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Letters - February 11, 1998
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TV and the Academy Regarding your December 3 cover story, we agree with Elaine Showalter's conclusion that academia needs to pay more attention to television and vice versa, but for very different reasons. Showalter's wide-eyed yet paradoxically myopic look at television's ambivalent relationship with academia misses several important points. Educators and citizens need to be aware of television's fundamental cultural power for reasons that go beyond simply appreciating "brilliantly written" shows such as NYPD Blue, the "promotional savvy" and "production values" of MTV, or the "self-reflectiveness" and "ironic allusion" of ER. The medium of television may be good at capturing the immediacy of an event or the emotion of a moment, as Showalter suggests, but it has inherent limitations as well, including a tendency toward simplifying complexity and a penchant for flattening, distorting, or limiting experience. Even engaging, quality programs, such as filmmaker Ken Burns's documentaries, must work within the boundaries the medium imposes. Moreover, Showalter and other critics often conveniently overlook TV's troubling socioeconomic, historical, and political contexts and cultural consequences. Over the past several decades, television has transformed our learning environment and cultural space in often unintended ways. Consider television's neurophysiological effects on young people. In 1995, after examining decades of scientific research over a nine-year period, the Carnegie Council on Adolescent Development published an influential study concluding that "passive consumption [of television] leads to attention deficits, nonreflective thinking, irrational decision-making, and confusion between external reality and packaged representation." Other scientific studies have demonstrated that the brain's "plasticity"--its neurophysiological growth and development--is actually retarded over time when young children passively consume television without engaging in more active kinds of learning such as socialization, reading, and creative and imaginative play. In adopting a fairly simplistic and dualistic argument (disdainful professors versus progressive prime-time), Showalter also ignores the economic and political forces that drive commercial TV. American television may not be a "shameful, disgusting, trashy wasteland," to invoke Showalter's hyperbolic argument, but in its current incarnation it is a ratings-driven medium whose primary purpose is to sell advertisers access to viewers' eyeballs and wallets. Moreover, the industry is becoming more centralized; even as channels proliferate, control of broadcasting is being concentrated in the hands of fewer people. As many critics have pointed out, commercially driven television is an aggressive international business. MTV and prime-time narratives scripted by corporately funded writers compete for control of our cultural space with older forms of storytelling from families, schools, and churches. Bob Pittman, MTVs founder, has stated that his popular rock-music cable channel "has liberated television from the meaning of time, narrative or cause and effect ... eliminated the sacred and the profane ... and authority as represented by school teachers, policemen, clergy, or parents." Is this cause for rejoicing? Showalter's technologically deterministic conclusions are perhaps most disturbing. She paints a rosy picture of our "global village," and turns for support to MIT professor and "media expert" Nicholas Negroponte, an unabashed technological apologist with a vested personal, professional, and economic interest in our culture's unquestioning embrace of new media. We aren't arguing for censorship of the media (although it may be already in place in the form of corporate control), nor do we advocate a Luddite position or a return to some utopian past. Rather, we urge all educators to consider the implications of adopting, consuming, or promoting television and other new media. Television is far more complicated--and worthy of far more real respect--than Showalter's hurried embrace. To paraphrase Book Seven of Plato's Republic, our task as educators is to lead children away from images which lead to ignorance and toward that which leads to knowledge. Teaching and learning in this way would allow us to make more sense of our mediated world and would do both ourselves and our students a great service. Kate Gunness Williams '89 Rob Williams, Jr. '89 Albuquerque, N.M. Editor's note: The writers are affiliated with the New Mexico Media Literacy Project and can reached via e-mail at, respectively, williamsk@aa.edu and williamsr@aa.edu. I was disappointed with Elaine Showalter's spin on the merits of
American television. I approached the article
with an open mind, eager to be persuaded that the prime-time quagmire has
some redeeming qualities. But there she was citing programs such as
NYPD Blue, EZ Streets, and China
Beach as examples of, of all things, American realism.
Perhaps she watched so much TV as a reviewer for
People magazine that it permanently altered her notion of reality.
"Princeton on the Tube," the sidebar
to Elaine Showalter's article, neglected to mention a scene on a recent episode
of South Park, the new hit cartoon on Comedy Central. When the mayor
of South Park, a less than brilliant politician, is told she is stupid, she
replies, "I can't be stupid--I went to Princeton."
You missed a major Princeton TV moment when Brooke Shields '87
appeared on her now-defunct show wearing a Tiger Inn T-shirt.
How many Princetonians took umbrage when Alistair Cooke, as the host
of Masterpiece Theater, introduced an adaptation of
Anna Karenina by remarking, "Tolstoy didn't go
to the best university in Russia--nothing like Harvard
or Yale, but something like Princeton."
You state that Stephen Carrington, a character on Dynasty, "was a closeted gay." Like the terms Japanese and Chinese, gay is only used as a noun in plural contexts. One may say that "gays at Princeton were happy with the decision," but referring to a particular individual, one says, "a gay student" or "a gay man." Stylistically, the use of gay as a singular noun hurts the ear. To write "a gay walked down the street" is incorrect, and sounds as awkward as "a Japanese walked the other way."
PAW's redesign The Princeton Alumni Weekly has become a typographical monstrosity.
The excessive number of fonts and type sizes, irregular spacing, and
mindless screening and photo placement produce a chaotic effect. The magazine is
unpleasant to look at, disconcerting to read, and an embarrassment to all
but the most gung-ho alumni. The content is usually trivial.
Now that we have entered 1998 it is time to exorcise, obliterate, remove,
and commit to the ashcan the experimental, postmodern graphics slapped on
our Alumni Weekly. The colors of the Tiger are orange and black. They are not
blue, red, or whatever other color of the week is in vogue. Let me remind you that
blue, especially blue, is totally out of character and unfitting for our university.
That belongs to another school, which cannot hold a candle to Princeton. No
more blue borders on the cover or anywhere else. The cover logo should be
forever orange, real orange, and the full name
is the Princeton Alumni Weekly--the last two words in the current logo are
hardly visible. And please eliminate the blocks around the Class Notes numerals.
Editor's note: Okay, we can't please everybody. We hope some readers noticed that, starting with the January 28 issue, we increased the type size for Class Notes and Memorials, and are once again capitalizing the month in the issue date at the bottom of each page.
Leo the Lip and JFK Regarding Wes Tooke's October 22 On the Campus, I would like to correct
his remark that President Kennedy's prose might have benefited from a
Princeton education. JFK started his college career as a member of the Class of
1939. He matriculated with us in the fall of 1934 and left at Christmas due
to illness. The following fall he enrolled at Harvard with the Class of 1940.
Editor's note: In his application for admission, Kennedy wrote, "To be a Princeton man is indeed an enviable distinction." We're sure he meant it, but understandably his allegiance changed. Several years after he graduated from Harvard, Princeton granted his request to be removed from its alumni rolls. |
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