At the 76th annual convention of the American Psychological Association held in San Francisco in September 1968, noted semanticist S.I. Hayakawa contributed TV to the youth rebellion in the late 1960s, as well as drug taking, alienation and radical politics. An excerpt of the talk was published in the 'Fort Lauderdale News and Sun-Sentinel' in October 1968.
"For most of the history of the human race, the semantic environment of children has been created by their parents and close relatives, who pass on to the young their pictures of the world, their value systems, their standards of behavior. As children grow older, their semantic environment is expanded by other influences, friends, neighbors, movies, and the big experience of school.
"We take the process so much for granted that few of us have awakened to the fact that, for millions of families, especially in the United States, it just isn’t taking place any more. In order to describe what is going on today (in 1968), let me suggest an analogy. Suppose from the time that your children are old enough to set up and understand words and pictures, they are snatched away from you three or four or more hours a day by a powerful sorcerer.
"This sorcerer is a story-teller and a spinner of dreams. He plays enchanting music; he is an unfailingly entertaining companion. He makes the children laugh; he teaches them jingles to sing, he is constantly suggesting good things to eat and wonderful toys for their parents to buy them. Day after day, month after month, year after year, children for a few hours a day live in the wonderful world created by the sorcerer – a world of laughter and music and adventures and incredible goings-on, something frightening, often fun, and always entrancing.
"The children grow older, still under the daily speed of the sorcerer. Parents and relatives and teachers may talk to them, but the children find them sometimes censorious, often dull. But the sorcerer is always fascinating so that they sit there and sit there as if drugged, absorbing messages that parents did not originate and often do not even know about.
"For one-fourth or more of their waking hours from infancy onward, they live in a semantic environment their parents did not create and make no attempt to control. The present generation of young people is the first in history to have grown up in the television age. If you were born in 1938, you were ten years old in 1948 and had already lived through your most important formative years, so that in all likelihood you missed the experience of having a television set for a babysitter.
"But a significant proportion of children born after 1945, brought up in their parents’ homes, to be sure, had their imaginative lives, their daydreams, their expectations of the world created by television. Is it any wonder that these children, as they grew to adolescence, often turned out to be complete strangers to their dismayed parents? The impact of television is due in part to the nature of the medium, in part to the fact that American television is commercially sponsored.
"… An important fact about television – regardless of its sponsorship – is that you can have no interaction with it. A child sitting in front of a television set gets no experience in influencing behavior and being influenced in return … The child who watches television for four hours daily between the ages of three and eighteen spends something like 22,000 hours in passive contemplation of the screen – hours stolen from the time needed to learn to relate to siblings, playmates, parents, grandparents, and strangers.
"Is there any connection between this fact and the sudden appearance in the past few years of an enormous number of young people from educated and middle-class families who find it difficult or impossible to relate to anybody – and therefore drop out? I am sure you have met them, as I have – young people not necessarily of the underprivileged classes, who are frightened of the ordeal of having to make conversation with their friends’ parents or anyone else not of their immediate clique.
"The militancy of young people, both white and black, eager for social change is often accounted for by saying that they have lost faith in the slow processes of democratic discussion and decision-making. This argument seems to me highly questionable. It is my impression that militant young people, far from being 'disillusioned' with democratic processes, are totally unacquainted with them, since they are rarely shown on television.
"To be sure, national conventions are shown on television every four years, but the arduous, day-to-day debates, fact-finding, and arguments by which social decisions are arrived at by every democratic body from your councils to the Congress of the United States are never shown. If young people did not learn of the complexities of the democratic process from their years of viewing television, what did they learn.
"They learned that social problems are never complicated; they are simply the conflicts between good guys and bad guys. Bad guys can never be reasoned with – you can only shoot it out with them. If the bad guys confront you with superior force, you can lay your body on the line and go down fighting. Young people also learned from commercials that there is an instant, simple solution to all problems: acid indigestion can be relieved with Alka-Seltzer; unpopularity can be overcome by using Ban; feelings of sexual inadequacy can be banished by buying a new Mustang, which will transform you into an instant Casanova.
"Television documentaries about the problems of the world offer neat, half-hour wrap-ups of complex events. Highlights are selected, while boring, tedious details are left out. Time is compressed; cause and effect are simplified. In situation dramas, people are presented not in the full complexity of their humanity, like people in real life, but in stereotyped roles. They therefore arrive at their emotional responses quickly and easily, each Pyramus to his Thisbe, each Harlequin to his Columbine.
"In private as in public affairs, life is not too hard to understand. That’s what television says. But as the general semanticists are fond of saying, the map is not the territory. All too soon, young people learn that the maps of reality given them by television do not correspond to the actualities. Material possessions and the consumption of all approved national brands do not bring happiness or peace of mind.
"The world, they discover as they approach adulthood, is far more complicated than they ever suspected. Getting along with other people is not easy; you have to adjust to them as much as they have to adjust to you. The world makes all sorts of demands the television set never told you about, such as study, patience, hard work, and a long apprenticeship in a trade or profession, before you may enjoy what the world has to offer.
"Disillusioned young people may at this point reject or rebel against the culture and its 'materialism' - not realizing that what they are rejecting is not the culture as such, but merely the culture as depicted by Madison Avenue and the networks. Even as they reject the culture as they understood it through television, they miss the pleasant fantasies they enjoyed as children when they turned on the set. So they 'turn on' in other ways.
"Having scornfully rejected the notion that they can achieve instant beauty and radiance with Clairol, they espouse the alternative view that they can achieve instant spiritual insight and salvation with LSD. The kinship of the LSD and other drug experiences with television is glaringly obvious: both depend upon 'turning on' and passively waiting for something beautiful to happen.
"Because television was invented at a particular time, in a particular state of our economy, it was assigned almost entirely to utilization for commercial purposes. This decision was made in ignorance of what the consequences might be – an entirely pardonable ignorance, since no one knew at the time what the social impact of this new medium might be.
"Business and the advertising profession are not to be blamed for making use of this medium as energetically and ingeniously as possible. There are no villains in this story; we are all simply victims of the unforeseen consequences of a technological revolution – and a revolution in the technologies of communication always has more far-reaching consequences than anyone can predict.
"The problems raised here deeply involve students of child development. What kinds of programs are good for children – and at what ages? Does the excessive viewing of television result in fantasy-living, poor study habits, and alienation, as many of us suspect but few of us can prove. These are problems too for students of literature. 'Life,' said Oscar Wilde, 'is an imitation of art.' Delmore Schwartz said, 'In dreams begin responsibilities.'
"The imaginative representations of life, as depicted by commercial television, are a form of literature, shaping people's daydreams and lifestyles, just as surely as 'The Song of Roland' or 'Huckleberry Finn'. What models of conduct does present-day (the 1960s) television programming hold up for the young to emulate? What dreams of future achievement or success does it generate in boys and girls to direct their energies and aspiration?
"This paper is speculative, I don't imagine there is a shred of evidence, other than subjective and intuitive, for anything I have said here about television and the state of mind of disaffiliated youth today (in the 1960s). The trouble is that what research there is on the effects of television is almost entirely limited to research by advertising agencies on the effectiveness of their campaigns.
"Inquiries into the over-all effects of television – on politics, on public opinion and decision making, on the lifestyles of young people and the psychic lives of young children – are only beginning. This paper is therefore not a presentation of conclusions but a request that we begin making inquiries. What are the relations between mass media and family communications? How do we begin answering such questions?"
"We take the process so much for granted that few of us have awakened to the fact that, for millions of families, especially in the United States, it just isn’t taking place any more. In order to describe what is going on today (in 1968), let me suggest an analogy. Suppose from the time that your children are old enough to set up and understand words and pictures, they are snatched away from you three or four or more hours a day by a powerful sorcerer.
"This sorcerer is a story-teller and a spinner of dreams. He plays enchanting music; he is an unfailingly entertaining companion. He makes the children laugh; he teaches them jingles to sing, he is constantly suggesting good things to eat and wonderful toys for their parents to buy them. Day after day, month after month, year after year, children for a few hours a day live in the wonderful world created by the sorcerer – a world of laughter and music and adventures and incredible goings-on, something frightening, often fun, and always entrancing.
"The children grow older, still under the daily speed of the sorcerer. Parents and relatives and teachers may talk to them, but the children find them sometimes censorious, often dull. But the sorcerer is always fascinating so that they sit there and sit there as if drugged, absorbing messages that parents did not originate and often do not even know about.
"For one-fourth or more of their waking hours from infancy onward, they live in a semantic environment their parents did not create and make no attempt to control. The present generation of young people is the first in history to have grown up in the television age. If you were born in 1938, you were ten years old in 1948 and had already lived through your most important formative years, so that in all likelihood you missed the experience of having a television set for a babysitter.
"But a significant proportion of children born after 1945, brought up in their parents’ homes, to be sure, had their imaginative lives, their daydreams, their expectations of the world created by television. Is it any wonder that these children, as they grew to adolescence, often turned out to be complete strangers to their dismayed parents? The impact of television is due in part to the nature of the medium, in part to the fact that American television is commercially sponsored.
"… An important fact about television – regardless of its sponsorship – is that you can have no interaction with it. A child sitting in front of a television set gets no experience in influencing behavior and being influenced in return … The child who watches television for four hours daily between the ages of three and eighteen spends something like 22,000 hours in passive contemplation of the screen – hours stolen from the time needed to learn to relate to siblings, playmates, parents, grandparents, and strangers.
"Is there any connection between this fact and the sudden appearance in the past few years of an enormous number of young people from educated and middle-class families who find it difficult or impossible to relate to anybody – and therefore drop out? I am sure you have met them, as I have – young people not necessarily of the underprivileged classes, who are frightened of the ordeal of having to make conversation with their friends’ parents or anyone else not of their immediate clique.
"The militancy of young people, both white and black, eager for social change is often accounted for by saying that they have lost faith in the slow processes of democratic discussion and decision-making. This argument seems to me highly questionable. It is my impression that militant young people, far from being 'disillusioned' with democratic processes, are totally unacquainted with them, since they are rarely shown on television.
"To be sure, national conventions are shown on television every four years, but the arduous, day-to-day debates, fact-finding, and arguments by which social decisions are arrived at by every democratic body from your councils to the Congress of the United States are never shown. If young people did not learn of the complexities of the democratic process from their years of viewing television, what did they learn.
"They learned that social problems are never complicated; they are simply the conflicts between good guys and bad guys. Bad guys can never be reasoned with – you can only shoot it out with them. If the bad guys confront you with superior force, you can lay your body on the line and go down fighting. Young people also learned from commercials that there is an instant, simple solution to all problems: acid indigestion can be relieved with Alka-Seltzer; unpopularity can be overcome by using Ban; feelings of sexual inadequacy can be banished by buying a new Mustang, which will transform you into an instant Casanova.
"Television documentaries about the problems of the world offer neat, half-hour wrap-ups of complex events. Highlights are selected, while boring, tedious details are left out. Time is compressed; cause and effect are simplified. In situation dramas, people are presented not in the full complexity of their humanity, like people in real life, but in stereotyped roles. They therefore arrive at their emotional responses quickly and easily, each Pyramus to his Thisbe, each Harlequin to his Columbine.
"In private as in public affairs, life is not too hard to understand. That’s what television says. But as the general semanticists are fond of saying, the map is not the territory. All too soon, young people learn that the maps of reality given them by television do not correspond to the actualities. Material possessions and the consumption of all approved national brands do not bring happiness or peace of mind.
"The world, they discover as they approach adulthood, is far more complicated than they ever suspected. Getting along with other people is not easy; you have to adjust to them as much as they have to adjust to you. The world makes all sorts of demands the television set never told you about, such as study, patience, hard work, and a long apprenticeship in a trade or profession, before you may enjoy what the world has to offer.
"Disillusioned young people may at this point reject or rebel against the culture and its 'materialism' - not realizing that what they are rejecting is not the culture as such, but merely the culture as depicted by Madison Avenue and the networks. Even as they reject the culture as they understood it through television, they miss the pleasant fantasies they enjoyed as children when they turned on the set. So they 'turn on' in other ways.
"Having scornfully rejected the notion that they can achieve instant beauty and radiance with Clairol, they espouse the alternative view that they can achieve instant spiritual insight and salvation with LSD. The kinship of the LSD and other drug experiences with television is glaringly obvious: both depend upon 'turning on' and passively waiting for something beautiful to happen.
"Because television was invented at a particular time, in a particular state of our economy, it was assigned almost entirely to utilization for commercial purposes. This decision was made in ignorance of what the consequences might be – an entirely pardonable ignorance, since no one knew at the time what the social impact of this new medium might be.
"Business and the advertising profession are not to be blamed for making use of this medium as energetically and ingeniously as possible. There are no villains in this story; we are all simply victims of the unforeseen consequences of a technological revolution – and a revolution in the technologies of communication always has more far-reaching consequences than anyone can predict.
"The problems raised here deeply involve students of child development. What kinds of programs are good for children – and at what ages? Does the excessive viewing of television result in fantasy-living, poor study habits, and alienation, as many of us suspect but few of us can prove. These are problems too for students of literature. 'Life,' said Oscar Wilde, 'is an imitation of art.' Delmore Schwartz said, 'In dreams begin responsibilities.'
"The imaginative representations of life, as depicted by commercial television, are a form of literature, shaping people's daydreams and lifestyles, just as surely as 'The Song of Roland' or 'Huckleberry Finn'. What models of conduct does present-day (the 1960s) television programming hold up for the young to emulate? What dreams of future achievement or success does it generate in boys and girls to direct their energies and aspiration?
"This paper is speculative, I don't imagine there is a shred of evidence, other than subjective and intuitive, for anything I have said here about television and the state of mind of disaffiliated youth today (in the 1960s). The trouble is that what research there is on the effects of television is almost entirely limited to research by advertising agencies on the effectiveness of their campaigns.
"Inquiries into the over-all effects of television – on politics, on public opinion and decision making, on the lifestyles of young people and the psychic lives of young children – are only beginning. This paper is therefore not a presentation of conclusions but a request that we begin making inquiries. What are the relations between mass media and family communications? How do we begin answering such questions?"
