TV, or Politics Even for Slackers

I am watching television. I also ask permission here to do some "theorizing" about the act (a very passive act) of watching television. I am immersed in a space of mediated reality, there is a changing image in front of me that seems to have its origin from some source behind the screen. I do not mean this literally, with a naive vision that would see the screen as some kind of window. The tele- of tele-vision implies that the image is from a distance, whether from a remote location, the site of the broadcast, or the television studio, or from the vaguely defined center, the authoritative source of the network broadcast, the network itself.

Therefore spectator-screen-image: this is the triad that forms the outline of the experience of mediated reality, the image appearing as though from behind or beyond the screen. This is an enframing [Gestell] (the word is Heidegger's from "The Question Concerning Technology") of the real order of things, of the world itself. Something is within this frame, something is left out. On the level of language, then, is a second meaning of this enframing. The frame shifts from context to context, it is a context-based "framing" of situations.

What can be said further concerning the distance or the gap between the viewer and the real event? It is not symmetrical-- what is presented as television is raised to the level of the authoritative. The barrier of entry to producing programming that seems also authoritative (YouTube with its "broadcast yourself" slogan notwithstanding) is huge. As many by now have pointed out, television, unlike the printing press that preceded it, and unlike the networked communication over the internet that seems to emerge as a possible successor, is not participatory. Is there not a whole politics of inclusion and exclusion, center and marginal periphery, around this issue, or this question, of participation? And yet it is not enough to bemoan "the media" or some hegemonic power of the network, for our own state or standing within participation or non-participation. As Sartre and others have taught us again and again, we are responsible for the whole world, for the entirety of the condition we find ourselves in. In this game no refuge in another world, in non-commitment, or in the private language of "our own world" is allowed, one must begin where one is, as one must make a move.