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Zen Tv

"How many of you know how to watch television?" I asked my class one day. After a few bewildered and silent moments, slowly, one by one, everyone haltingly raised their hands. We soon acknowledged that we were all "experts," as Harold Garfinkle would say, in the practice of "watching television."

For an experiment, students were asked to watch TV consciously. Insofar as this is sort of "Zen and the Art of TV-watching," I said to them, "I want you to watch TV with acute awareness, mindfulness, and precision. This experiment is about observing television scientifically, with `Beginner's Mind,' rather than watching television passively with programmed mind. Ordinarily, if you are watching TV, you can't also observe and experience the experience of watching TV. When we watch TV, we rarely pay attention to the details of the event. In fact, we rarely pay attention." The purpose of our un-TV experiment is to provoke us into seeing television as opposed to merely looking, and to stop the world as the first step to seeing. Here we engage in stopping the world by stopping the television. 1) Watch any TV show for 15 minutes without turning on the sound. 2) Watch any news program for 15 minutes without turning on the sound. 3) Watch television set for one half-hour with out turning it on.

[...]

Almost every household's living room is arranged around the television set. As a weight room is arranged for weight training, our living rooms are arranged for TV training. The furniture is purposely arranged for the transcendent practice of "watching TV," rather than for the immanent, human practice of communication or interaction. The interior design of the average American living room with its lines of attention, hierarchy, and transcendent TV is very similar to the interior design of the average American church with its transcendent altar, lines of homage, and gestures of genuflection.

Marshall McLuhan says TV opens out onto an electronic global village. It would seem, rather, that it gives us only the illusion of being. It reinforces security by presenting danger, ignorance by presenting news, lethargy by presenting excitement, isolation by promising participation. The media confines reality to itself. And it limits knowledge by giving the illusion of knowledge. In the same way that the most effective way to deflect, diffuse, and terminate a social movement is to announce that it has been achieved (the feminist movement must contend with this on an almost daily basis), the most effective way to deflect inquiry is to present it as fulfilled. TV acts in this guise as a thinking presentation device that offers non-experience as experience and not-knowingness as knowing.

In the words of Mat Maxwell, "Television becomes the world for people. ... The world becomes television." The overall and cumulative effect of the media is to heighten our insensitivity to reality. Rather than breaking the chains of ignorance, political domination, and illusion in our Platonic cave, something insidiously similar yet different is going on. Instead of actually turning away from the shadows to see the realities, instead of actually leaving the darkness of the cave and going up into the sunlight, we merely watch an image of ourselves doing this, we fantasize about doing it, and think it's the same.


This excerpt originally appeared on www.awakin.org. Bernard McGrane is an American sociologist, author, and Associate Professor of Sociology at Chapman University. The full text of his article can be accessed here.     
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SLW Oct 1, 2023
Eye opening! It is like being to be hypnotized so that a person doesn’t have to get in touch with his true self. Life is being wasted by the numbing effects of the tv.
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janetmarie May 23, 2023
Wow! I have avoided TV forever (1960 -), but as a card carrying member of this insidious culture, I bet I have other habits that do the same job of avoiding my mind and any discernment process. argh. Nowadays, especially since covid, isolation of age and transportation difficulties my laptop does the job. Argh. Thanks for the thinking!!!
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Clive T Proud Apr 1, 2023
because of this article I have taken my TV out of the living room (where living should happen) and put it in the spare room . Now I have to go to a separate space to see what the TV world is up to. It can also work to put a decorative cloth over the screen when not in use. This way TV watching becomes more intentional. Either way it makes possible more actual living in the living room . I tend to play my guitar more . The world is not on TV it's outside my front door!
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Doris Fraser Mar 12, 2023
Stopped TV Roku, READ instead!
Reply 1 reply: William
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Patrick Watters Oct 4, 2020

1. weekend in Vegas?
2. weekend home watching TV?
3. weekend in Mokolumne wilds?
4. weekend at Disney?

The human spirit needs places where nature is still wild. }:- a.m.

Reply 1 reply: Wendy
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transcending Oct 2, 2017

I tried his experiment with this article (it, too, a form of media: whether Internet, or TV, or radio, or newspaper, or book, or town crier, or wandering storyteller, or conversing friend; each socially mediating experience) and did fifteen minutes of "Zen reading", watching my reaction/attachment/acceptance/resistance to presented opinion/judgement/analysis. Now on to staring at a blank laptop screen in the darkness, though maybe still lit, so enlightening (the activity, not the person)...

Reply 1 reply: Bob