TED-Lauren Zalaznick: The conscience of television

     We all acknowledge that human beings are highly social animals, even to the extent of making this statement somewhat banal. In other words, communication takes a huge role in people’s daily lives; we talk together, scan through internet news, get curious about other’s lives and go to facebook. Regardless of how we communicate, we interact with people everyday, whether consciously or unconsciously. Among all different means of communication, television is such an pivotal medium considering how much time ordinary people spend on watching television. This is probably why Lauren Zalaznick, a chairman of NBC Universal Media, decided to talk about its surprising and influencing characteristic: being consciousness.

     In her provocative speech, Lauren Zalaznick states that television has a conscience, the complex of ethical and moral principles that controls or inhibits the actions or thoughts of an individual. The underlying, and tenacious reason for this is that television directly reflects the moral, political, social and emotional need states of a nation, being used in the process of disseminating people’s entire value system (In this case the word ‘nation’ would refer to the United States). With tangible statistics and graphs that facilitate the understanding of her speech, she shows how TV had such a strong connection with its society for the past 50 years. For relevant example, in the graph showing a relationship between the employment rate of United States and the number of fantasy-related TV programs, the lines of two variables were shown to be parallel, implying people want more take-me-out-of-reality shows as their everyday life gets harsher.

     The significance of her presentation is that it elaborates TV is not just a stationary, indifferent, gray-colored and square-shaped box that people watch with potato chips grabbed in their hand; rather, it is alive, being a medium which plays a great role in helping interactions between actual society and people’s value system. TV program schedules do change in accordance with what people desire to watch; social-commentary shows were popular during 1970s where Vietnam wars and Nixon administration took place. People wanted more news and judgment-related programs than comedies after 2001 fall. These evidences clearly elaborate how TV maintains strong connections and shares interaction with society. 

     However, during the speech, I was curious and quite skeptical about one thing: Is conscience a characteristic which only television possesses among all different form of media? Aren’t all kinds of media have consciousness? In my opinion, other media such as internet or newspapers are all uniformly consciousness too; conscience is not something that only television has. There are tons of innumerable examples, but to exemplify very lucidly, we can take a look at newspapers during election period. Several pages are dedicated to deliver different information about candidates, voting results and people’s reaction. These are what people exactly want to know about during election period. Scrutinizing through the example, ‘conscience’ is a universal characteristic of all different kinds of media.

     Personally, I was profoundly impressed by the research study that Lauren Zalaznick carried out which prevented her concise speech from being abstract and tedious. She said “We went back 50 years to the 1960 television season. We surveyed the top-20 Neilson shows every year for 50 years, a thousand shows. We talked to over 3000 individuals aged 18 to 70 and we asked them how they felt emotionally.” What a nice research done! I appreciate the effort she had to put in order to complete this huge research. To sum up, all media, including television, is a conscious and animated passage which connects the whole society and its members.