Television as an American Artifact

            The flat box casts an eerie glow across the room, mesmerizing the gaze of a single individual. His limbs are sore from a hard day's work, his mind exhausted from the stress in life. And so he sits, entranced and drawn into the vivid fantasy world of brightly lit pixels. Without a doubt, the television captures the very essence of modern day American culture and lifestyle, by playing off own perception of the American Dream and the ideal life, rampant consumerism, and our unhealthy and desensitized lives.

            The American Dream, the lavish and high life with endless opportunities, is what has been packaged and shipped off to foreign nations about the core of America's ideals. Swathes of immigrants have come to America to pursue this dream, but as we have seen in history time and time again, such dreams remain dreams for many Americans. We eventually see the disparity between what we are able to attain and the ideal life that we want in America. This is exactly what modern day television plays off of. Television series paint the fantasies that we were "meant" to live, and for simply that reason, many Americans choose to indulge themselves excessively with it. We live hours upon hours of our lives in this fictional world, and as a result the modern media continues to try to render grander lives on the screen. As Kalle Lasn mentions in Culture Jam, her friends in foreign countries had a grand and exaggerated view of common American life, but when they came to visit, they were shocked at how disjointed and unattached from reality our day-to-day lives were. I certainly have a similar experience when I participated in a school exchange student delegation to Iwata, Japan. My host sister watched American television series from time to time, mainly titles on the Disney Channel such asDrake and Josh, iCarly, and The Suite Life of Zach and Cody. As we were discussing life in America, I quickly came to realize that she was drawing assumptions from these fictional shows that were completely incorrect. Not every American lived in a great big two-story house with a nice green lawn, goes out to parties all the time, and school isn't nearly as interesting. The American Dream is at the heart of our culture, and this vision still lives on today. However, for most Americans there is a sick twist: the dream is fed to them through the television.

            Television also captures another mainstay of American culture: our ridiculous appetite for consumerism. If fantasy television programming wasn't already bad enough, every half hour we have to sit through about five to ten minutes of commercials. This begins to seem more ridiculous the more you think about it. For the amount of actual television programming we watch, we spend an additional half of that time watching commercials. There isn't anything fantasy-like or engaging about commercials. No, the reason commercials are on the TV is to feed our culture-drilled urge to go out and indulge in material goods, whether they are necessary or not. As Kalle Lasn says, the mass media is playing off our perception of "cool", the "soma" of the modern world. We are being brainwashed by the "constant barrage" of the media to go out and buy, buy, and buy. Consumerism is fueled by the endless innate competitive drive of Americans, but twisted into the respect that we have the urge to always appear better than our peers. So we go out and we buy the newest iPhone. Apple knows what they're doing. They release a new one, without many technical improvements, but still slapping on the label of "the newest, revolutionary technology!" Culture is defined as a set of unspoken values and agreements shared by the general public. There is an unspoken agreement between peers when they see someone has the newest phone, the best clothes, or even the newest model of cars. Even at our school, we see the one kid with the Audi roar out of the parking lot and we shake our heads in disdain. But how much of our disdain is disapproval of his lavish spending, and how much is our own jealousy that we couldn't afford the same? Day in and day out, we hear the commercials on TV pushing us on to buy the newest products. We come to our schools and workplaces and we hear the chatter, we see the people pushing up their Prada glasses and checking their G-Shock watches, and somewhere in the back of our minds the idea that that was "cool" is instilled within all of us. Televised commercials, mass media, and America's ludicrous consumerism, without a doubt, go hand in hand.

            Obesity isn't a part of our culture. However, our unhealthy lifestyle is definitely a part of American culture. One of the biggest culprits of America's general reckless abandon attitude toward health, along with fast food and food processing, is most likely the TV, being something that can keep a viewer still and prevent them from exercising on their spare time. Although recently we've taken a step back from excessive indulgence in food, the general atmosphere of the media toward advertising food still remains the same. Commercials about Coke, Doritos, and Fruity Loops are everywhere, but can you even remember the last time you saw a commercial on TV about fresh produce or free-range cattle? It's an endless siege by the media, pushing us to ignore our health. But it doesn't just stop at physical health. Our very own mental health is affected by television, primarily through what Kalle Lasn calls "jolts". These jolts are delivered through fast changing camera angles or other methods to evoke our base instinct of "fight or flight". However, we've become conditioned to it as time went on, to the point where our children are developing higher rates of ADHD than ever before. Television has also desensitized us to shock, which Lasn defines as images of "killings, gunshots, assaults, car chases, and rapes", so on and so forth. Our emotional health is also being affected by fantasized love scenes, and heart-wrenching images of unfortunate children in third world countries. However, just like with jolts and shock, we've become desensitized as a whole to these emotions after seeing the soppy romance for the hundredth time, the commercial about donating money the thousandth time. Everything about us is being desensitized through television. We are even being desensitized to reality itself. In one of the most thought provoking lines that I've ever read in a book, Lasn prompts us to "jot down in a notebook the number of times a day you laugh at real joked with real people in real situation against the number of times you laugh at media-generated jokes, the amount of sex you have against the amount of sex you watch, and so on." With this, I quickly realized how the television was numbing our grasp on reality itself.

            A culture built on mass media delivered through the television, a culture that wiles its hours away in the fantasy world inside the borders of the screen, a culture addicted to the "soma" of "cool" and "consumerism", a culture losing its grip on reality through the TV screen: that's American culture in the modern day world. Perhaps one of the greatest and most harmful inventions in the last few centuries, there is no greater "American Artifact" than the television.