ABSTRACT
One of the Un-TV exercises we have discussed had students watch television for 15 minutes without turning it on. Through this unfamiliar, norm-breaching experience, many of them were thereby able to gain abrupt personal insight into the cultural practice of TV watching. Many became able-perhaps for the first time-to access and contemplate the subconscious background influence that TV had on their lives:
R. Walt: The time I spent staring at the blank screen was probably the hardest part of the experiment. I tried to clear my mind, but couldn’t help feeling extremely uneasy. I looked at my position in relation to this thing I was staring at. I suddenly felt almost ashamed and stupid. I realized that during the most impressionable time of my life, my grade school years, I probably spent more time in this position gazing into this goddamn little box than with any other one human being. I tried to look at myself and decide what was actually me and what had become a part of me through the activity of “watching TV.” To tell you the depressing truth, I couldn’t discern any distinct boundaries. Perhaps it was then that I first began to get a glimpse of the immense cultural force behind this media that had instilled in me, and just about every other American, the desire to watch this thing, and thereby unknowingly adopt the values presented therein as our own.
