Can Your Students Read TV?

Of course, students already know how to read the highly emotional and symbolic language of television. They learned it informally by clocking in an average of 5000 hours in front of the set before they reach school age — the same amount of time it takes to jet around the world 148 times, or orbit the moon 30 times. But just because students are sitting slack-jawed and motionless in front of the set, it doesn’t mean their minds aren’t hard at work. Contrary to popular wisdom, television watching is not a passive activity.

It takes concentration to make sense of contemporary television. Narratives are broken by commercials, flying graphics, rolls and crawls, fast cuts and fades to black. Students may not have the vocabulary to articulate to adults how they make a story out of this hodge-podge of images, but on a rudimentary level, they already have a firm grasp on the grammar of television. In order for them to be fully aware that television is carefully constructed with specific codes and conventions, someone has to talk to them about the way tv works. —Kathleen TynerCan Your Students Read TV? (Media Literacy Review)

While I agree with Tyner’s main point, that students should be trained to think critically about TV, I don’t agree with the phrasing “television watching is not a passive activity.” Yes, a viewer’s brain is active, but there’s no way for the viewer to change the experience based on reactions.

You can shout questions or challenges to a live speaker, you can applaud or boo, or sit in stony silence, or whisper a comment to your neighbor. Good speakers can pick up on such cues, and if they don’t the audience will.

You can write back to a weblog.

All you can do to a TV is turn it off. It’s binary. Or, in the case of those call-in contests, at best it’s multiple choice. It is of course possible for live TV to respond more subtly to audience input, but didn’t Ray Bradbury cover that pretty thoroughly in Fahrenheit 451?

Perhaps Tyner could have said “TV need not be a passive experience, if you are a critical viewer.” I’d agree with that — but it’s probably fair to say that most of the slack-jawed teens aren’t tuning in because they want to exercise their minds.

11 thoughts on “Can Your Students Read TV?

  1. Oh, for those who don’t get this, The Medium is the Massage is a book published in 1967 by Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore. It is often confused for the Medium is the Message (that is, with an “e”). That is not a book, but a phrase from on of McLuhan’s other books, Understanding the Media.

  2. haha, Maybe the message will follow the soundtrack, message your more as the music gets more tense, and stopping when there’s silence? :-)

  3. I will also be technical. The “medium is the massage” in the mind of Marshall McLuhan ;) Perhaps they’ll come out with a TV-chair that massages you as you watch the screen?

  4. Evan, a respectful intellectual challenge in an academic setting is hardly subversive, unless the environment is so bad that it takes subversion for conversations to happen. I think we’re in pretty good shape at SHU.

    Will, I noticed that TV quote as well, and I had a similar reaction. At the bottom of the page, it says “This article first appeared in the January 1991 issue of Cable in the Classroom.” And that’s right aroudn the time when I was an MA student watching Star Trek: The Next Generation with 20 or 30 friends each week.

  5. hehe, I’m being all technical, but I’d sure like to see where “The medium is the massage.”! I’ve heard of chairs that massage you, but a tv? ;-)

  6. “I’d agree with that — but it’s probably fair to say that most of the slack-jawed teens aren’t tuning in because they want to exercise their minds.”

    Hey, I read this and just thought – I think watching tv is for the mind as walking is for the body. It’s not strenous exercise, but if it were no exercise at all we’d just stare at a blank wall and wouldn’t bother buying a tv. I suppose that on a technical level you can call it “passive” because you don’t interact with it, but that forces me to point out that reading shakespeare or is also always a passive activity, as you can’t interact with a book any more than you can interact with a tv show you recorded on your DVR! :-)

    P.S. The article quoted some source as saying 80% of people get their news from tv…I wonder how out of date that is? I would bet a *lot* of people nowadays get their news from the internet…

  7. We all can learn from each other. I learned today without any instruction that I can challenge my professor without worrying about sounding subversive. You learned something about yourself.

    I am starting to see the frames of reference we are all coming from… Humans are, essentially, a medium, right? We are all unique and hold different faculties and shortcomings. We’re not built better or worse, just different. Our body stands inbetween a thought and an action. So, I think it’s important to remember this when discussing media issues.

    I can see and appreciate your value of interaction and change. But, with my studies in psychology, I find that introspection is just as important.

    My favorite art medium is actually music. I feel that, as humans we need to be, to some degree, challenged with unalterable environments (such as observing a painting in a High School field trip). Our lives are full of strife and most things in life we can’t change readily (our boss, coworkers, students, teachers). But, we also need to learn how to make choices about changing aspects of life that are alterable (government, our interactions and relationships with others).

    Music (particularly folk music in the purest sense) is one of the few media arts I can think of that allow for collaborative change of the environment. Things have historically gotten done this way. The experience of making music is incomparable. Whereas gaming is centered on the ego, folk music is a task centered outside of the ego.

    Rather than a Randian me vs. everyone else around me, I like the feeling of being outside looking inward.

    I am amazed at the power of communication. How a discussion can teach us just as many important things as a class. I wasn’t meaning to nitpick for my sick enjoyment (from my understanding, you are busy with other things, too). New media are good. Even age-old media are good. Music and visual arts and text have been around because they are good at what they do. Film has lasted a pretty long time, too.

    The medium is the massage. The media that resonate with us reflect and affect our personality (and frame of reference).

    See you in EL405 tomorrow…

  8. Evan, while it’s true you can choose to comment or not, once you’ve made the choice to comment, then you have a much wider range of choices about what to say. It’s for that reason that I’d say a blog is potentially far more interactive.

    Of course, if this blog had hundreds of comments per day, and there was little or no chance that I would take the time to respond individually or generally to the comments posted here, then this blog would not be very interactive.

    Much can be gained from asking students to think critically about TV, or just about anything else that takes up a big chunk of their consciousness. No argument there… but being members of a scholarly community naturally we’re drawn to defining our terms.

    My background in new media obviously colors my definition of “the opposite of passive,” so perhaps what I really demand is not “active” participation but “interactive” participation, in which case TV is doomed from the outset — and that’s not fair, since I can’t pretend that I’ve never watched TV. When Star Trek the Next Generation was on, sometimes there would be 20 or 30 people in my duplex, watching the show when it aired at midnight on Sunday. That was a social phenomenon, and although Captain Picard coudln’t hear us when we cheered the Enterprise or booed the Borg, we heard ourselves, and that was reason enough to keep doing it. (At the time I also closely followed a Star Trek newsgroup, where people would pick apart each new episode whenever it aired in their region, so I guess even then I was demanding some sort of interactive experience.)

    But I think we’re all in agreement — a critical audience can be actively engaged in a critical analysis of a message delivered in any medium. Obviously it’s not necessary to be “interactive” in order to count as “not passive,” and this online discussion has helped me to see that bias. I’m not sure that anyone out there would think it was worth the trouble to make a whole TV show just to help Dennis Jerz see his new media bias, and it’s that kind of immediate, focused intellectual exchange that I miss when I find myself spending time with mass-media that is produced with mass audiences in mind.

  9. Okay, I’ll bite.

    When I shout answers out at a game show, sort out my responses to a political debate, try to figure out how the weather is changing, take notes while watching a plumber explain how to fix a sink, and watch just about anything on the Discovery channel, PBS, or Animal Planet, am I being a passive thinker? I’m not sure the ability to vocally respond and/or change the message is what defines “active” participation with a text. I can understand why you’d poo-poo the consumerist vacuity of commercial television, but I think Tyner’s argument for raising media literacy is still pretty darned persuasive!

  10. “All you can do to a TV is turn it off. It’s binary.”

    True enough. Although I must interject, a weblog is also binary. You can comment or not. You can read or ignore… There are just more dichotomies in a weblog, and thus, more options.

    Video games are also binary in nature. You can shoot the alien or not. You can walk forward or backward. Television came years and years before the weblog, so naturally, the system will be less complex.

    In our visual/consumerist culture, we like to intake a lot. I think the aspect of the medium of the weblog that is the most fascinating is the fact that it allows for more than intaking.

    While I see your logic, it still a jump to imply a weblog is not binary in nature. Perhaps you weren’t implying that. In any case, the author asserted a negation of passive. Is “not passive” always “active?” I don’t want to put words in the authors mouth, but perhaps she meant that TV can be engaging.

    I don’t particularly watch TV, but I have friends who do. And the time they spend watching TV as opposed to talking and gasping and saying “I bet {insert possible plot twist} is going to happen!” is incomparable.

    But again, the basis of the article boils down to the mystery of what she means by “not passive.” I think that lack of clarity or assertiveness is the most confusing part of the article.

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