By Stanley K. Schultz
Voting season, like deer-hunting season in many parts of the United States, is nearly upon us. The same sense of spirits-fortified futility that fills the unsuccessful hunter also may haunt many a voter who heads for the polling place uncertain about whom to vote for. Advertisements, many of them negative, mean-spirited, and contradicting one another, saturate the television airwaves. Since national surveys reveal that far more than the majority of the American electorate rely primarily on television for their news and information, voting season finds us more confused in our decision-making than perhaps ever was true in the past.

The American public's love affair with television has hastened the decline of majority rule in the United States. "Majority rule," of course, constitutes the core of the historical American experiment to build a democratic and egalitarian society. Or, so we have told ourselves over the previous two hundred years. But, television has changed all that. Originally promoted as a medium to bring us together, television has carved the American public into new and increasingly segregated minorities.

Back in the 1920s, a young man named David Sarnoff, who eventually would build a successful empire called RCA-the Radio Corporation of America-initially failed to convince potential investors to bankroll radio. Sarnoff's selling point for the new wireless "music box" was advertising. Resistant investors, however, stated that radio couldn't have a commercial future because it depended on "broadcasting." The word itself is significant, because to "broadcast" is to send a message throughout the land without knowing whom, if anyone, will receive it-or heed it once received.

Concern about the uncertain results of "broadcasting" led to a new industry called "market research," pioneered by a University of Wisconsin engineering graduate named Arthur C. Nielsen. He created a way to test the audience for radio advertising by attaching a device called an "Audimeter" to a selected sample of radio receivers throughout the country. In 1950, Nielsen applied the system to television. By the 1960's, his Television Index Service had become so pervasive that Americans commonly measured their cultural tastes by talking about the Nielsen Ratings. Purportedly, the ratings showed that Americans had developed cultural communities by forming majorities who shared the experience of watching the same entertainment shows, the same evening news programs, or by coming together to watch the first step of an American astronaut on the Moon. Critics, however, were not convinced. Studies revealed, for example, that during the day as many as 40 percent of housewives were not watching their turned-on television sets. The forms sent to households by the Nielsen Company even include a column that asks the raters to list the channel numbers and hours per day of stations not watched although the set is on. A 1988 survey showed that more than 50 percent of all 18-to-34 year old Americans engaged in "grazing:" remote control in hand, they switched back and forth between at least two programs; 20 percent switched among three shows or more. As one critic put it: "more and more Americans were not listening to what they 'heard,' nor looking at what they 'saw'." This naturally upsets advertisers. But, it should upset each of us as citizens even more so.

Television "broadcasting" has created an anonymous audience that potentially might constitute a new majority of witnesses instantly consuming the same experiences and thereby being drawn together in a shared sense of community. After all, more than 98 percent of American households have at least one television set; around half contain two or more sets. In reality, however, television has segregated us from any such possible sense of community. In the pre-television era, when people wanted to share experience, they left their homes to gather at a ball game, a concert, a political rally. In the television era, we not only do not participate in physically and spiritually shared communities of others, we less and less commune with one another in our own homes. For one member of a family to go watch his or her favorite program in isolated privacy from others in the household has become commonplace. With the multiplication of cable and satellite channels, each personalized to a relatively small numbers of viewers, we will undergo even greater cultural segmentation and segregation from any sense of community.

Television, the tool that 1960s' heralds of the new era of electronic communication promised would build a "global village," today promises instead to produce an increasingly segregated set of tribes who share less and less with one another. In voting season, this promise hovers over our political horizons like an ever-darkening storm. That storm threatens to erode even further the foundations of our democratic society. After all, if there is no American cultural majority, how can we hope for an American political majority that shares any sense of community about the purposes and direction of the nation?

© Stanley K. Schultz

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