...TV is doing an irraparable harm...

“Behind Winston's back the voice from the telescreen was still babbling away about pig-iron and the overfulfilment of the Ninth Three-Year Plan. The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it, moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live -- did live, from habit that became instinct -- in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.”

This paragraph was written by George Orwell in his antiutopistic novel “1984.” which gives us his vision of not so distant future where totalitary rezim and police repression lead to a complete humiliation and degradation of people of Oceania.Of course, the whole point of the paragraph is telescreen (a.k.a. TV) which is used for observing and controlling every human being.

Although today, almost every household has at least one TV , it’s consumers don’t even think about the consequences that may be caused by this device. Now I’ll allow myself to make a comparison: the purpose of the Nobel’s dynamite was to help people solve some major problems in constructing like making the Suec canal, faster mine exploitation etc. but instead it is used mainly in arm industry, and it’s use is everything but human. It may be the case that TV was created for similar purposes, for eg. education, entertainment…but nowadays it seems that the original idea of it’s existence is rapidly fading.

That leaves us with a question, what happened to a Nobel cause??? Well, somehow over the decades it twisted into something as deadly as a gun, into the mass media. Its main goal is political dominance and cultural dependence. Now we won’t talk about political issues because we know what it feels like to be a victim of a “mass medical” propaganda, but I would like to point at some cultural anomalies that are happening in our society. The first thing that pops in my mind is so called “pink culture”. It is produced in several TV stations over the country and it contains highly provocative material in terms of its cultural values. Its talk shows, soap operas, in one word its whole programme is made for one purpose only and that is getting more and more TV viewers at any cost, even when that cost is a “cultural crime”, the ultimate kitsch, and the unbeatably cheap way of having fun. Since this is a free country, as the Americans say, there is no law that prohibits such a “sacrilege” and as the result of that we get a free ether fulfilled with wide range of subculture. Well, all of that wouldn’t be so bad if everybody knew how to judge these matters. Unfortunately, the ones nearest to a scene of impact are children, who do not have the ability to see all the bad things that TV provides. Nowadays, very large part of their education is in hands of television which doesn’t even care any more since kinder auditorium is so small and does not contribute to “money industry” created by big TV corporations.

So, where is this world going??? Is it to its own destruction, or its salvation? Maybe we are so close to Orwell’s predictions and we don’t even see it. And maybe the right thing to do is to make an antipode of George’s “Thought police”, the “Culture police” that would solve problems like “cultural violence” and educational fertility and remove the cancer of this society in years to come!

written by Doriana Gray