What's this fuss over TV all about anyways? PT. 2

Here is some highlights of Groothuis's second point concerning how TV contributes to truth decay. I would strongly recommend you read this entire article yourself by purchasing his book, Truth Decay. It is well worth the read.

The Loss of Self: Truth Removed

Second, along with the displacing of the word by the flickering television image comes a loss of authentic selfhood, whereby the self is deemed as a moral agent inexorably enmeshed in a moral and spiritual universe. Instead the self is filled with a welter of images and factoids and sound bites lacking moral and intellectual adhesion. The self becomes ungrounded and fragmented by its experiences of television...

Post modern illiterates live their lives through a series of television characters (better: shadows of characters), and changing channels becomes a model for the self's manner of experience and its mode of being. Moral and spiritual anchorage is lost. The self is left to try on a pastiche of designer personae in no particular order and for no particular reason.

The reading of great literature immerses us in realities beyond ourselves, although not unrelated to our selves. But this life of reading requires existential participation not permitted by television, which simply sweeps us along at its own pace. One cannot muse over a television program the way one ponders a character in Shakespeare or in C.S. Lewis, or a Pascal parable, or a line from T.S. Eliot.

Through television, oblivion to self is amplified and broadcast globally and ceaselessly. As a consequence, the self is destabilized, uprooted and hollowed out; it becomes ungrounded, weightless, truthless, opaque to itself - and it likes it that way, because no alternative is available (on television).

What's this fuss over TV all about anyways? PT 1

Starting today and continuing for the next few days I will be posting some excerpts from an appendix in Douglas Groothuis's book, Truth Decay. This appendix is entitled "Television: Agent of Truth Decay." In this appendix he highlights five ways in which television contributes to the loss of truth, and then gives three practical suggestions for overcoming these effects.

All that follows is taken from the appendix in Truth Decay. This is his first point how television contributes to truth decay.

The image over the Word: Discourse in Distress

First, television emphasizes the moving image over written and spoken language. It is image-driven, image-saturated and image-controlled. This is precisely what television does that books, recordings and pictures cannot do; it brings us visual action. However, when the image dominates the word, rational discourse ebbs...

When the image overwhelms and subjugates the word, the ability to think, write, and communicate in a linear and logical fashion is undermined. Television's images have their immediate effect on us, but that effect is seldom to cause us to pursue their truth or falsity...

The triumph of the televised image over the word contributes to the depthlessness of postmodern sensibilities. Reality becomes the image, whether or not that image corresponds to any objective state of affairs - and we are not challenged to engage in this analysis...

Joshua Meyrowitch, a professor of communication, complains that his students "tend to have an image-based standard of truth. If I ask, 'what evidence supports your view or contradicts it?' they look at me as if I came from another planet." This is because "It's very foreign to them to think in terms of truth, logic, consistency and evidence."

Kenneth Myers stresses: "A culture that is rooted more in images than in words will find it increasingly difficult to sustain any broad commitment to any truth, since truth is an abstraction requiring language."

In postmodernism, truth and logic are mere social constructions, which can be deconstructed and reconstructed at whim...

God gave us a book, not a video. When, in any culture, written language is marginalized by television, biblical truth begins to lose its vibrancy. Christians must restore the primacy and power of the Word as an antidote to truth decay by television.