We aren’t the world
by Bruce Campbell

You remember where you were when you heard we bombed Baghdad, when the Challenger exploded, when the stock market crashed or when O.J. was found innocent. But do you remember the moment you first heard cable TV would carry over 150 channels into your home?

You should, because that moment arguably had longer impact on you than any of the other events. Your very next thought might well have been to wonder how many times any of us were going to be able to watch Dragnet.

You needn’t have worried. After quickly doing the math on 150 channels of either new productions or rerun residuals, the media powers knew that the only things they could afford to bring us would be 1) things that actually paid them to air, like specialty channels or infomercials or worship services, or 2) low- or no-cost TV channels from all over the place.

At first, all over meant Atlanta, Chicago and New York. But in a few short years, all over has globalized. Now, courtesy of cable TV, Americans can watch the BBC, newscasts from most major European cities, Australian documentaries, Brazilian soap operas, South African soccer and Russian orchestras. Not that you would, as the current ad goes, but you could. This summer, Congress mothballed a pet project of Al Gore’s to launch a satellite containing a single camera that would feed continuous video images of earth to everyone and not do a darn thing else – arguably the ultimate global TV.

From the very birth of modern media, the great myth has been that it was possible for humankind to achieve, apparently for the first time in history, global connectedness. Gone would be the barriers of culture, distance and civilization, and even though language would be a hurdle, this, too, would be overridden by the image of a single human family with ultimately more in common than distinct. Each duly noted milestone in media history represented a marker of this myth: the first radio broadcast, the first satellite, the first intercontinental television transmission, globally televised sporting events, worldwide telecast of the moon landing, the World Wide Web. All of these say, "We are together, aren’t we?"

But we aren’t, and why aren’t we? Why, when we have unprecedented access to global media, television in this case, are we still beset by parochialism and unable to see the big picture, even if we did have GoreSat?

The reason that TV has been unable to deliver on its promise of an electronic global city is simply that the act of making and delivering television enforces symmetry. When you finally have the chance to watch, without comprehension, newscasts from around the world, you are struck by their remarkable sameness. Those ebullient Latins may be highly emotionally expressive in their soap operas, but so are we. Sports are sports, dance is dance, music is music, and political posturing is all but hard-wired. One hundred and fifty channels, and one thing on.

It’s a huge let-down to think that, after all this work and expense to connect us, we’re pouring mountainous sums of money into enterprises that strive to make us look like each other: relatively well-off, telegenic, heavily made-up, brassy, hip and breezy. The reality check comes when you realize that you are yourself perhaps not like that, that you don’t know many people who are and that very, very many facets of life don’t get on TV even once. If we have global TV, it is a depiction of a world which includes everyone, but which very few of us actually inhabit.

Almost the same words are used in describing the effect of global broadcasts of Princess Diana’s funeral or the World Cup finals: These are said to be moments that unite us. How fascinating that the whole concept of unity can shift from one of some sort of intentional consensus or singular ideal, to representing the effect of all of us sitting at the same moment staring passively into a TV set. By this logic, Northern Ireland has undoubtedly been "united" several times over but we’re damned if we know why it insists on blowing itself up.

The actual global city sure isn’t the Global Village. It’s a much more varied, nuanced, dynamic and unstable place. The extent of our differences greatly outreaches the different languages our game shows now come in. We are not only less equipped in our global understanding for having seen the TV version, we are actually ill-equipped, the more so because we believe that we do understand. l

Witness media review editor Bruce Campbell commutes to work in midtown New York from Westchester County.