TVs may come without ‘off’ switch
NEW YORK (AP) – In a city full of annoyances, few exceed the typical New York taxi ride: A rattletrap whose driver yacks on a cell phone while you try to put “Could you turn on the AC?” into words he can understand.
But now it’s gotten worse. Some of these cabs come with compulsory TV. Now a miserable experience has been enhanced by the distraction of ads and other unsought information throbbing on a TV screen installed in the front-seat partition already crushing your knees.
Sure, the wretched thing can be muted. But it can’t be turned off. For each average 15-minute trip, there is no escaping a taxi TV’s visual clutter. You are its captive audience, hijacked and paying your own ransom at 30 cents per one-fifth mile.
This is something of an outrage, especially in a city whose overweening concern for our welfare has led to a recent ban on smoking from most public places. Why don’t similar concerns shield us from unwanted exposure to TV?
These days it’s safe to pickle your liver at the neighborhood saloon without putting your lungs in harm’s way. And yet … good luck finding a barroom spared from a television teeming with ESPN, the Weather Channel or CNBC.
At your favorite pub, or wherever a TV ambushes you, just try resisting its magnetic pull. No matter its programming, any TV draws your eyes to its hyperkinetic light. And for you to resist its tropistic allure is work.
Who needs this video force-feeding! If cigarettes can be banned, why no regulation of TV in public places? Why, if not a total ban, at least a mandatory nonviewing section?
Even devoted couch potatoes need TV down time. So why can’t we wait for our plane, pump gas or even ride in an elevator without being besieged by video images?
Why can’t we go to a concert or a ballgame without huge TV screens competing for our attention with their pixel version of the same event unfolding before us in the flesh?
Why can’t we go to Bloomingdale’s or the Virgin Megastore or a Ralphs checkout line without locking eyes with televisions pitching wares we might prefer to buy in peace?
Consider this passage from the current Fortune magazine addressing marketers: “Looking for a big TV audience to push your new deodorant? Try Wal-Mart’s in-store TV screens, said to reach 100 million shoppers every month.”
Some of those 100 million shoppers surely see Wal-Mart as enough of a show without TV.
“Whenever TV takes over a new place, you remember how few places there are where it is not,” wrote Margaret Talbot in The New York Times, and added, “The more places TV invades, the less privacy we have in public.”
Why this should be happening is a no-brainer, says Todd Gitlin, a professor of journalism and sociology at Columbia University whose books include “Media Unlimited: How the Torrent of Images and Sounds Overwhelms Our Lives.”
“The attention of the public is a marketable resource,” notes Gitlin, “and anybody who can seize the public’s attention can make money by renting it to others. Screens in elevators? Why not! Screens on the seat-backs in planes? Why not!”
But how (I ask Gitlin) do I field the inevitable argument that, if I don’t want to watch a taxi’s TV, I can just look out the window?
“You can do that,” he says. “But then the burden has been placed on you to react. When your consciousness has been invaded, you can repel the invader, but it takes effort on your part.
“You can look out the window, you can close your eyes. But you’ve lost a bit of freedom.”
Maybe it’s time for us to reclaim our freedom from involuntary servitude to TV, and from the marketers promoting its virulent spread.
I want an addition to the taxi commission “Passenger’s Bill of Rights” (whose fanciful provisions now include “A driver who knows and obeys all traffic laws” and “smoke- and incense-free air”) that would guarantee me “A TV-free ride.”
I want the option to shop in a TV-free zone, where I am within neither earshot nor eyeshot of a TV. I want to nurse my drink in the TV-free section of a bar, talking with a friend or lost in my own thoughts, without the imposition of a TV screen.
Even in this in-your-face city, in this in-your-face era, I don’t want TV always in my face.
Good luck, says Gitlin, who suggests my rights end with somebody else’s right to make a buck off of me.
“Maybe you’ll have to pay a special fee to be television-free,” he proposes. “I’m joking. But it’s not funny.”
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EDITOR’S NOTE – Frazier Moore can be reached at fmoore(at)ap.org
AP-ES-07-30-03 1407EDT
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