TV: The Timid (or not-so timid) Giant

Reading Response for Tuesday, 9/3

McLuhan, Understanding Media (Chapter 31 – Television: The Timid Giant)

In the longest chapter of his book, McLuhan addresses the presence of TV. He compares the medium to others, including print and film, as well as to other institutions such as sports—with specific attention paid to baseball—the automobile, and the medical industry. McLuhan also questions the effect of TV on adolescents, dress/presentation, political life, and education.

McLuhan categories TV as a cool medium, and he writes that “it is the extraordinary degree of audience participation in the TV medium that explains its failure to tackle hot issues” (309). In reflecting on my experience with contemporary, modern television, I’m not sure if McLuhan’s words stand true today. I wonder: How much active participation do we, as viewers, lend TV today? While 99% of those living in the US have at least one TV, and the average time spent watching television/week is 5:11 hours, how much of that receives our full, undivided attention? Yes, my TV might be powered on but I’m hardly engaged (especially when reruns are aired). According to McLuhan, “TV will not work as a background. It engages you” (312). I think this is a bit flawed, and I’d have to disagree.

McLuhan spends a few pages discussing the “low-pressure style” of TV presenters. He uses the familiar tale of the 1960 Kennedy vs. Nixon presidential debate as an extended example throughout the chapter. TV viewers thought Kennedy, the “handsome” senator, had the debate in the bag, while those who listened to the debate on the radio, however, thought Nixon had won.

In contrasting TV from film, McLuhan refers to the TV image “as one of ‘low definition,’ in the sense that it offers little detail and a low degree of information, much like the cartoon” (314). While today’s TV might offer less information than (and in not nearly as timely a way as) the Internet, I’d argue that it’s entirely more detailed-oriented than the cartoon. Today’s TV is technologically regarded and praised for its “high-definition” quality as well as its ability to provide viewers with hot, dramatized information. The TV image is no longer cited for “low intensity or definition” as McLuhan writes of it on page 317.

McLuhan categories print and movies as hot mediums. He believes that TV, as a cool medium, “leaves much more for the listener or user to do than a hot medium,” and “insures a high degree of audience involvement” (319). What I don’t understand is how a medium that is “visually low in data” leaves this room for viewer involvement. I might argue that today’s movie/film industry solicits more involvement from the audience than TV; movies take us to other worlds and relieve us (for approximately 1.5 hours) from our daily lives. Perhaps McLuhan categorization and my recounts are illustrative of TV then and TV now.

An “extension of the sense of touch,” (333) the TV medium is related to the medical experience in the following lines: “One of the most vivid examples of the tactile quality of the TV image occurs in medical experience. In closed-circuit instruction in surgery, medical students from the first reported a strange effect—that they seemed not to be watching an operation, but performing it. They felt that they were holding the scalpel” (328). While I agree that those in the medical field must put to use “maximal interplay of all the senses, (333)” I don’t think this is anymore the case for TV, or of any of our current media or that matter. And that’s a whole other can of worms.  

Sources:

BLS American Time Use Survey, A.C. Nielsen Co. (2012). Television Watching Statistics. Retrieved from http://www.statisticbrain.com/television-watching-statistics/ 

McLuhan, Marshall. (1964). Television: The Timid Giant. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (308-328). London: The MIT Press.