The TV Child
The unique and dangerous structure of minds molded by TV.
In a highly literate world, the TV child is a cripple.
I ought to know: I transformed from an “A-student” and a “big reader” to a TV child, literally overnight.
All I knew, at first, was that the right side of my body was paralyzed and I needed to tell someone. I had propped myself up against the wall of my bedroom, and I was using my functional left side to drag myself toward the door. When I reached the threshold, the crutch of my bedroom wall ran out. I thumped face-first on the hallway carpet. I’m not sure how long I was there, slipping in and out of consciousness. Eventually, though, my brother discovered me on a late-night trip to the bathroom.
The next thing I know, my mother is holding me like a little child again. I can understand what she’s saying - the sounds make enough sense - but when I try to respond, I realize I have completely forgotten English. What comes out of my mouth is a sing-song babble - what it might sound like for a non-English speaker to do an impression of English. My mother’s eyes widened, and that scared me badly, so I stopped trying to speak. She held me until I fell back asleep. When I woke in my bed the next morning, all was normal again. The only evidence that the dream had been real was the aching bump on my forehead.
I had had a half-hemisphere seizure in my sleep. Like a leg falling asleep from sitting on it too long, the entire left hemisphere of my brain had shut off, paralyzing the corresponding right side of my body and disabling everything done in the left hemisphere, including language. This resolved after about an hour, and even though my brain suffered no permanent damage, I never shook that glimpse I had beyond the veil. The loss of language was not an impoverishment, it was like a mystical experience, which I now imagine would take years of meditation atop some Himalaya to achieve naturally.
Before that day, I was a big reader. Interested in school. Perfect grades. Normal. After that day, school seemed strange to me, like we were crimping off the vast majority of our experience in order to train a weirdly isolated visual sense. Reading, after that day, would produce in me a strange synesthesia: a sensation of my legs tumbling over my head as I tried to focus on the orderly, disembodied symbols on the page. I took up a new fascination with TV, which I had no words for, of course, but which in hindsight offered me a more embodied experience than reading. To the horror of my parents, I had become one of those kids who sits six inches away from the screen, hypnotized.
It’s interesting that the image of a child glued to a TV is terrifying, but a child with a nose buried in a book elicits warm hushed smiles (so as to not interrupt the delicate magic). Recently, I watched the movie Poltergeist. In that film, the television - viewed six inches away by their youngest child - literally causes the unearthing of dead bodies and ghosts buried under their house: tribal memories, preliterate hauntings, which terrorize the highly literate suburban family.
Television, unlike the written word - that Gutenberg explosion of literacy that trained the Western mind - is an implosive, inclusive force of re-tribalization. By allowing it into our living rooms, we inadvertently invited the ghosts of the more embodied past to terrorize us - to ultimately make us unable to work our normal jobs, pay our normal bills, and comply with the strictures of the homeowners association, which were all made possible by the critical mass of a book-reading populace. Our intuition knows that if this critical mass falls below a certain level - one too many iPad babies - the whole enterprise collapses. The fear that the foundation is silently rotting underfoot terrorizes the working parent (hence the horror of that film), who has staked his entire livelihood on the wealth maintained by our agreement to abide by the literate mindset.
Alphabetic language and then the printing press are the critical joists hidden under the floor. Not only for the content they allow us to distribute, but for how the medium of written word itself shapes our consciousness. Really, we cram all senses into the visual through training ourselves to see sounds, smells, and feelings through words. This makes us crave left-brain order, individuality, and linear thought.
All of our hand-wringing that people don’t read enough anymore and all of our insisting that successful people read a lot are hints that we know this is true. The fact that most Americans basically don’t read after college does not disprove this, but just indicates that they are no longer interested in climbing the social ladder and comfort themselves about their mediocrity with massive doses of TV. What you’re also not supposed to say out loud is that the content you actually read is not nearly as important as the act of reading it. It’s all fundamentally to train yourself to be the sort of creature that reads. Not to put too fine a point on it, but it is to become a good cog (a Gutenberg/industrial revolution-era clockwork metaphor that once did not have such a negative connotation).
Not all media has this effect. There have also been technologies of re-association, reintegration of the full tribal awareness. This happened through the radio, for example, most dramatically to Germans, who were slightly less deeply entrenched in literacy than, say, England. For them, the new radio was a sudden and massive flood of the unifying kinetic, berserker spirit that quickly overwhelmed the literate mind. The Nazi was, among other things (many other things), a Nordic tribal revivalist.
The television is the spiritual successor of the radio, greatly enhanced by moving pictures. So, it even more powerfully evokes a participatory mode of being.
The individual TV child (and its historical equivalents) is either the prophet or the addict. The addict is the inner tribal man gone feral in the literary world, passions dominating indiscriminately. For my childhood, the rube sitting slack-jawed on the couch watching TV commercials was a cautionary tale. On the other end of that very same bell curve is the prophet - the unified man, the artist - who guides and creates the taste and attention of the sterile and middling literary man.
The reason parents fret so dutifully to “educate” their children (by which we all intuitively understand: make them readers, and stop them watching too much TV), is to dissuade them of their innate tribal sense. We do this so anxiously because we want to secure our children a safe place right in the middle. This is a smart calculation, at least on the surface, because the chances of becoming a prophet are low (and not even desirable in many cases), and the chances of becoming an addict are quite high. So, we fear and denigrate television as a “low art,” but not because it is. What’s so inherently gauche about a video-audio medium, really? We fear it because of its tribalizing effect.
David Foster Wallace, perhaps the last true literary prophet, was often asked by reporters if he had a secret heroin addiction. He replied that no, believe it or not, he did not have a problem with heroin. The worst addiction he ever had was to TV. But that wasn’t sexy or lurid enough to print. Maybe we weren’t prepared to look at what TV had done to us, which was central to Wallace’s writing.
Post modern writers like Wallace transferred the retribalization of television back to the written word, in all its tactile and garbled lack of linearity, which made for some very strange books. Re-awakening our other senses gave us a new ability, as a whole culture, to “smell” when actions and words were not quite aligned. This is the birth of sarcasm, irony, metatextuality, and calling out hypocrisy. The early TV shows, for example, in the ’50s and ’60s, are about the simple values, integrity, and family, which were patently undercut by the behavior of the executives that peddled the content: warmongers, politicians, and prescription drug pushers. The postmodernists attacked TV’s sincerity, and they forced it to evolve new layers of irony as a defense. But even the act of watching TV itself is an ironic sort of thing: The TV viewer, with an average of six hours of viewing a day (at the time), was shown that the best life existed by the adventurous people on his TV, who did not watch TV. Instead, they are involved in hyper-ideal and maximally interesting relationships, which render the mundane details of the slack-jawed TV watcher’s life intolerable by comparison and require him to watch ever-more TV to deal with it (a central quality of addiction, by the way).
The postmodernists make fun of this whole thing, themselves TV children turned prophets. The problem, of course, is that the ironic hipster can’t be criticized because you never know what the ironic hipster actually means. Here’s what David Foster Wallace thought they actually meant: “asking me what I really mean is so banal…” This creates an endless meta-textual feedback loop of ever-growing protective layers of irony that, in my opinion, spelled the end of serious mainstream literature.
Wallace, in the same piece, mentions a conservative tech writer who believed the problems with TV could be solved with better TV technology. At the time, TV sets had to be passive receivers of evanescent electromagnetic waves. This tech writer saw that with the invention of the microchip, we would be able to store and replay content, mix and match it, and have virtual conversations with any thinker or writer we wanted to. This should make TV more like reading. Wallace eye-rolled at this optimism way back in 1990, a time neither he nor the tech writer could have known how perfectly they were describing the coming internet (and how much it sounds like AI optimism today).
But Wallace was right in his cynicism, though, because the internet, for the most part, is the spiritual extension of television. Despite the fact that we have access to any content from all of human history, and that we could create and distribute just about anything, we are for the most part passive consumers of trends and programming. Now, instead of three channels being broadcast to everyone in the country, it is a network of perfectly sycophantic algorithms designed to suck you into a pool of Narcissus.
What people forget about that myth, by the way, is that Narcissus doesn’t know he’s looking at his own reflection. He thinks it’s something else. In the same way, we think that what the TV or AI or the internet shows us is something besides ourselves, and so we’re endlessly fascinated by our own reflection.
True participation, I think, would mean discovering the parts of ourselves that we don’t like through butting up against each other - real people. We avoid that. Instead, we like the illusion of participation and to watch other people through one-way glass. We’ll even watch videos of other people participating in an illusion of participation, like those live streams of gamers playing video games, a facsimile of a facsimile of participation. The whole charade, I think, exists to devise ever more complex ways to deceive ourselves about the fact that we so desperately are afraid to participate, and yet would like to feel like we’re participating; to soothe the looming specter of shame and guilt about our own docile voyeurism.
There is nothing new under the sun. That docile passivity was once a virgin and unexploited aspect of what it meant to be integrated and tribal: to feel that there is something larger than oneself (God or nature) and to rightly submit to that, like so much water flowing down so many hills. Only now we are in the not-so-all-loving embrace of the entertainment-media-complex.
The answer, I think, remains annoyingly in striking some difficult balance: the ability for each of us to acknowledge and accept the desires of the inner TV child, the pre-literate kinesthetic feeler of patterns. Instead of allowing him to make us slack-jawed rubes, to channel that into risking going out and finding a real community. At the same time, the ability to hold on to what’s best of our literate abstractions, to use them as tools when necessary. We can no longer master all of these abstractions - there’s just too many - so we have to risk assailable commentary, to risk being wrong, and to have the audacity to be sincerely wrong without hiding behind irony or cynicism, or the convenience of nihilism which says, what’s the point anyway? And instead decide that there must be a point. Because obviously there’s a point - ever receding, though it is, beyond our goalposts.
I like TV. More than other writers I know, or more than they will admit, at least. If I ever allowed myself to watch it, I would probably do it all day. I could also watch 9 hours of YouTube videos about impractical engineering projects and ones about how airplanes work. I like quietly thinking of counterarguments as I listen to podcasts. But it’s probably better if I direct that energy to set up more Zoom calls and coffee chats or, hell, maybe go volunteer at the food bank.
On the other end, I still have to somewhat force myself to dive into a book. Still, I read for a couple hours every day, but the abstractions tend to blur together in my mind and get jumbled. I still get that strange synesthesia, like my legs are flipping above my head, tumbling through space with nowhere to stand. I learn to feel into this groundlessness, slowly connecting it to real experiences with real people, and then write about it here.
The problem with our TV-like devices is that they hypnotize us with the feeling of being in the neighborhood and then stamp a Coca-Cola logo on our spinal cord. Now, we’re looking around and asking, “Will a smarter iPad really fix this?” Mechanization, once it reaches its apex, necessarily flips like this. Almost like the still mechanical images of a movie, which, when played in rapid succession, transform into an illusion of organic movement. And so goes the trajectory of our whole world. As automation increases in power, we run out of new worlds to conquer, which once motivated further specialization. Instead, we implode back into the tribal, as the still images move fast enough to smooth back into organics.
For TV children like me, hopelessly uncomfortable with bureaucracy, we are not necessarily doomed to become fringe addicts or crippled abstractors, working in lowly email jobs because of our limited taste for, or ability to deal with, arbitrary divisions. It may be that more of us than ever before can become prophets: creators of new pre-literate motivational frameworks. Being crippled, it turns out, is probably a necessary first step in being a prophet.
This is also a dangerous time that will tempt many more people into addiction, e.g. Wallace’s “entertaining ourselves to death.” When inanimate and yet hyper-advanced objects of the literate world become animated with ghosts, they both terrorize and hypnotize everybody in the house. The hyper-tribal-drum of the TV makes us into overfed sleepwalkers - walking dead. Vulnerable to manipulation by the people who make and maintain these community-and-sex-replacement-machines. Porn is just a doomed late-night search for the campfire.
Most people have no idea about the screaming pit they are somnambulating into. The job of waking up, I suppose, would be learning how to truly be together again, through, with, and outside the hall of black mirrors. For me, that’s as simple and yet as hard as making sure all this writing is at least translating into making a few new friends.