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The reality of TV: television isn't to blame for every social ill but neither is it neutral.

Article Excerpt
When anthropologists Don Kulick and Margaret Willson took cinematic equipment into the remote village of Gapun in the Papua New Guinea Highlands in 1991, they encountered some interesting responses. While many Gapuners had 'heard stories' about moving images, only a small number had actually seen a film or television program. Yet this lack of direct experience had not stopped the members of this community from developing a series of elaborate narratives about the potent force of visual media.

In Kulick and Willson's account, published in The Anthropology of Media, Gapuners regard cinematic technology as an 'eye' with incomparable power. According to local explanation, draivisen--as television is known in the local lingua franca, Tok Pisen--could be directed by any person who possessed it to see anything they wished to see. Draivisen could look into other spaces and other times; it even had the ability to penetrate death and call forth ancestors. One local pronounced his desire to acquire draivisen in order to spy on sorcerers. There were tales of seeing, via draivisen, both the Pope and the Queen 'in the flesh' on their respective recent visits to PNG. These narratives about the power of draivisen connect up with Gapuners' exuberant millenarian ideas. Images of white people in their native countries are interpreted as pictures of the spaces and bodily forms that Gapuners themselves will come to occupy after the millennium or death. As Kulick and Willson explain: Conceived of as an eye, film and cinematic technology becomes for the villagers an instrument of knowledge and revelation whose narratives interweave with and comment upon the present, the past, and what is to come.

The box that stands in the corner of our lounge rooms appears a much more mundane object. Television is so pervasively a part of our lives, so central to our understanding of our place in the world, that we take it for granted. In order to be reminded of the world-changing potency of visual media it is helpful to look to the responses of peoples whose encounters have been much more recent. For us, such media have become thoroughly naturalised, a part of the furniture, as Catharine Lumby observes in Arena Magazine no. 82.

In rejecting the 'effects theory' of visual media--a particular distillation of technological determinism--Lumby takes issue with writers who have made television 'symbolic of all that's allegedly wrong with the modern world'. She argues that cultural critics of both the Left and Right tend to accord a similar determining power to television--the technology is identified as either producing passive citizens who are disconnected from broader social concerns, or as having provided people with too many immoral ideas that have caused them to commit anti-social acts. Lumby draws on...

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