A week without TV! (22-28 April) [french info] [english info] [Adbuster's campaign] [Antipub's campaign] [Fravia's own contribution]

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"Je n'ai qu'une vie. Je ne la regarderai pas passer par procuration devant un poste de télévision"

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Too much information running through your brain?

This year, create some thinking space by leaving your TV screen blank for one week. You'll be one of millions of people around the world joining this TV fast. The short term goal of this social ritual is to encourage more people to create their own brand of entertainment -- a powerful gesture of consumer sovereignty. The broader goal is to draw attention to the fact that a handful of megacorporations now control the global information superstructure and routinely censor opinions that challenge their interests and profitability.

While the television universe has been expanding, the number of corporations that control it has been steadily shrinking. Right now, television is controlled by seven megacorporations in the US and strongly dominated by three worldwide. Our 5000-channel universe has become limited by a narrow scope of corporate filters -- ones driven by the interests of big-money sponsors like the global auto makers, oil companies and the fast-food and fashion industries.

As media concentration has increased, diversity of opinion has decreased. Viewpoints that challenge sponsors' interests have been virtually eliminated from the world's most powerful medium. Television has become a mass merchandizing tool, and in the process, we the people have been effectively shut out of the culture-making process.

In fact, it would appear that freedom of opinion and expression do not exist on the airwaves.

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3 heures 40 de télévision par jour, c'est la dose moyenne par français

Soir après soir, nous sommes assis durant de longues heures face à une lumière scintillante. Les mêmes images pénètrent nos cerveaux, uniformisent nos existences, nos connaissances, nos goûts, nos désirs. Nous passons plus d'heures à regarder des émissions sur la nature qu'à la vivre dans sa réalité ; plus de temps à rire des plaisanteries à la télévision qu'à plaisanter nous-mêmes ; plus de temps à regarder des scènes simulées de sexualité qu'à faire l'amour.

Notre psychique est submergé par les assauts de milliers d'images jouant avec notre sensibilité, notre affect. Des millions de spots publicitaires conditionnent notre inconscient collectif et façonnent l'idéologie dominante de la télévision. Une idéologie où la jouissance immédiate par la consommation prime sur toute volonté de sens. A force de répétition, notre capacité d'attention se trouve diminuée, notre imagination et notre esprit critique s'épuisent, et nous avons de plus de plus de mal à nous consacrer aux valeurs essentielles.

"Une semaine sans télévision" est une tentative collective pour sauvegarder notre plus précieuse ressource: la lucidité.

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Fravia's own contribution
The no-TV week promoted by [adbuster] and [antipub.net] is IMO a worthy initiative, which deserves to be better known. There are many attempts nowadays to 'take back' the most worthy of our possessions: our life and our time from the icy grasp of the commercial bastards that would like to have us watching their crap when we are inside a lift (targeted ads in lifts, EU), when we are travelling through railways tunnel (stroboscopic ads in the tunnels, CH) and even when we will look at the evening sky (laser ads projects, States). There are some first signs of resistence... more and more people are for instance now demanding that shops REMAIN CLOSED on sunday, so that their kids have at least a day that is different from all the others (for whatever purpose -bar buying things- they'll find fit), and some other are even introducing unilaterally another "no consume" day in their weeks (I have chosen wednesday) so that at least twice a week you can do something more interesting than visiting with your kids a mall (where you are [conditioned to buy] things that you do not need). But TV, this 'whip to spur the slaves to consume' must be countered as well.

No TV for a whole week: a worthy initiative indeed... it wont be difficult for me to adhere, since - as I wrote long ago - one of my most peculiar endowments is the capacity of NON watching for months any TV at all.

Yet I will be sincere: I must confess that I still watch TV every now and then, though these already short periods are indeed shrinking to nil. There is a channel here in Europe, [Arte] which is a public Franco-German broadcast, with a relative low level of advertisement, that is supposed to cater to quality, not to audience rate. This channel actually does at times broadcast something of interest.

Anyway - just in case - one should never watch TV "directly": of course we should give our videorecorders the important task to 'watch television' at our place. Apparates slurp thus all advertisement so that humans can (later, eventually, maybe) examine quickly whatever is supposed to have had some interest, fast-forwarding over any moronical interruption.
I believe that at least some squares, in many towns of our planet, should have statues of the inventor of the videorecorder (whoever he was). He gave us freedom from TV, a very difficult task. Note also that it is relatively easier to avoid watching videorecorders :-) Heil to the inventor of the videorecorder! Greek heroes' fatigues pale when confronted with such a beficial feat!

So -as I was saying- I do at times watch some telefilms I am interested in, indeed, but already in the late eighties I stopped watching what the slavemasters sarcastically call 'information' on TV. Even checking (collating) the same info on -say- a French, a German and an English channel did not bring me nowhere. Same bunch of pre-formatted lies. The concerted propaganda is truly 'transnational'... in its most abominable forms.
You'll find [elsewhere] on my site a discussion about the difficulties of finding some real snippets of information in this increasingly propagandistic and bombastic media soup we are supposed to happily slurp.
In order to (try to) understand what is really happening around, I personally use at the moment either [printed press] or web media: a combination of "Le Monde Diplomatique", the "Neue Zürcher Zeitung", "The Economist", "Die Zeit" (this last weekly is unfortunately getting less and less useful) plus some snippets of real information I am able to find on the web. But you should never forget that each one of these sources of information has his own dangerous bias and his owners' (as opposed to yours) interests to defend.

In the Television landscape things are much worser. My kids have never seen anything else than their (wide) collection of cartoon and animal wildlife videotapes on TV. They are only now beginning to realize that there is a 'broadcasted TV' as well, out there.
Of course they will, soon enough, watch TV-channels like their friends do, yet I hope that the long time spent with films of accettable quality will give them some advantage in judging and choosing what they intend to see. Time will tell... maybe our approach is completely wrong: centuries ago the Mongols set their kid on a horse and then prodded this until the kid learned to ride (or knocked his head on the ground :-)
Maybe to-day parents SHOULD put their kids early in the morning in front of the awful crap (and kid-targeted advertisement) that all TV channels spit out without interruptions. And then leave them there, the longest the better. Maybe thattaway they will survive perfectly in the zombies' society we live in. But I doubt it and I simply cannot perform such a crime.

So it will not be difficult for me to join the no-TV week promoted by [adbuster] and [antipub.net], but at times I wonder if reversers should not rather do the contrary and WATCH some tv for a whole week: it would be instructive to say the least.
I am really convinced that Goebbels would be proud of the techniques used nowadays to present what they ironically call 'information' on TV. Maybe we should watch all kind of TV's 'offerings' more often for our social reversing purposes.

For a reverser there is much to learn -for instance- from these incredible 'afternoon sitcoms' with paid laughers that 'underline' the 'puns' from 'outside the camera' (a pavlovian technique if I ever saw one). 'Prime rate' emissions are also great fun, with their fantastically petty philosophies: most sitcoms struggle hard to reach the cultural level of a meeting of Barbie dolls. Finally, if you want a quick glimpse of the ultrasqualor, you should take the time to watch TV in the morning, say around 11.00 ~ 11.30. Be warned! That will leave you with some brain-scars but will deliver mighty reversing knowledge...

But this we should not do during the turn-off week, eh! From 22 to 28 April we are not going to watch any TV at all :-P

~S~ fravia+, 22 march 2000, updated 13 March 2001

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