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Everybody hates television: for critics on the Left and the Right, television is responsible for everything from creating apathetic citizens to assaulting family life. Catharine Lumby looks at how and why we project our anxietites onto the small screen.

Article Excerpt
If Gustave Flaubert were alive today, I'm betting a new entry in his Dictionary of Received Ideas would read: TV: A device invented in the earlier part of the twentieth century that precipitated the end of civilisation. After the advent of TV, couples no longer communicated, teenagers were corrupted by images of sex and violence, and small children lost all interest in natural play.

Flaubert's Dictionary, which was titled in French Le Dictionnaire des Id,es ReOues, satirised the cliches and platitudes that passed for considered opinion among the French middle class of late nineteenth century. Its beauty is that the irony frequently runs so close to the bone that it's easy to imagine a flustered bourgeois contemporary of Flaubert's reading it as a serious dictionary of ideas.

In Flaubert's day it was the subversive intrusion of the railway into modern society that was the subject of great anxiety and frenetic dinner party debate. Today, it is technologies of communication rather than transportation that are often said to be destroying the social fabric and undermining family values. Television has become most symbolic of all that's allegedly wrong with the modern world for cultural critics on both the Left and the Right.

For liberal US academic Robert Putnam, television is one of the key corrosive forces eating away at social capital. TV, he argues in his book Bowling Alone, isolates people, soaks up their time and makes them depressed.

In a familiar metaphor, he equates watching television with eating McDonalds: 'Like junk food, TV, especially TV entertainment, satisfies cravings without real nourishment'. For critics like Putnam the problem with television is that people who are watching it are pretty much doing nothing. TV is making them passive, intellectually lazy, and disconnected from broader social and political concerns.

For conservative critics of the box, the problem is often the reverse. Television, according to some on the right, is giving people too many ideas--and bad, immoral ones at that.

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