

It all goes back to Marshall McLuhan’s notion of mass media turning the world into a global village…the catch is that our own actual villages are fragmenting at the same rate that the global village is coalescing.  One feeds the other; you may not know your next-door neighbors, but the folks on The Real World are everybody’s neighbors.

The good news is, I only have to do this for one more day.  The bad news is, I have to do this for one more day.

In a twenty-four-hour universe, things aren’t as time-specific as they used to be.

[In speaking of Saturday morning cartoons] The overall effect is overstimulation, which makes me feel right at home.

</span>[On Batman Beyond, a cartoon] There’s no moral, no message, just a lot of really cool action.

Then Nicky [a child Lechner enlisted to help him understand cartoons]  points excitedly to a promo on Nickolodeon.  "They put slime on the teacher, then Britney Spears comes, then they serve Chuck E. Cheese pizza."  It’s the Nick Takes Over Your School sweepstakes; Nickolodeon understands its audience very well.

…mute everything for a moment to watch the apocalyptic climax of Raiders of the Lost Ark, which doesn’t seem to have been edited for television.  It’s pretty grotesque for 4:54 p.m. [on a Saturday]

I have a massive case of déjà vu; it feels as if I’ve seen everything before.

TV is a big hamster wheel, and I have five more hours to run.

Saturday Night Live was built on irony.  If it ever appeared to take something seriously, the whole house of cards might collapse.

I was staggered by the degree to which TV is now about TV – and the proportional degree to which areas of real life are out of the loop.

…after watching exposés of behind-the-scenes doings…in one week of television, I have to conclude that the serpent is in danger of devouring its own tail.

…I wish everyone working in TV would heed the words of Carl Reiner: "Tell me about yourself, not about other television shows you’ve seen."

And thus concludes the first installment of my thesis research.  I bid you adieu and a very Happy and Prosperous New Year.

Much love,