Robert Kirby
CHANNELVISION
I am currently overseas, enjoying a somewhat overdue topping up of my Eurocentricity, by way of some time in Spain, France, Italy and good old Blighty. I have therefore taken advantage of the chance to write two consecutive columns on more or less the same subject: the visual war that is being waged on television viewers.
A weekend or three ago I was watching two of my grandchildren watching television. What surprised and, to a certain extent, angered me was that they reacted strongly to the flash-cut video effects in much of what was coming up on the screen.
When yet another of the lickety-split fast- spool adverts came spinning up they flung their hands in front of their faces in what was an almost instinctive protective action against the frenetic visual assault that comprises so much of current television.
I believe that one of the most abused technologies of the 20th century is the accursed electronic video-editing machine and its companions, those magic boxes of visual trickery that offer their operators unlimited scope when it comes to speeding up, distorting and generally unsettling normal visual presentation.
In the codes of today it is apparently no longer permissible in television programmes and, particularly in advertisements and trailers, for viewers to be presented with some sort of measured, logical and reasonably relaxed assemblage of material. It has become fashionable to present a whirling optic nightmare. It is considered necessary that literally dozens of different images get crammed into a half- minute of a commercial. In longer items the same basic rules apply. A viewer’s visual reception is literally bombarded not only with imagery but with imagery that has been doctored and inverted and which shakes and shoves and spins. It is the visual equivalent of running the gauntlet and it can’t be too good for the brain.
Some years ago, some of the more devious thieves in the American advertising industry thought up a particularly underhand way of conning the customers. It was called subliminal advertising (sit down, Barney and Claudia! It had nothing whatsoever to do with racism) and entailed inserting very brief visual images into television programmes; so brief that they were not recognised by the conscious mind. The profile of, say, a Coca-Cola bottle or a well-known product logo would be edited into a film, but for only one or two frames – for a twenty-fifth or a twelfth of a second.
To the viewer this would be the tiniest flicker on his screen, but to his subconscious the message was received and was quite clear. It was that much more effective when the shape of the Coca-Cola bottle was inserted at a place where drinking a coke would be a good idea. It is said the technique was used widely and also in televised political speeches, when political opponents were mentioned, unpleasant and frightening profiles were sneaked in; a quick hammer and sickle, a devil’s trident.
Subliminal advertising worked well, so well in fact that it was banned by the authorities, as I recall on the grounds that consumers had a right to know when someone was trying to sell them something and so, therefore, would be able to erect their rightful defences against sales pitches.
The interesting part of the subliminal advertising story is that it showed how receptive the brain can actually be and, also, how this inbuilt receptivity can be abused. Recent studies in the United Kingdom place some blame for mental dysfunction on the fact that today the human brain is simply being fed far too much information, far more than it was designed to accept or can possibly process. In actual quantities, the brain gets more straight information shovelled into it in one week than 100 years ago it got in a year.
According to the researchers the penalties of this overloading include the erosion of both short- and long-term memory, inability to concentrate, an overall degrading of mental skills and, perhaps worst of all, deterioration of the intellectual discriminative functions – the “so-what” syndrome.
All of which is, of course, very good news for advertisers. Having one’s customers already well on the way to being brain-dead is a tremendous advantage; more especially if their powers of discernment, of choice, have been immobilised.
More on this next week, and on the depreciating fashion of visual trickery, the quick-montage of film clips and fragments, which are in effect a dumbing- down.