<doc.id=5031.a3>
<title> Seeing is not believing. </title>
"Television, as I have implied earlier," writes Neil Postman in Amusing Ourselves to Death, " serves us most usefully when presenting junk-entertainment; it serves us most ill when it co-opts serious modes of discourse -news, politics, science, education, commerce, religion- and turn them into entertainment packages. We would all be better off if television got worse, not better.". Strange as it sounds, Postman has a point, and it is my intention to direct attention to but one of the reasons why: the power of images. Television is a medium of pictures and the picture is a double-edged tool for conveying information. 

Pictures, in a quite frank way, address human emotion and not the intellect. Because of this, images and pictures appeal to a viewer in different ways and have a greater (subconscious) impact on the brain than a printed argument. A printed argument requires contemplation and processing before receiving (it needs to be translated from letters into words and from words into thoughts) meanwhile a picture hits us with a direct impression and impressions are easily mistaken for knowledge. Simple things like colours, style, and movement affect a viewer more than one might be aware of. For an example of this I come to think of a political debate that I watched some years ago, involving Sweden's current Prime Minister, Göran Person. I have never been an especially big fan of politics, yet I had decided to try to follow one of the popular debates on TV. It took me an hour or so to realise that my dislike of Göran Person's performance in the debate had nothing to do with what he was saying (which I had lost track of by then), but was instead because I truly disliked something as trivial as his glasses. My impression of Göran Persson (based on his choice of eyewear) easily overruled any intellectual information he delivered. So, the information I gathered from the debate can be summed up as follows: I do not trust Göran Persson because he obviously has bad taste (and it took me roughly over six months to shake off this belief). 

By understanding that immediate power of an impression, television today has begun to refine the art of using (or perhaps abusing) images to convey a message to a viewer. Television is more than entertainment; it is in itself a science -the science of how fleeting images on a screen fools a viewer into believing he or she is taking part of important information when the information is always secondary to the impression given by the image that delivers it. (It is of course also the science of how to sell a product and make money out of it by the means of using the appeal of fleeting images on a screen). Moreover, television today is such an obvious part of society that one forgets to question that. The content is frequently questioned of course, even though it in reality is the medium itself perhaps we ought to question. Just as it is important to be critical and watch out for creditability and quality in things read it is needed to be even more alert on what is witnessed on a screen. 

To sum up, let's come back to that quote from Neil Postman's book. Television, with its images and impressions, is a medium clearly fit to deliver entertainment. What television is not, however, is especially fit to deliver serious discourse due to the deviousness of the image. It takes a lot out of a human mind to sort out impressions from facts and information which brings me to say that, yes, we would all be better off if television got worse and not better. If nothing else, it would certainly make it a lot easier to determine what is important information and what is not. Seeing is, alone, after all is said and done, not the same as believing. Or, rather, it should not be.
</doc>