The Silent Cathode Ray Tube--Memories of an Era When Only the Senses Remain (1979)

The Silent Cathode Ray Tube--Memories of an Era When Only the Senses Remain (1979)

This statement about the "intellectual limits of television" is a critique made in the late 1970s, a time of great transition in Japanese society. After the high economic growth of the postwar period, the first oil crisis in 1973 forced Japanese society to confront the spiritual and intellectual challenges that lay beyond material wealth. The penetration rate of color televisions had already exceeded 90%, and the television had become a central source of information in the home. However, the content of these programs, while dealing with complex political and economic issues, tended to simplify the content in order to attract viewers' interest in a short period of time, and to rely more and more on staging that created a strong impression.

Against this backdrop, the narrator, who is said to be an NHK personality, said, "No matter how carefully you present political, economic, and social issues, only 15% of the content will be remembered at most. This is not a mere criticism of the supremacy of viewer ratings, but rather a reflection of the fact that television itself is structurally ill-suited to "deep thinking. The phrase "television is not a "secondary proponent" of intellectual action," is not merely a criticism of the supremacy of viewership ratings.

This point is fraught with a paradox in that the ideal of "making people think" through the media is rather hindered by the nature of television, which provides a large amount of instantaneous information through visual and auditory means. In other words, television can be an entry point to "know" something, but it cannot be a tool for "thinking. Even if it sows the "seeds" of problems in viewers' minds, it cannot provide the soil to nurture them. This is a critique of civilization that television remains a "stimulator of the senses" and is incapable of "deepening knowledge.

This criticism can be directly applied to media such as SNS and YouTube. Short videos, fragmented information, and immediate chains of reactions dramatically increase the speed at which knowledge is distributed, but at the same time deprive people of space for reflection, contemplation, and dialogue with others. Many people "think they have seen it" and leave with the "idea" that they "get it. As a result, information is not remembered and does not lead to social decisions or political choices.

Therefore, this cold criticism directed at television in the 1970s is an extremely sharp idea that is still applicable today, even though the forms of media have changed. The narrator of the time saw the "poverty of thought" behind the high viewership ratings and skillful production. The warning bells were already ringing at this time that the information society is not an age in which "knowledge" is omnipresent, but an age in which "knowledge" is consumed and forgotten.