the television is watching you

[ the fear of no television ]

Television is the dominant medium of the present time. In daily use, global distribution and cultural impact it dominates all other media, and, more literal, it constitutes the foremost medium of 'moment'. As a medium of momentum, television ties us, viewers, inextricably in the present moment.

This present tense of television presents itself as an unlimited and continuous flow without a beginning or an end: it looks like an enclosed space without an origin or a centre, which finds its only existence in its governing principle of continuity. Television never starts: switch on your TV and you'll always already be in the middle of something. Television doesn't end either: programmes smoothly move and morph over into each other or into other media. For instance, almost every television program nowadays refers to a program related website, to a follow-up or rerun, to the next program on the same channel (after the break.../ coming up...), or to other media outside television like magazines (e.g. Oprah Winfrey's O Magazine), newspapers (in news programmes) and mobile telephones (SMS voting and prize contests in game shows).

As such, television never stops: if we switch off our TV set, television itself continues - but without us: the television is still on; we are being switched off. Just like mass media continuously lock us in our position as media consumers, in which we are, always and everywhere, attached to media.

Since the 1980s the mass media in general and television in particular have become inextricably entangled with all other human and cultural domains. No longer can a clear distinction be made between the press, entertainment and information - they are all collapsed onto and into each other. The news covers celebrity gossip and other infotainment, soap series reflect political trends, journalism creates public opinion and public opinion is more and more being invested with entertainment.

This complete entanglement delivers television visible and sensible throughout society and renders it inextricable from our perception of and discourse on social issues. All our references to important occasions and events are media or televisual references. Without television, and to a lesser extent newspapers and to a greater extent the internet, we cannot speak of the world anymore. This world is completely mediated, or: encapsulated within media, within the television screen. Television creates reality insofar as reality has become fully dependent on television (and other mass media) to be known.

Once the question "if nobody sees the tree falling, did the tree fall at all?" was mere philosophical spielerei; today the question if something unrepresented does exist, has become socially and culturally urgent - not because a television society of spectacles creates cynicism, but precisely on behalf of that intimate and inextricable embrace of mass media and political, social and cultural dynamics. If television doesn't show the regional conflict in Chad, that conflict doesn't 'exist' because it cannot play any part in our public and political processes of opinion and decision making, which in turn are being affected and largely defined by television. Of course, the violence in Chad is all too real (although that statement can only be made by virtue of the media; by its appearance, be it not on television, then at least somewhere else in the media) - the issue at stake is not that events that are not being shown on television don't exist physically, but that they don't exist socially and culturally (or: in social and cultural discourse).

So, the question arises, who is watching who? Are we watching the television, or is television watching us? Though we are looking at the television image, the image defines its own mode of spectatorship and the televisual image forces us to watch it in a particular way.

In March 2003, a few days into the invasion of Iraq by the allied forces, the Arabic news channel Al Jazeera aired, uncut and several minutes in duration, a video recording of a pile of bodies of US soldiers. CNN showed a few short fragments of the same recording, the Dutch NOS Journaal aired a slightly longer version, but without the bloody parts. The obvious and therefore rather harmless ideological and cultural bias set aside, this was a clear example of the transgression of journalism into visual culture, and of news coverage into the politics of television. The images held no news value whatsoever: the fact of killed soldiers is as singular, cold and harsh a fact can be; the images became the spectacle around it, the illustration for the hard-of-hearing.

The images restored their content with the luminous glow of truth. We may still raise some question marks at the aphorism that defines the unrepresented as non-existent, its inversion - if you can see it, it must have occurred and must be real - seems to be fully accepted and completely normalised.

The transgression of reporting into imaging, of the informational into the televisual - the notion that images as such constitute 'the news' (which goes for entertainment as well as for news reporting), has settled conveniently in the minds of our televisual reality. The image of a giant tidal wave that throws a man on the shore off his feet and swallows him up, holds no news value. It could be featured on America's Funniest Homevideo's as easily as during the coverage of the tsunami in South Asia (and as irony demands, the image actually was featured in both occasions, in two versions that were very much alike). Soccer hooligans only 'make the news' if there are images of fighting supporters. Gruesome murders are, however cynical, business as usual, occurring on a daily basis - the bare fact that the murderers have videotaped the act of killing upgrades business as usual to the level of breaking news. All these images lack in perspective, context and broadness of scope. The images absorb the attention of the spectator and force us to value horror or beauty as such - as horrible or beautiful images. We are led to be impressed by the image itself, not by the acts and events the image represents. The image has become a moment, tied by its continuity to the endless flow of moments that chains and demands our gaze to be captivated and fascinated by imagery that renders reality as momentous, excessively visible and enclosed within its own frames.

Even during the entire night television pours out its unlimited flow of images, varying from reruns of news and current issues programmes to phone-in game shows and commercials for kitchen knives, social contacts and phone sex. Since the nights have been illuminated too, since television has no test pattern and colour bars at all anymore, it seems that our fear of the dark, of night and of the other side of things (all that is invisible) has been transformed into the fear of the absence of images as such. If the very notion of the dark and the other side of things has been dissolved in absolute and excessive visibility, all that remains is the certainty of visibility itself. Television embodies our fear of no television.