Television and Shared Experience

A Church article with View Comments posted 30 December 2009.
Tags: alienation, social networking, television

I was listening to NPR’s Laura Sydell yesterday as she and her guests were discussing media trends over the past 40 or 50 years as they connect to shared experience. One guest on the program was arguing that the development of global communications technology means that next-door neighbors may have few shared cultural experiences. In essence, by enabling a large fraction of the population to seek the television news that it wants to watch, the music that it wants to hear, and the political ideas that it wants to think, there are fewer cultural touchstones that we share in common.

In fact, it goes farther that that. Stanford University communications professor Clifford Nass argues that we are witnessing the emergence of the first culture in history which does not offer, on a grassroots level, a set of shared experiences that allow people to build relationships with their neighbors. Even if one doesn’t watch the shows, one knows enough about them to participate in conversation about them, and so they serve whether 100% of the population is engaged or not.

This leads me selfishly to the question of the necessity of television. During my ongoing preparation to become a pastor in the church, I have been repeatedly questioned over my choice not to own a television. Although usually not expressed in such sophisticated terms, my questioners argue that not participating in modern American television watching prevents you from making a connection with your parishioners because you do not participate in those cultural touchstone experiences. The failure to watch television is presented as pastoral irresponsibility.

Of course I disagree with this for several reasons. First, of course there have always been great pastors who have not participated in much TV watching – their entertainment tastes turning more to the arts or literature. When they experience, as all do, a failure in their pastoral care, no one chalks that up to a failure to make a connection through television. Moreover, we now live in a society where the most popular television show in America in 2009, American Idol, only captured 16% of American viewers on its season finale! Gone are the days when millions of Americans watched Walter Cronkite every night and discussed the same news the next day around the water cooler.

These cultural trends also have profound implications for the church. As hundreds of millions of people involve themselves in social networking, new cultural touchstones are developing that transcend neighborhood or regional boundaries. The church can engage these new touchstones, participating in them readily, expressing and confessing the truth we have in these new forums. If we fail, we will become increasingly irrelevant.

While these new cultural trends serve to unite people in very specific ways, the lack of broad, in-person contact between people is alienating. This problem will only grow as time goes on and technology encompasses more of what we do and who we are. Our approach to the problem of alienation should not be merely therapeutic, bandaging the victims, but proactive so that we seek ways to live in this new connectedness. We can be, or become, the Third Place where in-person relationships can flourish.

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1. The Worst Show in the History of Television: Cop Rock
2. It’s Not Just You
3. A Sobering Experience
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