Television Language of White Noise
Television, in our culture, is by far the most dominant medium of communication and stimulation. The fears, the joys, and the horrors of the world are all channeled through television. As seen in the Rodney King police beating videotape, television can incite in a population sheer and utter rage and dark hostility. That same footage; however, can also detract from the very anger it incites. After countless times of viewing the footage, in a never-ending Simulacrum of the same grainy image, the masses became desensitized to its graphic violence. In fact, the repetitive viewing of the footage during the trial led to the desensitization of the jury and the acquittals of the "guilty" officers. In White Noise DeLillo recognizes television as a vital component in American culture and makes it a major focus of the novel. DeLillo uses media and more specifically television, as a symbol of the American Simulacra and links the Simulacra into his character's escapism from the violent realities in White Noise.
John Frow, in his criticism of White Noise, rightfully focuses on television as the defining medium of the Simulacra in DeLillo's America. Television, of course, by definition is a copy; it is a broadcast of something that has been filmed; it is viewed in millions of homes worldwide, each television flickering the same image into the sub-conscious eye. Frow presents a close reading of a speech Murray gives to his students:
they're already too old to figure importantly in the making of society. Minute by minute they're beginning to diverge from each other. "Even as we sit here," I tell them, "you are spinning out from the core, becoming less recognizable as a group, less targetable by advert...
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...vior. In that same realm, Mink finds salvation as a repentant and punished sinner. On television and in the novel, harmlessness always prevails.
By coding his novel, White Noise, as if it were a television show, DeLillo comments on the state of affairs in our modern culture. DeLillo demonstrates our society's codependency on what was originally only intended to be a medium of communication. By showing the benevolence of the medium as it translates into the lives of his characters, DeLillo is saying that maybe our dependence on television, even as blood bath entertainment is not as bad as generally perceived.
Bibliography:
DeLillo, Don. White Noise. Ed. Mark Osteen.
New York: Penguin, 1998.
Frow, John. "The Last Things Before the Last: Notes on White Noise."
DeLillo, Don. White Noise. Ed. Mark Osteen.
New York: Penguin, 1998. 417-431
As this suburban sprawl of the fifties took America by storm, Spiegel discusses how television provided a necessary means of escapism for frustrated families. The first television show, broadcast in 1949, was a very simple program in which a man and woman sit watching and discussing the TV. Although by today's standards this would be seen as unsurpassingly boring to audiences, this simple show provided a stress relief and easy entertainment; it seemed as though audiences enjoyed watching programs which, similar to their own situation, seemed more rewarding.
Jeffrey D. Sachs’s essay “ A Nation of Vidiot” focuses on his views about the American relationship with televisions. In his essay explaining why people should avoid watching TV too much. And the author also gives readers a reason to believe in the articles that he wrote. He explained the problem to television advertising used to sell the product and the country's politics. There are fine examples why developing countries the consequences that have ever television were created. And he has to convince his readers when he criticized some of the problems seen too much television can cause people watch television as reduced memory, and body weakness. However, for the children, the TV screens the main tool of the children. The authors also offer TV how difficult and dangerous for television viewers. Overall it’s a pretty interesting read, but one thing is sure: the essay is a
Tuchman, Gaye. The TV Establishment: Programming for Power and Profit. New Jersey: Prentice Hall, Inc., l971.
The many evils that exist within television’s culture were not foreseen back when televisions were first put onto the market. Yet, Postman discovers this very unforgiveable that the world did not prepare itself to deal with the ways that television inherently changes our ways of communication. For example, people who lived during the year 1905, could not really predict that the invention of a car would not make it seem like only a luxurious invention, but also that the invention of the car would strongly affect the way we make decisions.
According to Raymond Williams, “In a class society, all beliefs are founded on class position, and the systems of belief of all classes …” (Rice and Waugh 122). His work titled, Marxism and Literature expounded on the conflict between social classes to bridge the political ideals of Marxism with the implicit comments rendered through the text of a novel. “For the practical links,” he states “between ‘ideas’ and ‘theories’ and the ‘production of real life’ are all in this material social process of signification itself” (133). Williams asserts that a Marxist approach to literature introduces a cross-cultural universality, ensuingly adding a timeless value to text by connecting creative and artistic processes with the material products that result. Like Williams, Don DeLillo calls attention to the economic and material relations behind universal abstractions such as aesthetics, love, and death. DeLillo’s White Noise brings modern-day capitalist societies’ incessant lifestyle disparity between active consumerists and those without the means to the forefront of the story’s plot. DeLillo’s setting uses a life altering man-made disaster in the suburban small-town of Blacksmith to shed light on the class conflict between the middle class (bourgeoisie) and the working poor (proletariat). After a tank car is punctured, an ominous cloud begins to loom over Jack Gladney and his family. No longer a feathery plume or a black billowing cloud, but the airborne toxic event—an event that even after its conclusion Jack cannot escape the prophecy of his encroaching death. Through a Marxist reading of the characterization of Jack Gladney, a middle-aged suburban college professor, it is clear that the overarching obsession with death operates as an...
In “Wires and Lights in a Box,” the author, Edward R. Murrow, is delivering a speech on October 15, 1958, to attendees of the Radio-Television News Directors Association. In his speech, Murrow addresses how it is his desire and duty to tell his audience what is happening to radio and television. Murrow talks about how television insulates people from the realities in the world, how the television industry is focused on profits rather than delivering the news to the public, and how television and radio can teach, illuminate, and inspire.
Paul S. Boyer. "Television." The Oxford Companion to United States History. 2001. Retrieved November 24, 2011 from Encyclopedia.com: http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1O119-Television.html
Amongst the technological advancement and growing mass production in post-modern America, the movement towards a consumerist driven society was inevitable. However, Don DeLillo, in White Noise, undermines the role of consumerism by portraying that this particular aspect of society distorts reality and manipulates the perceptions of people. DeLillo, through the Gladney family, proves that consumerism is a way of life that dictates the social, physical, and emotional choices that an individual makes. Consumer culture causes Jack and Babette Gladney to lose their individuality, making them a part of a collective group in which their sense of self remains meddled. It is through their fear of isolation, displacement and death that Babette and Jack finally experience a renewed sense of identity.
Being There is the story of Chance, a simple gardener turned American media hero. He seems to know nothing but television and gardening. His thoughts and judgments are products of television and his gardening experience. Yet through his simple mild mannered ways he unintentionally becomes the center of America’s business news. The author of Being There, Jerzy Kosinski said “To read a novel is to practice for real life. Fiction doesn’t change anybody’s life, it merely hints at the different ways of looking at oneself, at others, and at society” Since Chance was not able to read, television shows were his novels. Television was his practice for real life.
In Sach’s essay “A Nation of Vidiots,” he explains how he believes that the use of television that we intake can contribute to making
In Don Delilo’s, White Noise different themes are displayed throughout the novel. Some themes are the fear of death, loss of identity, technology as the enemy, and American consumerism. The society represented in the novel views people as objects and emotionally detached from many things. Death is always in the air and trapped in peoples mind. The culture that’s represented in the novel adds to the loss of individualism, but also adds to the figurative death of the characters introduced in the novel.
Throughout the book, McKibben compares the two experiences, contrasting the amount of useful information he received from nature, as opposed to the amount of useless, hollow information the television provided. He goes on in the book to make several very important observations about how the television has fundamentally changed our culture and lifestyle, from the local to the global level. Locally, McKibben argues, television has a detrimental effect on communities.
Don DeLillo’s ‘Videotape’ is a short story of man who is absolutely captivated by some footage on the news that can be described as both, raw and shocking. The footage is being repeatedly played over and over. It depicts a young girl with a camcorder travelling in the backseat of her family’s car who happens to be filming a man driving a Dodge behind them. She continues aiming the camera at the man and filming until, suddenly, he is shot and murdered. The man watching the tape at home is clearly mesmerized and fascinated with the footage to the extent that he was trying to get his wife to watch it with him. This story portrays society’s utter fascination of shocking and disturbing content relating to death and other horrible events unless they themselves are involved. This, along with other characteristics, clearly suggests that “Videotape” is a piece of postmodern literature. This report will analyze and describe why “Videotape” belongs to postmodern literature through the in-depth analysis of the selected passage and a brief breakdown of the story as a whole.
American literature has evolved extensively over the course of the history of the republic, from the Puritan sermons which emphasized the importance of a solid individual relationship between the individual self and the omnipotent God to the parody of relativism we find in Joseph Heller’s Catch-22. One of the recurring concerns of American fiction, though by no means restricted to American writing, is the position of the self with regard to the other, whether manifest as God, nature, the community, or another individual. Since at least the Modernist period, writers have explored the definitions and relationships of the self formally as well as thematically and narratively. Don DeLillo’s 1985 novel White Noise carries on this particularly American obsession of the troublesome question of the self, its boundaries, its supremacy, and its very existence. Through his innovative use of his protagonist Jack Gladney as the novel’s narrator, DeLillo creates a fictional system which threatens to dissolve at every turn of the page. In offering a view of contemporary culture through the eyes of Jack Gladney, DeLillo creates a metafictional document that shifts the focus of the reader’s attention from mass culture to a single individual’s experience of that culture. Thus, the question is not so much the semblance of the fictional world of White Noise to the reader’s experience of reality, but the mimetic function of Jack Gladney’s narrative.
Gauntlett, D. Hill, A. BFI (1999) TV Living: Television, Culture, and Everyday Life, p. 263 London: Routledge.