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In the second part to this series on the fear in our lives we ended with enlightenment, but really that is where we should begin. Fear and sadness can cut off the channels of joy in our life, it brings us down to a point where we are literally frozen, not wanting to eat, feel or live the life we were meant to live. We want "more light", as poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe said with his dying words, more light to chase away the darkness in our lives. But sometimes this darkness is more perceived than real.There are many things that inform the idea we have of the world around us, and it is not just what our eyes see, but how we perceive what we see, and how we have been programmed to perceive, which has a major input on our view of the reality we inhabit. The relationship between the human brain and the eye is a very complex one; Sometimes seeing isn't believing, believing is seeing.
For example, what we experience as children plays a part in informing us of how we see the world, or what our world is like, and two people can see the same thing, and yet experience it very differently. When the first TV series for kids "For the Children" made its début in the United Kingdom, at 3 p.m. on the 24th of April in 1937 (the first female TV announcers had made their début in the UK in 1936) the world was a very different experience indeed. The 10 minute episodes which ran until 1950 - with a break for the Second World War - would have seen a lot of changes take place in its target audience. But one thing remains the same. If we live our lives in the dark, without enough light, then we let our imagination fill in the blanks - and the difference between a healthy imagination and an unhealthy one will determine what we think we see.
Even looking at our human history through the shortest lens of TV highlights this. A long-running factual programme reporting on all aspects of life in Britain, the BBC's Panorama has been reporting on air since the 11th of November, 1953, and when we look at news reports in 2013, the aggressive rhetoric of enmity is still alive and well; countries are constantly in a state of war, where we are too ready to use words of war, instead of words of peace. Our children seem to lack basic disciplines, and parents are worried how they can protect their young from the increasing amount of dangers that are no longer merely out in the street, but invade the home through the internet via smartphones, tablets and laptops.
Although families in the UK are more likely to watch TV together now than they have been in over a decade, according to a study, age is a factor in how we watch, when we watch, and what we watch it on. Crucially, this freedom to watch what you want, when you want, from box-set marathon binges to pausing the action and picking it up later has come hand-in-hand with TV's ascendancy. You are in charge. And with television now becoming portable enough to fit in our pockets, it has been freed up from any timed schedule. Smartphone users reach for their phone about 150 times a day. Nearly half of all smartphone users admit to using the device in the bathroom, it goes everywhere with us.
With over 50% of people in Britain now owning a smartphone (that's four in ten of UK adults), and the share of internet traffic coming from mobile phones growing by around 150% each year, people aged between 16-24 are twice as likely to live in a home where mobile is the only kind of telephone. This age group spends 74% more time watching videos and TV shows on their smartphones than they did last year. On average this age group behave differently than other UK adults - who spend most of their "media time" using TV or radio - by spending half their time with computers and mobile phones, indicating that the viewing habits of younger generations are changing.
Additionally, when we look at younger age groups, we see that 92% of American children have some form of online presence by the age of 2, while over 91% of UK children live in a household with access to the internet. If we take into account that more children between the age of 2-5 can use a smartphone or a tablet than tie their shoelaces, and that three in four households in the UK now have access to broadband internet, we can gauge that the influence of the internet and mobile technology is widespread (just think, the world's population spends 500,000 hours a day typing internet security codes).
Portability is key for all our entertainment, like books of old, but with infinite interactive possibilities. One in ten UK adults now owns an e-reader (a Kindle-like device), while a report on The State of the Internet found that 24% of people globally share "everything" or "most things" online. Add to that the statistic that 33% of adult smartphone owners would give up sex (and 70% give up alcohol) rather than their phone, and you have a cocktail ripe for widespread addiction on the go.
Advancement is undeniably beneficial, but the spread and development of new technologies has outpaced the development of a clear understanding of how they impact on users' health, privacy and anonymity - we risk creating a planet in which privacy is impossible, affecting the way we relate to our world. For instance usage statistics show that Indians, Indonesians and Saudi Arabians are the most open internet users when it comes to sharing information online, while Australians and Americans are much more private with their personal data.
And while some of us yearn to be "googleable", some believe it could stifle the freedom people currently have to enjoy themselves because they know they are being watched - thus bringing in new fears of "lifelogging" and "over-sharing" to add to an ever longer list, where fears easily turn to paranoia.
Mass observation has become a global phenomenon, and the influence of the internet has meant that nothing feels static or permanent any more. It is estimated that 4 in 5 messages on the internet are spam. Others fear new types of cyber-crimes popping up every day, especially as we shop online more and share more private details about ourselves that can be tracked.
Many high street retailers have shut up shop blaming their failing "bricks and mortar" retail economies on "showroomers" and cheaper prices online. Because of the money being saved by the consumer, the argument that whenever we buy online we are being "watched" hasn't seemed to deter people. It seems we can be unaware of very real threats, unless televised, or perhaps we are being fed enough distracting fears via the TV to worry about who is tracking you online. Many are not very security conscious, either - the most commonly found internet password (and therefore the worst) of 2013 was "123456".
Moreover, people are always ready to exploit the inherent weaknesses of any new technology, and most of us find new developments so exciting we want to try every new piece of equipment out there without really knowing how they could affect us in our daily lives. Science fiction is more popular than science fact - most people's favourite sci-fi films are those set in dystopian futures, which depict a world dominated by technology, totalitarian governments and the collapse of society as we know it, but nowadays it feels like we can get the same thing just by watching the news.
What we watched once as sci-fi is now all too uncomfortably feeling like historical movie, and it's not just our daughters we feel we have to guard from the big, scary, violent world that is still so unkind to women and restrict them from enjoying their freedoms safely. Boys are just in as much danger, we feel, from perpetrators and from themselves when they become the perpetrators - as they must be the effect of a long line of causes.
We fear at lot; we fear we are bad parents, or fear the things we eat and fear to trust those supplying us with our food. But is the world really this bad? Are we correct in our fears? Or is it our fears that influence the way we see the world around around us, shutting us out to the beauty and joy our planet has to offer? The results of a survey published at MSN UK has found that many Britons think we've never had it so bad. The poll of 1,000 people discovered that in a whole host of ways - from the weather to football - many of us think life today is worse than it was in the past. But is modern life so very rubbish? Is it a case of rose-tinted glasses, or a reflection of the reality of decaying Britain?
So has the UK gone to the dogs? One interesting point is that the survey found 28% of respondents thought television was getting worse. Some would say since the 13th November in 1965 - with the first ever use of the f-word on British television by literary agent Kenneth Tynan during a satirical discussion show entitled "BBC3" - TV has been on a downward spiral. Substandard scheduling now just has a wider reach, out of the control of parental guidance. The reality is there is a lot more choice in TV in term of stations and programming - and thanks to catch-up channels, iPlayer and On Demand it is also much more user-friendly. With the increasingly varied times and devices at the disposal of the modern audience, we can watch what we want, when we want.
It helps account for why more than half of us will spend 23 years of our lives in front of a screen. But some are more of a couch potato than others: The world record for continuous TV watching in 2005 was 69 hours and 48 minutes, while in 2012, at an event organised by 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment from the 8th-12th of February in Los Angeles, the world-record length for watching television was 86 hours 37 minutes, achieved by Carin Shreeves and Jeremiah Franco, both from the USA. And the TV watching marathon times just keep getting longer, and the record-breaking more inventive.
In the UK, a Guinness World record for most people watching TV underwater was achieved by 114 participants in an event in Basildon on the 1st of April in 2009. Meanwhile, the longest screen kiss in a TV show was achieved by David and Amy Barger for a duration of 3 minutes 47 seconds, on the Valentine's Day episode of KTUL TV's "Good Day Tulsa" in Oklahoma in 2013. And for those frustrated with their TV sets, Mike Yikealo punched ten 53 cm (21in) television sets wearing boxing gloves, in a time of 7.66 seconds on the set of Guinness Record TV, Stockholm, Sweden on the 3rd of February in 2001. But we don't need grand events to pull us to the small screen. Over 3 million hours of television were broadcast in 2011. That's equivalent to over 342 years of television, or the total number of hours that has passed since 1671.
But as our TV screens are increasing dominated by tired talent contests, low budget reality shows and repeats, promotions showing consumers using tablet computers and smartphones to watch videos are no longer a vision of the future - but an accurate depiction of the present. According to the latest research by Accenture, online video viewing has become a mainstream activity for consumers of all ages: 90% of those surveyed currently view video over the internet - where watching catch-up television on a tablet computer is three times more popular than watching it on a smartphone.
No doubt, TV will change to accommodate viewing habits as they shift online and hardware becomes more portable, as supported by UK viewing figures. For example, the London 2012 Olympics Closing Ceremony was watched by just over 24 million viewers, the highest figure ever recorded for a single programme, and the Royal Wedding between the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge in 2011 had an accumulative total of 26 million viewers (including online views). By comparison the 1981 Royal Wedding had nearly 22 million viewers.
Of course a wider reach is no guarantee of quality, which is entirely subjective. In the USA there is a TV channel specifically dedicated to dogs (although dogs can only watch television using modern TV sets, the rate of frames per second was too low for dogs to see moving pictures on older models), while other nations are heralding in a reactionary form of "slow TV": a fifth of the Norwegian population watched a TV broadcast of a log fire in February 2013, for example. Over on our shores we prefer to watch real people being thrown onto the fire - metaphorically speaking of course. In 2008, 14 million people tuned in to watch the X Factor results, while in 2010, 16.5 million people tuned in, making it the most viewed TV programme of the year. In the year in between, Britain's Got Talent end show was the most watched programme of 2009.
However a year before, the most watched programme was award-winning animation Wallace and Gromit: A Matter of Loaf and Death. It was also watched by the most viewers of any programme on Christmas Day in the UK in 2008, and secured the largest Christmas Day audience in five years. In recent years the New Years Eve fireworks broadcast in the last hours of the year has been amongst the most watched, but it has been suggested this is as a result of people opting to stay in to save money during a harsh economical climate. The popularity of other programming therefore feels like a blip on the reign reality shows have on our TV screens.
To some people, reality TV is evidence of everything that is wrong with both TV and society. While in 2013, Judge Judy extended her contract with CBS for 4 more years (worth 180 million dollars), more votes were cast in the 2012 season of American Idol than the 2012 presidential election in the United States. But to others, television itself is the best form of light entertainment ever - one that paradoxically can take us out of this world, or make art that imitates or eerily predicts it. One such example is the 1968 television play "The Year of the Sex Olympics" made by the BBC and first broadcast on BBC2 as part of Theatre 625.
Influenced by concerns about the societal effects of television, the play depicts a world of the future where a small elite control the media, keeping the lower classes docile by serving them an endless diet of lowest common denominator programmes and pornography. The play concentrates on an idea the programme controllers have for a new programme which will follow the trials and tribulations of a group of people left to fend for themselves on a remote island. In this respect, the play is often cited as having anticipated the craze for reality television. Thus at the edgier end of the spectrum, modern drama classics are being made, but ultimately it is one entirely down to personal preference.
But how much does personal preference dictate personal influence - and vice versa? Even while the TV show M*A*S*H lasted 8 years longer than the actual Korean War did but seemed to have no influence on our distaste for war (the final episode was watched by over 60% of all households in the US, with some 125 million people estimated to have tuned in to see it), drama shows like Sex and the City have been linked to teen pregnancies, with a RAND Institute study in 2008 suggesting that teenage girls (aged between 12 and 17) who watched a lot of TV shows with a "high sexual content" like SATC were more than twice as likely to become pregnant.
Meanwhile in 2012, over 160 baby girls were named Khaleesi after a character in Game of Thrones, while in the nineties sci-fi series X-files the popular demand for the "I Want To Believe" poster in Mulder's office - a prop created exclusively for the show and not intended to be made commercially available - caused Fox to release the poster for sale. It was also well known that George Reeves, who starred as Superman in the 1950's TV series, was frequently assaulted by children wanting to test his invulnerability. There is research, too, which suggests there is a link with what you watch to your personality traits. For example, people who watch Mad Men tend to be creative and emotionally sensitive and if you watch Family Guy you may be rebellious and not conform to the norm.
And the argument whether it's down to the power of the public to dictate what is on our screens, or the screen that has influenced what we want to see, is like the dispute over what came first - the chicken or the egg. The first series of the ITV drama Downton Abbey scored 92 out of 100 on Metacritic, making it the highest-scoring reviewer-rated show of 2010, but it was a surprise hit, not dictated by current viewing tastes. So, although some believe the power of what we see and its effect is indisputable, it seems a vicious cycle. But one in which TV might give us a clue as to why we think our situation is darker than it really is.
There is no denying that the start of the 21st Century has seen its face share of global crisis, but modern life is not in decline simply on televised criteria. We may complain about good manners, sport, TV or world events, but in most cases we're comparing today's reality with a half-remembered golden age that never really existed, or a modern world we only know through our television screens.
Depending on where you get your news fix, TV journalism has morphed into a sensational non-stop series of crises, full of incremental horrible developments. Some TV news reporting feels like we're watching a hope-sapping broadcast from a depressed dimension, where someone simply reads aloud a list of the worst events in the world, while the viewer is bombarded with pictures of fresh horror. It allows no time for reflection, and soon it can all become meaningless, with the effect of making reality somehow feel unreal.
Life becomes more like a work of fiction writing itself, a destiny beyond our control turned into the factual reading of the most horrifying stories we can imagine. And all we can do is stare at it in stunned desperation, left stranded in a nihilistic wilderness, or worse we become so far removed from reality that we we end up picking sides, as though the horror playing out on our screens is a sport, and we as the audience are left rooting for one group or the other.
Nevertheless, I often say I am a news addict, I like to catch up with news reports first thing in the morning to see what state our world is in. We can't avoid the reality we are living in; getting immersed in news reports means getting involved with your world, and motivating an impetus to change what is not working. We can't avoid reality, and I always believe that the problem is not the news itself, but how it is presented on television.
Read why you shouldn't avoid reality.
Today the world's largest TV has 201 inches and costs £414,000, but back in 1926, John Logie Baird's first television only had 30 lines on screen and gave a coarse image. Compare that with the digital signal of modern television, which sends pictures with 1080 lines, and you'll see we've come a long way from the earliest daily TV service - which began on the 30th of September in 1929 when programmes by J.L. Baird were transmitted by the BBC from the Long Acre Studio in the UK. Meanwhile, TV went airborne and mobile early in life. The first time that television images were received on an aircraft was in May 1932, when transmissions from American station W6XAO were picked up by a receiver on board a tri-motor transport plane over LA. Nearly three years later the first "mobile TV" was used in 1935 on the 22nd of March - a 3 and a half ton Mercedes-Benz Fernseh-Aufnahmewagen, equipped with an intermediate-film transmission system and used for Nazi propaganda.
After the Second World War, in America in 1951 came the emergence of live TV, televised sporting events and the beginning of sitcoms. In early fifties Britain, it was the televised coronation of Queen Elizabeth II that kick-started the love for this glowing box - which was to quickly turn its black and white origins into a mass medium of living colour. But although the first colour system was developed by J.L. Baird in 1928, it wasn't until June 1951 that the first TV series produced in colour, The World Is Yours, was transmitted by American station CBS. For some reason the first cartoon for television, Crusader Rabbit was made in colour despite the fact there was no colour television.
In the UK the first colour television broadcast took place in 1967, while the longest running TV educational show, Costa Rica's Teleclub, was first broadcast on the 8th of February in 1963, and is still on air today after fifty years of continued transmission. The world's longest running TV cookery show is Mexican Channel 4's Hasta La Cocina, which has been broadcast each weekday since the 1st of December, 1960. The Late Late Show of Ireland, which started in 1962, and The Tonight Show, which started in 1954, are the longest running talk shows in the world. Back over in Britain, the first programme shown on BBC2 in 1964 was accidentally the long-run educational pre-school series Play School after a power cut halted the opening night's programming, while on a competitor TV channel Coronation Street is the longest-running TV soap opera in the world. Between 1981 and 2004, Coronation Street always made it to the top ten most watched programmes in the UK.
Over half a century on from TV's mass inception, and today in the UK we watch approximately 4 hours of TV a day on average, with most new gadgets that come out being seamlessly joined to this viewing experience. The UK has one of the highest proportions of homes with high definition TVs in Europe. In 2011, the UK had 51 HD channels, while the US had 177, and TV viewing hardware is constantly changing to keep up with the available software. When satellite TV became available and the choice of channels widened considerably, people were asked to subscribe and pay for certain content. In Britain in 1996, BSkyB broadcast the first pay-per-view TV programme, the boxing match between Frank Bruno versus Mike Tyson. It cost subscribers £9.95, and today TV is still generating revenue.
Even now with increasing internet penetration, people in the UK are still watching more TV than ever before - just in different ways. One in 4 UK internet users claim to watch TV content on the internet every week. That's almost a quarter of UK internet users accessing online TV weekly, giving the UK a higher proportion of people accessing TV content over the internet than America, Japan, Germany or France. And alongside the online presence of TV stations, with 3 in 5 British homes using super-fast broadband services, video viewing sites like YouTube have vied for a space on our TV screens, too.
The first YouTube video was uploaded on April the 23rd, in 2005, and was called "Me at the Zoo". Since then, the videos and hits combined count amongst billions, with 72 hours of video uploaded every minute. And the speed of consumption is increasing as social networks impact on TV viewing. Youtube is the top non-Facebook brand attracting over 74 million fans, while 1 in 13 people globally use Facebook and spend on average around 7 hours per month on the site. Facebook is now bigger than the entire web was in 2004, and is the second biggest website by traffic behind Google (the 5th most popular Google search in the UK is for "Google").
Combine this with Twitter, where an average of 600 tweets per second are sent by its users (of which nearly 50% are aged 15-24 and just as likely to use their smartphones as their PC or laptop), and it creates a greater "snowball" effect. With almost half of people's waking hours spent engaging in media and communication activities, it took 5 months for Psy's "Gangnam Style" to reach 750 million views on YouTube. By comparison it took the previous record holder, Justin Bieber's "Baby", nearly 3 years to reach that number.
And with 60 million TVs in the UK from 2011 - that's almost one TV set per resident, with 9.3 million of those being flat screen TVs (an equivalent to one in every three households) - television and the internet feels like a marriage made in heaven. As the younger generations spend more time with their computers and phones, it could mean, however, that TV will change as we know it.
Nearly three in ten of the UK population claim to download or stream television, with one in three of UK adults with access to the internet having used catch-up TV services online in 2012. This heralded in the term "time-shifting", where consumers put TV programmes on storage mediums such as laptops or other TV devices to watch at a time more convenient to them - which statistics show for nearly half of time-shifted TV is on the same day. "The Snowmen" episode of Doctor Who, shown on Christmas Day 2012, was the most time-shifted programme in UK history up to that time. In 2013, the three most watched TV shows on Christmas Day were Doctor Who, Coronation Street and comedy Mrs. Brown's Boys, which all benefited from time-shifting.
This also saw the emergence of on-demand Internet streaming media such as Netflix and the "TV binge" - where you watch your favourite shows in one sitting. It would take you a week to watch every episode of the The Simpsons if each episode ran one after the other without stopping, for example, while watching every episode of Sesame Street non-stop would take nearly half a year. But although there are some fears online appliances like YouTube may push TV out of the limelight, the majority still prefer to watch their favourite shows on their TV screens.
Despite the growth of online catch-up TV via a PC or mobile, 96% of households in the UK own a digital TV. Between 2008 and 2013 the number of households in the UK with 33+ inch TVs tripled. Moreover, the main TV set remains the dominant device for consuming video. After all, it was the TV that heralded in the video generation; the first video aired on MTV was "Video Killed the Radio Star" by the Buggles in 1981. It didn't, and neither will new technology kill off TV or video.
The UK has a higher proportion (per capita) of digital video recorders (that's a TiVo like device in nearly half of all UK households) than France, Germany or USA, while statistics show that people spend about 7 hours a day watching, reading or listening to different media, but they fit more into this time by simultaneously using multiple devices. Two-thirds (six in ten) of smartphone, laptop and tablet owners in the UK say they regularly use them while watching TV to tweet or comment on their social networks about what they see - that's six in ten of the population.
No one could adequately foresee how popular this little glowing box was going to be. In 1972, the BBC began a "purge" of its archives to save costs, and amongst the shows selected for disposal were all 268 black-and-white episodes of Doctor Who. Since 1978, cast, crew and fans managed to recover 171 lost episodes. We have become loyal followers, avid watchers, and celebrity addicts; and many of us - whether we like it or not - centre our lives around the small screen.
Television, like any other invention, is pure potential - it only reflects our nature, and if we are motivated to frighten people, then people will react to that. There is research that suggests TV is the most inspiring media to "do good" (from changing harmful habits, getting more physically fit, making a charitable donation or becoming more eco-friendly) but using a powerful medium like TV to play on our fears, some experts believe, can bring drastic consequences. TV is the quickest way to get into the mind of a nation, and lulling us into a false sense of cosy satisfaction of watching the world fall apart from our living rooms like passive observers, in fact reduces everything to a small screen of fear - we get distracted and myopic when we reach out beyond our four walls. In effect, reducing everything to a small (or not so small any more) screen is similar to giving in to the framework of our fears.It is a worrying prospect, but some experts say more concern should be placed not on what is on the screen, but the fact that the screen is replacing significant quality time between families who simply spend it together watching TV. In America by the time a child reaches the age of 17 they will have watched the equivalent hours of 2 years of television, and this number rises when you compute the screen time taken up by new technologies and portables, such as tablet computers and smartphones, which are being used by both child and parent. The main concern of experts is that parents are not always good role models in this respect; today we can see many parents texting while they walk. Often they are so plugged into their device that it becomes a barrier to communication with their child.
A recent study from Stirling University's school of education found that the family's attitude to technology at home was an important factor in influencing a child's relationship with it. It concluded that the experiences of 3 to 5 year olds are mediated by each family's distinct sociocultural context and each child's preferences. The technology did not dominate or drive the children's experiences; rather their desires and their family culture shaped their forms of engagement.
But there are other experts in the field who disagree. Psychologist Dr Aric Sigman has regularly said that children are watching more screen media than ever and that this habit should be curbed because it could lead to addiction or depression. Maybe we should do what the Icelanders did. Until 1987, there were no television broadcasts in Iceland on Thursdays. In any case, however, the technology is here to stay. And with more and more televised dramas pushing the sexual boundaries on home viewing screens, children are now becoming sexualised at a young age - and with easy access to porn and websex, this cannot be completely regulated because of the open nature of the internet.
Even with parental regulation, censorship, education on the issues, net filters and controls and more vigilance notwithstanding, we have to accept the material is available and accessible, and the change has been done; we just have to live with the new issues that will arise, and create rules for their responsible use. And television is not only a player, but a dramatical and informative reflection of the changing attitudes in society towards these new avenues for sexual gratification that are out there.
One publication has advocated pupils being taught how to view pornography in school sex education lessons, while in a 2012 BBC documentary "Websex: Where's the Harm?", Nathalie Emmanuel investigated how the internet was changing the sex lives of young people. Along with the usual dangers of perverts and predators online, the speed with which new dangers are emerging since that documentary aired reads like a TV drama. Parents feel they have more to fear with new avenues for access to porn, and opportunities for danger arising from social networking. We have even merged sex with texting to create the term "sexting" - the act of sending sexually explicit messages or photographs or both, primarily between mobile phones.
The grown-up's guide to sexting.
Sexting has now become a tool in cyber-bullying and juvenile sexual abuse, where children blackmail each other with their naked pictures, threatening to distribute them on Facebook, Instagram and the like. The sexting of the rape of a teen in Steubenville in Ohio by her peers shocked the small town community in America, while such acts have also been linked to suicides by the victims due to causing severe emotional stress.
With the internet encroaching ever further on to our TV viewing experience, these issues will arguably gain even more prominence. While our notion of relationships are shaped by what we see on the screen, the fine lines of flirting and human interaction have gotten even finer on the internet, and easier to cross. As adults sometimes we don't know if we are on the right side of seduction, so how can kids? Why should children even be exposed to this before they are properly given the tools to deal with such issues?
It becomes even more harrowing when we are faced with the news story of an American 13-year-old who killed his own mother after a failed attempt to rape her in a row over a ban on the Call of Duty video game, or when we read of internet horror memes that drive children to commit murder. And even though some experts now say that spending hours online, watching TV or playing computer games each day does not harm young children's social development, other studies suggest that people who regularly play action video games could be at increased risk of developing neurological and psychiatric disorders. Moreover experts still advise to "limit screen time", because spending lots of time in front of the TV every day might reduce how much time a child spends doing other important activities such as playing with friends and doing homework.
Read how television affects young minds.
I am not advocating that television is "evil" and that we should eradicate it from our homes. Throughout this series of fear I have quoted and used examples from the TV screen; I watch good television drama for entertainment, and watch well-made documentaries for education, but I do try to skip the programming and schedules. The internet in one sense has given power back to the viewer, so that we can now watch the programmes we want to watch on our own time, and of our choosing.
One programme of interest is the BBC satire show, "How TV Ruined Your Life". It's a comedic documentary series which uses a mix of sketches and archive footage to explore the gulf between real life and television. Newspaper Guardian columnist and critic Charlie Brooker hosts the programme, and arguably he does focus on the negative aspects of TV rather than reviewing it, but some of his tongue-in-cheek comments do offer insight into our relationship with the TV screen in our homes. It is evidence that TV can at least poke fun at itself, and question its effect on its viewers. Brooker says:
As we make the journey from the cradle to the grave, we'll make and lose countless friends along the way, but one companion who'll be by our side throughout is Mr Terry Television, who's been there for us, holding our brain's hand through each increasingly shaky footfall. But television doesn't seem to like us whatever age we are, whether it's painting young people as tearaway yobs or old people as hilarious irrelevancies.Little wonder then we've come to view ageing as a sign of incompetence ... [and in an] attempt to discover what makes the different age groups tick ... Television takes the business of targeting the different age groups very seriously ... Boys are assailed by short sales pitches promoting mindless, devious violence, and extended sales pitches full of fantasy monsters, fighting, lasers and explosions, while girls are bombarded with ... adverts which should help fuel that future image neurosis.
TV has redoubled its attempts to woo ... young viewers [because they] have disposable income. The 16 to 24 age bracket is a group TV as a whole is desperately keen to pander to, [but what is] wrong with their assumptions about young people [is that] television constantly assumes all 16 to 24 year-olds are [shallow and] mindless ...
As a consequence, glib images of youth continually [appear from] every screen ... [while] middle aged men don't seem to be allowed to act their age anywhere on screen ... they're grown adults forced to appear like adolescents to appeal to the younger generation.
Having helped to establish youth as the ultimate desire, TV is only too happy to exploit your desperate attempts to cling onto it ... TV devotes much of its schedule to making older people look younger. Once people pass a certain age, they're only allowed on TV to be patronised ... excluded from the media they feel culturally obsolete. The irony is old people watch more TV than any other age group, [but] one of the main reasons old folk are overlooked by modern television is that advertisers aren't particularly enthused by them.
In summary then, TV ... either demonises or patronises you ... it makes you feel too old by ruthlessly highlighting your flaws [or] it wipes you off the screen altogether making you feel socially irrelevant.
So, is the world going wrong because TV has made us passive observers? Or worse created a mindset that we are living in a world where everyone expects the best of everything. It's an unhinged sense of entitlement - the more we want the less satisfied we feel. And the reason it might feel as though happiness is perpetually out of reach, some critics blame on aspirational television giving us an unrealistic expectation of how real life should work - with pretty, young, rich people decorating our screens. But when did TV Land become so addicted to the hard sell of an elusive good life? Many believe it has its roots in advertising.
During the genesis of TV many early adverts were functional things, little more than animated billboards extolling the virtues of the products they were pushing. In America the cost of broadcasting the first ever TV advert was only $9. But as consumers began to realise most products were basically the same processed stuff with different packaging, advertisers started attaching fantasies to the products they were selling - to make us buy into a dream. The success of advertising on false premises continues to grow well into the 21st Century. In 2013, the cost of a 30 second advert in the Super Bowl broadcast cost 4 million dollars.
With the advent of infomercials, commercials even got their TV channels, while the current world record for the longest television commercial is 60 minutes, broadcast for the 100th anniversary of Nivea. The world's longest running TV advert is the Discount Tire Company's "Thank You" commercial. First aired in 1975, the same advert has been aired continuously every year in parts of the USA. The world's shortest TV commercial is half a frame and lasts for 1/60 0f a second. Twelve different versions of the commercial were produced, all advertising MuchMusic (a Canadian music and video TV channel). Blink and you'll miss them, and the stats show we don't want to do that.
According to marketing surveys, seven out of ten TV viewers stay for the ad breaks, and viewers who use another device while watching TV are more likely to remain watching. It's in the advertising industry's interest that small screen programming diversifies into portable hardware, and with over 60% of TV viewing in the UK alone on commercial TV channels, it's no surprise that global TV revenues were estimated to be worth £258 billion in 2011. With that kind of money you could pay off the national debt of Mexico.
Out of that pie in 2011, the UK television industry generated £12.3bn of revenue, an amount that could build you Wembley Stadium 16 times over. This amounts to an estimated 2.7 billion TV ads being seen in the UK every day, with individual TV viewers seeing around 47 adverts on their television screens daily.
It's no wonder adverts have quickly adapted to new technologies. In the year 2000, the first interactive UK ad (for Chicken Tonight) was broadcast on digital satellite. ITV's This Morning was the first UK programme to feature product placement, or embedded marketing, in 2012. The first product featured was Nestle's Dolce Gusto coffee brand. But although the way the products are sold might have changed, advertisements still try to sell a concept, rather than the brand itself - sticking to decades of tradition linked to "dream" advertising.
As the sixties swung into view, "cool" was the primary dream. People lived in a world of glamour, and the desirable image of the high life has stuck through subsequent decades. The eighties saw human consumption celebrated for its own sake from dawn through dusk; in 1983 BBC Breakfast Time began transmission, while in 1987 TV broadcasting hours were extended 24/7. It wasn't about consuming as much as we needed, but consuming more than we wanted - and somewhere along the way these glitzy, aspirational values of mass consumerism leaked out and started infecting popular TV dramas.
Nearly a quarter of commercial TV viewed is categorised as drama, and it's been said that if everyone in the TV show you're watching is good looking, it's not worth watching. Yet the most popular daytime TV soap is the American The Bold and The Beautiful. The daytime drama - which is shown across 5 continents - has gathered more than 24.5 million viewers worldwide. We have relished watching exorbitantly wealthy beautiful people living empty lives - and no other series chimed as well with the money-worshipping eighties as the American series of Dallas. It changed our relationship with money, and with each other.
There are articles I've written that deal with wealth creation, but it always comes with a caveat - your true wealth lies inside. Because buying things doesn't always make us happy, not in the long run. Credit card debt devours souls. Stuff that's on sale usually has an annoying downside. There is no correlation between the price of a brand and how long it lasts. And consuming money as we do food for comfort, can be addictive.
Addiction is a much greater problem in society than it's made out to be. It's present in every person in various forms, but usually we call it something else. The most common addiction in the world, some believe, is the draw of comfort. It wrecks dreams and breaks people. Some experts say that in any field in you want to get ahead, if what you're doing feels perfectly safe, then there is probably a better course of action. Sometimes money can skew our perceptions because it has an emotional affect on us. Emotions exist to make us strongly biased towards or against something. This hinders as often as it helps; often we need to come from a divine perspective where we can rise above it, to see what really matters.
Currency is a tool, it's not important unless we make it so; some say if you make love important then you're the richest person in the world. The fact that it's clichéd makes it no less true. With love you can be vulnerable and tough at the same time - but on the opposite end of the coin, money can do that, too. Most of us will know what it feels like to need more money to make things work. Struggling to make ends meet is an experience most of us can appreciate; when our finances are good we try to help others financially, or try and give advice on how they can turn their finances around, but if want is all you need, then you are setting yourself up for disappointment.
Money isn't evil; this is a qualification that runs like a common theme through this entire series. The notion of religion, the workings of science, the gadgets we invent are all pure in their potential - however, like those, the problem with money is what it has come to symbolise, and what it gets in front of - especially our art. In 2001, NBC offered Jerry Seinfeld $5 million per episode for another season of Seinfield. He declined. But many of today's problems many believe can be attributed to the way we have turned our national currencies into the standard by which we measure the value of living things.
This is the real fear of gold lust. How much are we worth? How much to we have to accumulate to be worth anything? And what is our life worth if we lose all our wealth, or have none to begin with? In Britain, surveys show we still have a class system - there is still a top and a bottom, at the top we still have an elite of very wealthy people and at the bottom the poor, with very little social and cultural engagement - and it's no longer one you are simply born into, but has become synchronised with the American way of buying your way in. Joining the race to accumulate more and more wealth has created a dog-eats-dog world, and some say TV programming forged people's aspirations to want to spend as though they were rich - sometimes well beyond their means.
Now there is even a shift in the portrayal of the rich on screen. While in the eighties fictional lifestyles of the wealthy were glamorous, characters like JR Ewing in Dallas were clearly the bad guys. Now reality TV celebrates real life tycoons, and the more explicitly inhuman they are, the more their stars shine.
Critics tell us that money separates us from our humanity, whilst religion says its our humanity the separates us from the beasts that should serve us, but animals don't have any sense of money. They don't equate worth or value to metal and paper. Some have social ranking and feel stress like we do - the Barbary macaque for example - but money is a way humans have invented to boil our world down to a depressing amount of numbers, which we accumulate and use to make others feel inferior. Once you've accumulated lots of money, TV tells you how to invest it all, or feeds into the fear of its loss - disabling you from enjoying it or using it properly.
But it's not money that makes you privileged; it's not allowing money to "make" you that means you're privileged. Obviously we have to be realistic, we live in a market economy and cannot abolish the money cycle any time soon. But we have seen how its collapse can hit us all, and we shouldn't be dependant on it for dignity, or for compassion, or act inhumanely out of fear when we lose it. Money doesn't make you any better as a person. Life should not be a list of fiscal rules, where financiers become the judge and jury for how they are calculated and when they are met, and yet, money, and the people that control it, have become some of most visible idols on TV.
Why doesn't society today produce more people like Captain Robert Falcon Scott, whose doomed expedition to the south pole is an inspiration of human dignified struggle in the face of adversity? In one of his last letters he wrote as he lay dying with his men, he said:
...we are setting a good example to our countrymen, if not by getting into a tight place, by facing it like men when we were there. We could have come through had we neglected the sick.
Scott's last letters imbue an extraordinary sense of courage and compassion - to have given your life simply because you couldn't abandon a fellow human being in need is something we read of more in stories now, than real life news reports. But those people are still out there courageously battling against the odds: explorer Sir Ranulph Fiennes is going strong, despite age and health complications, and it could be that television just prefers to focus on different sorts of idols.
Life at the start of the 20th Century was hard... In British television there's a tendency to look at this period from the point of view of the officer classes.The summer of 1914 just before war started is always described as the end of an Edwardian golden age - innocent and charmed and about to be destroyed by the mud and blood and death on the Western Front. It wasn't a golden age for men like my great-grandfather.
In writing The Village I wanted to get past these received wisdoms about the past and describe the bigger picture.
While [the poet] Rupert Brooke was swimming naked in Grantchester men died in the fields - from overwork.
Television drama has spent too much time being in love with the poet and not enough time exploring the wonderful, complex and dramatic stories attached to the rest of the population.
Today, thanks to reality TV, ordinary people have become the celebrities - the camera is focused on the individual lives of people "like us". Decades ago people attained celebrity and power by showcasing a level of talent, but critics say now TV makes you famous for embarrassing yourself, and revealing your embarrassing ailments, on camera.
In Britain, many critics give Channel 4's programme "Embarrassing Bodies" as evidence of people who contrarily are willing to bare their medical issues of a sensitive nature - including their private parts - on public TV. Although others defend such programmes for raising awareness of certain illnesses, many feel such shows (because that's what they ultimately are) leave the viewer equally as repulsed as hollow, giving way for the saying that television mainly serves the talentless.
Great talent arguably can sometimes be the opposite, where it seems to fill our lives, but takes from its host. Such immense talent can be the tragedy that holds lessons for us all; it can leave the talented hollow inside, like those who possess ultimate mastery, the great born masters, as chess grandmaster Bobby Fischer and music artist Michael Jackson conspire to remind us, have hollow lives of surpassing unhappiness, as if the needed space for a soul was replaced by whirring clockwork of genius. But, some have asked, is it the talent, or the exposure that comes with it that sucks a person dry?
Today, the galaxy of fame has become expanded with the common people, but they don't really reflect the ordinary person; they are edited to distort the real challenges we all face daily in our lives - and yet we become glued to our screens secretly enjoying the freak show paraded in front of us. Entertainment is escapism, but laughing at others in this way shouldn't be - unless we are also willing to laugh at ourselves.
Appearing on TV makes the public treat you as the thing you portray - and thus televisions act like hate sponges soaking up the animosity of the general public directed at the public or the new celebrities that are constantly glittering in our eyes. The sheer amount of vitriol many harbour for these new celebrities is staggering - as evidenced by the case of the obsessed killer that wanted to kidnap, murder and castrate Justin Bieber or the two men convicted of plotting to kill singer Joss Stone.
Although some believe women have it better already, trumpeting the "end of men", there are still not enough women in positions of power, even though the world has suffered from this deficit for a long time. But why does what Beyoncé happens to sing on one track carry so much clout? Or should it carry that much influence? And why do we try and copy the style of the stars? Today's inspirational women are the ones who look out for themselves, and the real people with style are not the celebrities we spend our hard earned money trying to emulate, but the ordinary man or woman on the street that expresses his or her individuality according to their true authentic self. Such style is timeless.
But as much as these celebrities are venerated as idols, some hate on them with the dogged insistence of racists. And showbiz TV programmes exploit the fact that we both hate and loathe celebrities, picking up on every imperfection, generating more negativity on our screens. We've all pointed and laughed at magazine pictures of unfortunate celebrities who've had a spot of botched plastic surgery, haven't we? It even teaches some of us that we should aspire to be hated - because then that means we've "made it".
On this very subject, in a January 1985 article for Playboy magazine, titled "Freaks and the American Ideal of Manhood", James Baldwin said that Michael Jackson's public humiliations said more about our own fears, than Jackson himself:
...he will not swiftly be forgiven for having turned so many tables... freaks are called freaks as they are treated - in the main, abominably - because they are human beings who cause to echo, deep within us, our most profound terrors and desires.
Thus this isn't a new invention of modern times; veneration has always gone hand in hand with persecution in human history - especially of persecuted saints. The past, someone once wrote, is a foreign country. they do things differently there, and venerating the bones of a saint to bring you closer to the divine may seem strange to us, but we put up shrines to celebrities today, whose artefacts - say of John Lennon or Elvis Presley - can fetch huge amounts of money. We call these things memorabilia, but in medieval times they were called holy relics.
Saints were the celebrities of their day, and their relics were physical connections - like pieces of portable magic transported from church to church, wherever they were placed they made that space holy. Even though they were abandoned in the Reformation by the inevitable overreaction that saw many shrines destroyed, today Britain has restored many of those initially Catholic shrines for use in Anglican and nonconformist worship - not as sacred things in themselves but as a means of turning your mind towards God. Historically there was a great deal of superstition, and money and greed attached to relics, which was corrupting, but modern day protestants feel that the relic can be an aid to worship, rather than their reintroduction signifying the worship of a relics.
The living relationship Catholics have with their saints is often said to be misunderstood as idolatry, but mundane things have always taken on an aura of mystery simply because they've been touched by people we admire. In Victorian times it was the lock of hair of a lost loved one, in more modern times people revere pop and rock stars, but in previous religious times the cult of the saint was revered by many. The lives and deeds of the saints touched people in a profound way, and is still doing so over a millennia later. Their relics inspire faith and is a tangible link to the past.
In Britain, dead saints have helped build national identities like St. David of Wales, shrines built to dead saints have created cities like Glasgow in Scotland, and in England cathedrals have been built in their honour as a lasting testament for people's love of a worthy person. Some would say celebrities are not worthy people, but we idolise them, crucify them and then, when they die, we venerate them, because they invoke feelings in us so strong we label it as "love". Sometimes it is not about fear; poet Philip Larkin once wrote that what will survive of us is love - in a way it is what we hang our hopes, aspirations - and fears - on, but some today would say that the healthy way to celebrate a person that has gone, is to leave them where their journey ended, and continue on our own, with the same worthy aspirations in our own unique spirit.
We can pray for those that have died, and we can make them live again in memory, but we shouldn't build shrines and make daily pilgrimages out of fear for moving on with life. We should draw inspiration and comfort from the memory of past worthy lives - connected by a shared belief to something that is good. This belief can be extended to what is worthwhile today - in that we use our energies to protect living species and our habitat, so that future generations may continue to live in this heaven on Earth. This is the real, living, shrine we should be building today.
There are millions of worthy people that do good each day whom will never be venerated to sainthood, peaceful activists that struggle in the cause of animal rights, and for a better future for us all. It is for this reason, some critics say we should put aside relics and enhance our connections to the important causes, where our whole planet can become a sanctuary for life, rather than just the shrines we have built to venerated human saints, long gone that continue to hold a special place in many people's hearts.
There is no denying that if we could channel this emotional energy and direct it towards the simple message of love for all life, our fears over so many things would lessen. In Britain we may have put relics back in their shrines, restored from the Reformation, but our communities remain ever fractured. We live in communities where neighbours don't know each other; they stay in their homes and hate on each other from their curtained windows, like every other street in the world, full of people keeping themselves to themselves, while hating each other at the same time.
Instead of coming together on special days, people go away on holiday in their thousands. On Good Friday, people would rather go to celebrity raves rather than mass, and where once national identities took over religious identities, now celebrity identities have taken over them all - straight from our screens. But there are urgent issues today that require action, rather than passive observation from our TV screens, as we watch the beautiful and ordinary rub shoulders during their minutes of unforgiving fame.
Under the watchful eye of TV, reality is no one friend. With even the most beautiful people subject to such scrutiny, how can ordinary people compete? Our life becomes, critics say, one slow, nervous opinionated breakdown where we are constantly judging ourselves, and others. Reality TV has even exploited this sad phenomena by putting on shows where we judge people by the outer appearance, while other TV programmes even try to give you an "internal makeover", where somehow it's believed you can become comfortable in own body simply by publicly ridiculing yourself.
Is watching TV really bad for you?Television has been called everything from the boob-tube to the idiot box, and the effect some believe it may have on us are daunting when you consider the violence and commercialism that accompanies many shows. No wonder we were told TV is bad for us, and not just the part about sitting too close.
True, since TV became a popular household appliance, it has seen its share of awful and truly predictable programming. However, some believe that while programme choices have increased they have also improved. In fact, some say today's television can even be considered intellectually stimulating.
Proponents to this view say that compared to television of 30 years ago, many of today's dramas are more intellectually demanding, requiring viewers to focus on the plot and storyline, make inferences, fill in information and track shifting social relationships. It's called the "Sleeper Curve" and rather than dumbing down our society, it forces us to use our brains.
Although this doesn't mean we're not affected by what we see, it does seem to dent the myth that modern TV is making us dumber. The linear shows of the 1970s that we once found riveting are considered slow-moving and boring by today's standards, when a typical drama contains multiple story threads involving as many as 20 recurring characters. Viewers are rising to the challenge of more complex dramas with dialogue that doesn't state the obvious, and characters who use terms viewers many not completely understand. They argue that compared to television of 30 years ago, many of today's dramas are actually intellectually stimulating.
To give TV it's due, it has begun to allow ordinary viewers to criticise its programming, putting a twist on the TV-on-TV critique provided by programmes such as "How TV Ruined Your Life". In Britain there is a documentary series called "Gogglebox" that aims to reveal how we watch and judge television. However, all it appears to show is that we can still make a spectacle of ourselves as we judge TV. Mirroring, deliberately or not, a number of experiments in the 1970s and 80s, in which cameras were secretly placed inside sets - revealing, among other things, that viewers are prone to skip the adverts and to have settee sex during boring programmes - "Gogglebox" films various sets of relatives and friends as they watch the box. But is it people-watching and voyeurism gone mad? People should vent their feelings for their own good, not for our entertainment. In these instances, TV feels like a cult the preys on the vulnerable and their fears.
It's imperative we face our fears, and embrace our shadow sides; the fact of the matter is there will be times that, emotionally, mentally and spiritually, we'll all hurt inside, and piling up the hurt won't make our fears go away. But this shouldn't become an undignified spectacle we watch weekly on our screens. Sometimes these things produce something of interest, and most certainly it will entertain because many of us will always interested in the self-obsessed, but rarely is it of any worthwhile merit.
Yet many have willingly jumped on to this bandwagon of banality. Critics say that reality TV has created a new type of celebrity that didn't exist 10 years ago. In the topsy-turvy world of the celebrity, they can be split into two categories - those who are desperately trying to climb up the slippery pole for the first time, and those who have been up there, slid down, and now want to scrabble back up. It's pitying poignant. And if we're not gleefully watching people reveal their warts and all for a little share of the limelight, we are watching people from the limelight trying to work on us.
The sixties may have long stopped swinging in London, but the aspirational whirlpool on TV is speeding up; every image on TV is becoming more sexed-up in their desperate attempts to help us visualise more things to aspire to - and there is no better selling currency than sex. Through the TV, it's become a world where sex is used to sell everything, and there are some critics that bemoan the fact. British columnist Arifa Akbar, writing for the Independent, took a stab at cookery programmes on British TV:
So Paul Hollywood is not only giving Nigella Lawson a run for her money in the sex-symbol-of-the-stove stakes, but now he is going it alone without the ever-fragrant Mary Berry by his side in "Paul Hollywood's Bread". It's not the same without the peculiarly appealing chemistry that runs between them. And it's certainly more blokeish. We saw him kneading, pummelling and throwing dough around in macho fashion ("It's a great workout… I use all my body weight"), as he stated the show's raison d'être: "Making a loaf of bread is much more satisfying than buying it."That's all well and good, Paul, but how many of us actually dusted down our ovens after seeing him bake? Don't the ever increasing number of TV cookery shows just make us want to eat and so add to the expanding waistlines of our obese nation? Recurring images of Hollywood eating with telegenic relish and murmuring sweet nothings of pleasure as he masticated, certainly made the programme feel like it was designed to make us salivate – first and foremost. Perhaps this is supposed to engender the urge to cook, though it didn't work for me. Hollywood declared that bread could be a staple in every meal, cooking various loaves for breakfast, lunch, tea and dinner – a veritable carb-fest. Gwyneth Paltrow would surely not be amused.
Yeah, but it's not really about the bread, is it? It's about watching Paul Hollywood make the bread. It's about a well-turned-out honey-glazed hunk rolling up the sleeves of an expensive shirt and plunging his big hands into warm, moist dough, and working it, masterfully. Slowly to start with, using his fingers to stretch and tease. A drizzle of olive oil, then firmer and rhythmic. "I use quite a bit of my body weight, down through my hands," he says. Do you, Paul? Look, kneading with two hands now, a ball of dough in each hand. Mrs Hollywood is a lucky lady. I wonder is she jealous, now her husband is a national focus of lust?
Down to the mill then, for a bit of bump and grind, if you know what I'm saying. And to massage his rye loaf with an oaty mix. "Start by rubbing on the top, and take it as far down as possible," he says, in his soft Liverpudlian lilt. Down as far as possible … Oh Paul, really?
Actually, it also works well with the sound off and Barry White on instead. Or Donna Summer. Ooh, love to love you baby. Surely it should be going out at least half an hour later, because it's basically porn. For the amateur master baker at home. So to speak.
Using sex to make us "love" something, however, creates a crooked relationship between us and the television set, as dysfunctional as if it were a human partner. And it is not just cookery programmes churning out subliminal "food porn" on our screens, all kinds of subjects use the same titillating techniques. It's disquieting that we habitually suffix the word "porn" on to the end of generic shows that we think look "sexy" - home interior shows, pop celebrity shows and the like. Once idols were revered for their abstinence of earthly pleasures, now we idolise sex symbols and raise museums to pop music, rather than true heroes that seek to add value to life, and not themselves.
Does subliminal advertising actually work?
And thanks to TV shows like this, it somehow doesn't feel OK to own a reasonable house, or eat reasonable food any more - instead you might feel a lingering failure for dwelling in anything not an architectural miracle, or coming home to home cooked gourmet dining every evening - even when the reality is TV chefs probably go home to tuck into baked beans on toast, after working with all that convoluted fare everyday. But in front of the screen, even pet food is now advertised as though our pets are discerning gourmet diners. Food has become just another aspirational touchstone, a gastronomical one - where eating has become an experience to savour, than one to survive.
Our relationship with food has evolved considerably; food and our sense of taste is very much involved in our appreciation of life. It produces enormous pleasure. Scientists say this is one factor why we eat too much of the food we know is bad for us (and why the secret ingredient in great tasting food is usually either sugar or butter, in obscene amounts). We no longer eat for its nutritional content alone; for us food is more than eating for its nutritional value as other species do - ours is a social activity. It could be with family, it could be pleasurable, have politics or sex involved - for example dating, meeting new people, or a business lunch - a meal is something we use to accomplish other purposes besides filling our bellies.
We are the ultimate social animal, it's what has made us the dominant species, yet it brings with it a potential weakness. If we as a social group eat the wrong food, it's hard to be the one that doesn't - and if we are "sold" the idea nationally on TV that food is sexy when luxurious, then that makes it all the harder to say "no".
If food was just about nutrition there wouldn't be so many overweight people over-sexed with all the food porn available on our screens. There is scientific conflict over how dangerous obesity actually is to health in general, but there are some that say thousands die every day due to obesity in the West. There are those that believe we should we revert to the natural way of doing things by looking to the past, while others think we should employ science and use technological advances to engineer sweet tasting foods that trick our brains, without needing ingredients like refined sugar.
This may be healthier, but we are still at the start of genetically modifying foods and so are not really clear on its effects on our digestive systems - and is it really healthier if the adverse effect of such advancements is to make us eat more? It's not without some irony that the first TV remote control, which was created in 1950, was called "Lazy Bones". And promoting an unhealthy sedentary lifestyle aside when we live from our settees, it doesn't take a huge leap of the imagination to connect the rising phenomena of obesity with what we are spoon fed on our TV screens. Doctors are even recommending TV-free days to combat obesity, but it's more than just the effect long-term sitting has on our bodies.
Cookery programmes used to concentrate on the business of cookery, but today cookery programmes are less about food and more about about comfort, feeling safe and wanted - and we treat our relationship with food as irresponsibly as we do with sex. But whether it's who we sleep with, how much money we own, what our houses look like or what we eat, everything has become about a lifestyle to aspire to - and if the way we feed our family has become an aspirational lifestyle choice, so has the family unit itself.
We treat our children as status symbols; and advertisers know how much parents adore their children so they churn out aspirational ads that prey on their maternal instincts. This in turn makes parents feel like failures if they can't provide their children with everything they see on screen. We spoil them creating entitled children, some experts say, making them fat on "parental love" and obese with kindness, or become so paranoid over any misfortune that might befall our young, that we keep them indoors in front of the TV, to grow up in the glare of aspirational imagery. Here they soak up an unrealistic version of the real world outside, and so the cycle continues.
One (un)natural consequence of growing up with such glitzy empty mindedness is that children want to grow up to be celebrities themselves, becoming self-obsessed and self-destructive in the process. As evidence, we can watch MTV's "My Super Sweet 16" - which rather than a teen reality show, comes off as an orchestrated smear campaign against humankind in general. Of course showing our love by lavishing money isn't in itself a bad thing, but when on such shows spoiling your child has never been so unedifying or humiliating.
It makes for a good argument to say that this is not the healthy way to show children our love, or teach them about love and its place in the real world. Our fear that we might not show our children enough love and affection, has us overstepping the boundaries in many ways. Ultimately, we are killing our children with misguided kindness when it fosters teenage aspirations disproportionate to real life. There is science that says true love and kindness may even improve mental health, not destroy it, but it involves engaging in kind acts to help the person to get out and encounter other people, in conjunction with therapies that can help the person change their beliefs about themselves.
If our kindness or love is reinforcing a person's self-destructing view of themselves, then arguably this isn't love. In fact, some experts urge caution about performing acts of kindness chosen by someone else or just to impress others. Like eating the wrong foods because we follow the social group, performing acts of kindness because it's required by the group, can take away the individual's sense of autonomy. We no longer know who we are unless we eat the "right" foods, look a certain way, or have enough money to follow the lifestyles of the celebrities we idolise.
And if this is the way our children are being nurtured, then as the next generation, life will not get better. Depictions of empty excess demean us all; the worship of money is going to get worse, because becoming an actively swaggering moron has been openly encouraged for too long on television. And little wonder so many people have gotten themselves into debt. Some even say that the economic crisis has been a dent to this pride that comes before a fall - and we shouldn't fear it, but see it as liberating, as a chance to get back on track to what really matters in life. Because when the money runs dry, your dreams shouldn't - unless they are based on TV land delusions.
Everything used wisely can make a valid contribution to our lives - kindness, sex, and money, but our desire to be kind or healthy and our basic human nature to follow the herd can pull us in different directions. Still we are a clever species - we got ourselves into this mess, we can get ourselves out of it.
But not, however, if we are sitting in front of our TV screens without becoming a discerning viewer. Television as entertainment and escapism is great, but what happens when we can't escape TV's entertainment at our own expense? We could try pushing down our fears, switching off our TVs, and go out to enjoy our life.
Through most of human history, killing wolves has been regarded as a public good. These twin flame animals were hunted almost to extinction in America, France, the Netherlands, and in Scotland by royal hunts and individual hunters. But after millennia spent exterminating them, humanity is protecting wolves; they are making a comeback as we try once again to compensate for overreacting in the past. These days wolves are little more to most humans than a reminder of a wilder past they have put behind them, but which still tugs at their souls. Numbers have risen again - but in certain circles so have ancient resentments.
Although humans domesticated their best friend the dog from the species at least 15,000 years ago, humans have long regarded the wolf as their worst enemy. One predator rarely makes friends with another unless they have successfully tamed them into servitude, and the idea of manifest destiny - that conquering territory previously controlled by savages and wild beasts was a moral duty - is still pushed by certain religions and groups. But fearing the wild, and trying to control it has brought with it devastating consequences. Growing evidence of environmental damage is now fuelling the belief that while humankind was busy getting rich, it was ruining its most precious asset. Our efforts to control nature as a resource, rather than tame it for our use has had the opposite effect, with nature ever increasingly encroaching on our very doorsteps.
And we don't even have to leave our houses for the fear to enter - this dark world we're constantly told we live in comes shining through our TV sets. Because the moment it appears on our television screens, somehow it takes on a more ominous effect; television's slightly hysterical take on the world has a way of colouring our everyday experiences. In 1999 it was estimated that by the time an American child reaches 18 he or she will see around 16,000 murders on television. Its screen often functions as a magic mirror, as gruesome as any morality folk-tale, providing endless scenes of mesmerising unpleasantness - a gory tale of bloody murder, horrifying depictions of humanity's inevitable demise, and more petrifying news coverage than you could shake a fear stick at.
Worse still, because the news is filled with so many crime stories it feeds the impression that criminality is rising, when the evidence otherwise is very powerful. The downward trend since 1995 in the UK has been gradual but clear (suggesting that although it may skew our perception, television may not overtly influence the healthy mind). Obviously there are callous people in the world who need no help from television, and the majority of us do need to know what is going on in the world. Yet, while sensationalising serious issues might make them sexy or more eye-grabbing by giving them the shock treatment, does it make them newsworthy?
Shock tactics do sometimes work to expose the truth, and although it may seem as television has done nothing but either shock us out of our skin or make us laugh at ourselves with gallows humour, there have been a few exceptions when shock TV is said to have helped change world events. For instance, the 1983 American TV drama "The Day After", which is a graphic, disturbing film about the effects of a devastating nuclear holocaust on small-town residents of eastern Kansas, affected President Ronald Reagan so much as to change his stance on nuclear warfare. Reagan wrote in his diary about the effectiveness of the film, and that it had left him depressed. Not longer after the superpowers adopted a policy of arms reductions, culminating in a nuclear arms force treaty.
With the first treaty to regulate the global trade in conventional arms on the horizon, although today's world might not be facing nuclear devastation - minus Iran and North Korea - it still feels a lot more chaotic than it did in previous decades, perhaps because the presentation of current affairs has become more chaotic and perilous. The news feels like a hyper-edited real time televisual thriller, and no wonder, critics say, we are all so terrified on the inside; we're not even safe in our own homes as we sit there staring a machine that warns us worse is to come.
Television shouts boo in our minds, and we react in real life, retreating further into our armchairs. Most TV shows use fear to drive a message home, it's one of the most powerful ways to grab an audience's attention - because no matter how sophisticated we appear to be, our brain is still cursed with a paleomammalian limbic system that we can't fully control.
Ever wondered why we jump or our heart skips a beat at a bump in the night? Our fear responses are governed by twin almond shaped clusters of nuclei known as the amygdala - primitive reactions beyond the intellect, meant to protect, stimulated when confronted by a loud noise, and better known as the "flight or fight" or response. It is also thought to be associated with memory, so if you have an unpleasant experience and your amygdala is stimulated, an association quickly forms in your head. Experts say this is why our parents used scare tactics to mould on us from an early age - the more scarier the imagery, the more likely it would be to lodge into our collective memory.
Today, even though tuning into the news can be like looking directly into the face of terror, we do it, and we can't turn away because we are biologically programmed to pay attention to any potential threat. Thus the amygdala may fire off in response to the pre-programmed terrors we're born with - instinctive fears of loud noises and sudden movements and the like - but it's also easy for them to help us learn to fear almost anything.
Coupled with television, can the images we see on our screen train us to fear and hate our world, and create a negatively perceived view of our society that doesn't really exist? In the 1970s, Professors George Gerbner and Larry Gross, of the University of Pennsylvania, carried out pioneering research into the effect of television on viewers. They believed that within a few decades, TV had come to enjoy a degree of influence on modern society that was comparable to the power religion held over our species for centuries.
Gerbner and Gross developed a hypothesis known as cultivation theory, which said that over time watching TV alters the viewer's perception of reality; their view of the real world marches in step with that of the televised one. The more frequently an image or event is depicted on screen, the greater significance the cultivated viewer attaches to it in the real world. Since much of TV consists of dramatic conflict, violent action and alarming news coverage - according to their theory, the more you watch, the more passive, nervous and frightened you become.
Television dramas, however, prefer to present us with gruesome tales of murder of methodically planned out killings - but contrarily it's often the reassuring type of story which reinforces the notion that real life follows a dramatic narrative in which the dastardly villains are brought to justice. Not only does it perpetuate the myth that most killers are intelligent, clever psychopaths, but that somehow they are always foolish enough to get caught.
And when undeniably random bad things do happen, TV processes them on our behalf, turning them into titillation; in reality emergency shows or in shows where we videotape our own misfortunes and send them in for money, or just a laugh. And we have begun to associate the misfortune of others in this way - effectively stunting our own feelings of empathy for our fellow humans, and by extension for all life.
Furthermore, apparently concerned it is running out of nasty real life threats, TV has started visually speculating about bad stuff that hasn't happened - but might; in recent years there has been a slew of "what if" drama documentaries, depicting what could occur if things got even more dangerous for humankind then they already are. In TV's hypothetical universe, danger could spring from literally anywhere. Best to stay at home in front of your TV, then. And like a final twist to this horrific tale, the host of "How TV Ruined Your Life" had this to say about the fear generated on our TV screens:
Alarming though much of TV is, as we stare into our screens desperately gazing into the light like a rodent suckling at a consolatory teat, the warning box is comforting us even as it scares. It transforms random calamity into Hollywood style entertainment, rendering it less real; it says the good will defeat the bad, it makes sense of our universe in a way that is as soothing as it is fake - and it gets away with it. That is possibly more frightening.
If food programmes are porn, then it also feels that there is a pornographic focus on human terror. It appears TV not only distorts our perception to the world outside - as somehow only filled with the dark city streets of serious drama, a generally loveless place - but it also fills us with the unrealistic hope that despite this, things will always somehow get better. And switching it off doesn't make you feel any safer, unless you can "switch off" completely.
Television tells us how to behave for our own good, and when we don't respond to the voice of authority ordering us about, we can feel guilty. Everyone else is watching TV, so we must do the same. Subsequently, TV fills us with guilt, adding to the stress of modern living; and the science suggests that it can certainly condition you to be frightened of all sorts of things, to fill you with a false sense of reality, while making you want to avoid true reality at the same time, because of the skewed perception of the world we see from the screen.
That being said, however, it has to be remembered that TV is only a medium; it can inform as well as entertain and horrify. Documentaries can educate on a range of issues, with the more sensational gathering large audiences. The world's highest audience for a TV documentary is 39 million for CBS' 9/11 programme, which was broadcast in the USA on the 10th of March in 2002, highlighting that unless we shine a spotlight on these dark corners, we will continue to remain involuntary friends of fear.
In addition, it's through such TV and film we can learn about the world, and its different cultures. For example, Renate Costa's insistently prodding documentary about the secret life of her gay uncle, Rodolfo Costa, under the oppressive government of the Paraguayan dictator Alfredo Stroessner, opens a window onto a time of homophobia, torture and persecution in her country. Her quest is important for us to see, because it pulls back layers of delusion and dishonesty that exist in all societies across the globe.
And the research which suggests TV is more likely to make one cry, laugh, feel emotional than any other medium, emphasises just how powerful its effect is on our lives. Since films began, from the silent era to the first talking picture "The Jazz Singer" in 1927, there are some films (from the big and small screen) that will truly tug at your heart and bring tears, bring you a heaviness of the soul, and yet imbue a sense of appreciation for human life that inspires you in your own. At its best, it can even influence world leaders to change the course of history - TV dramas like "The Day After" or the cinematic Algerian-French film "Days of Glory", which depicted the discrimination Muslim soldiers faced fighting for the French in the Second World War - mentioned in part two of this series - are two prominent examples.
Another example is "Joyeux Noel" - a dramatisation of a true version of events that took place on Christmas Eve during the First World War. In that film, various front-line soldiers of the conflict peacefully met each other to share a precious pause in the carnage, with German and Allied soldiers getting to know the men who lived on the opposite side of a brutal war, in what became a true lesson of humanity. The fact that the story is based on real events shows us that there is good in humans across the world. In this story, all sides are respected as humans and the soldiers come to understand that under the law of nature, we are all one.
It also highlights how people can manipulate religion, not to heal and bring love, but to spread hate between people, and turn those with differences into evil beings because of where they were born and the language they speak - and who throughout the course of the film discover they are not so different after all. The film is symbolic of corrupt religious leaders who use their influence for all the wrong reasons, pulling people apart instead of bringing people together.
Yet, "based on a true story" can mean anything, and we need to be aware that what we are watching is not real life. Often dramatised or romanticised past accuracy, it's basically a story inside a screen. What is important is what we take from it. And though cinematic films are usually outside of the remit of TV produced programming, they do invariably find their way from the cinema screen onto our TV screens, via TV stations and streaming media, and our own media players. Plus, television makes its own films, too. Whole channels are dedicated to the TV movie, and especially at seasonal times of the year we are inundated with TV's pick of the old "has-been" movie stars to feature in their family film fare.
Nevertheless, films are not seen to be as intrusive in our lives as serial TV programmes, simply because they are not viewed as frequently, and are either seen as "art" or "pure entertainment" and thus only someone completely lacking in mental faculty would confuse it with reality. Plus we like our horror. Worldwide ticket sales for the "Saw" franchise put it just shy of a billion dollars, making it the highest earning horror franchise globally. The argument goes that we choose the films we want to watch; we have more choice with the films we watch - we know their genre, they are classified according to violent and sexual content, and how intelligently or poorly they are made. According to the Internet Movie Database, for example, the worst movie ever made (as of 2013) is "Disaster Movie" as polled by viewers. Thus it is a conscious choice.
Perhaps it is for this reason we have given films such a wide remit - far more than TV programmes. Although cinema movies have been heavily subject to censorship (Alfred Hitchcock's 1960 gruesome classic Psycho was the first American film to show a toilet flushing), films made for the larger screen hold their fair share of outrageously excessive violence. Paul Schrader, who wrote the script for the 1976 violent classic Taxi Driver in five days, is rumoured to have kept a loaded gun on his desk for "motivation and inspiration" as he was writing. This hyper version of reality pushed by film media is now being questioned by some - especially with the episodes of copy-cat killings that have followed a few films - over whether our world view is slowly being distorted by it, too.
Do violent films cause real life violence? It's a question that film-maker Quentin Tarantino has had to face a lot during his career. When he was probed on a link between violence on screen and in real life for an interview on British TV about his violent outing "Django Unchained", Tarantino almost became violent himself. His film (which has made well over £252m in cinemas worldwide) was released days after the Newtown school massacre in America, in which 20 children were shot while attending school in Connecticut. When asked about the link between enjoying film violence and enjoying real violence, Tarantino had snapped that he was "shutting" the interviewer's "butt down".
But should Tarantino have censored the interviewer; he himself enjoys the privilege of making his films without censor, so shutting down a viable argument directed at him can smack of hypocrisy. No one could legally blame Tarantino for a murder committed on the back of his films, but isn't he at least morally responsible - and morally accountable - for his films to take part in the discussions they raise?
In "Django", Tarantino's depiction of a vengeful slave meting out (very) bloody justice in the antebellum South has some seeing it brilliant or progressive, while there are others who thought Tarantino crossed a line, either in his depiction of violence or his deployment of racial epithets. Although the film with a black cowboy illuminates an area of American history that is often a whitewashed version of the reality, what distinguishes Tarantino from other directors of his ilk is the way in which he crosses the line: with the calculating indiscriminateness of someone who has spent so much time on the other side of the line that he seems to forget where he last saw it.
It goes without saying that as responsible adults, we need to be allowed to make the choice what we watch, and what we let into minds and our living rooms, but shouldn't we try to understand the effect it can have on us? If mindless entertainment makes us mindless, then what does watching mindless violence do to us? It is true that technology merely reflects our attributes; it is only as "good" or "bad" as the vehicle we choose to push it with - but if film is a powerful medium that has the potential to influence us, the question is, who is behind the media using that influence for their own life view?
And if that is one of fear, should we unconsciously allow it into our lives? It is not about censoring the director, but censoring ourselves, or watching something with an educated, conscious awareness, knowing the medium for what it is. Is it inspiring art at its best, or cathartic fantasy at its worst? Or the other way around depending on taste.
One criticism aimed at Tarantino is that he is more like a guy who leaves muddy footprints on your living room carpet because he decided long ago that refusing to take off his boots at the door was part of his identity. It's your choice if you allow a guy like that into your home. Being critically aware does take away the power of his visuals, but all that gore can just get visually tiresome, too.
Notwithstanding that Tarantino tends to do violence more elegantly and purposefully - and thus more unrealistically - the demented type of surreal, dream quality given in his films probably chill to the bone more than the subject content. In America, the descendants of slaves may have pushed under their conscious the shame that ancestors never fought back and thus such dreams of revenge were never realised, but in Africa there were many bloody uprising where white people were hacked to death in retaliation for the mass genocidal-like treatment native Africans had suffered at the hands of previous "masters".
It is precisely because of the extant mythology of black subservience in the Deep South that Tarantino's scenes pack such a cathartic payload for its black audience. The film's defenders are quick to point out that "Django" is not about history. But that's almost like arguing that fiction is not reality - it isn’t, but the entire appeal of the former is its capacity to shed light on how we understand the latter.
The same criticism has been directed at James Cameron's "Titanic" (the filming of which cost more than the actual building of the ill-fated ship itself) for using such an emotive subject as merely a backdrop for a fictional love story. But Tarantino's film adopts a revolutionary spirit and moral outrage (like a true Spaghetti Western, a genre it tries to emulate) when dealing with the brutality of slavery - however why does Tarantino feel it was necessary to depict black men being pummelled and tortured in such graphic, gory, and gratuitous ways? In his film "Inglorious Basterds", Tarantino doesn't show us Jewish characters being tortured to make us want the Nazis to "pay". So why here?
In "Django", Tarantino blows away any opportunity to avoid violence and advance the cause of equality with social moderation choosing instead purity, radicalism, and violence. At its very basic heart, this is what turns civil disobedience into terrorism, however justified its reasons, the ends do not justify the means.
If the "means" do not draw a distinctive line between what is opposed, then they negate the very end they fight for. If the slave becomes just as barbaric as the slave owner, then hasn't the master won? Because it is his mindset which is given continued life - one which is ultimately based on fear. A bully is a vehicle of fear. Tarantino's film, therefore, isn't a depiction of a brave man fighting back at injustice, it is about a man giving into fear and going down the easy path of revenge.
Revenge is short-term; forgiveness is long term. The wounds depicted in Tarantino's "Django" won't heal with the damage done in the film, it is done for the sake of entertainment - and to elevate that entertainment slightly by tagging a serious subject to its tail. But this "wag-the-tail" attitude to cover the enjoyment of cinematic gore for gore's sake is not given credence by a serious subject, it simply belittles a subject which is very serious.
There is a moral argument in "Django" about historical crimes and culpability, but it just feels like Tarantino is pretending to raise such questions in order to create the framework for an emotionally arid, ultra-violent action movie whose characters and audience seem to be emotionally stunted adolescent boys. For Tarantino, this film shows that for him history is just another movie to strip for parts - rigged for shock, where each scene lays a stick of dynamite and lights a fuse that runs down and down and down until the whole thing blows up with too much conscientious bravado and unrelenting tastelessness. So much exclamatory kitsch, on a subject as loaded, gruesome, and dishonourable as American slavery, is more than just bad taste.
When we look at the world through Tarantino's eyes, we see the dark side of things, where they become threatening - even to our way of life, and so in fear we feel we have to destroy what we don't understand. It gives rise to the unfortunate habit of making us attack the wrong targets. As mentioned in the first part of this series, too few of us have opted for Mahatma Gandhi's peaceful form of activism, in place of violent revenge.
When we act out of fear, we give fear more due than it's owed; sometimes we confuse it for respect, or mark our relationships with control, aggression and fear. Domestic violence and rape in general, for example, are more about power and domination, than sex. Other times because we fear we're not good enough, we will cheat, or hurt others, dispute over the smallest things, or do anything we can to be seen as the best - even if we don't really believe it. We will hide our true motives, blame others for what we're doing, rip each other off, have a lack of accountability, are afraid to stand up and take responsibility for our lives, and our actions.
It's time for us to own up to our real motives in our dealings with others, and own our fears. But how can we blame the ordinary man or woman, when we have prime examples of such destructive fear on our screens, and in our lives as a result? For instance, we live in a world where businesses hide behind health and safety rules, happy to perpetuate myths in fear of being sued perhaps, or bad customer service, abusing important rules that are there for the benefit of workers and customers alike. The individual is constantly feeling sucked up as huge monopolies assimilate everything for profit. And how are we meant to react when we read we're being cheated by the institutions that are meant to be serving us?
Although not as clearly documented as the brutality of Greek police officers, in England we have low expectations of the police and our legal systems, while politicians look increasingly out of touch with public opinion and feeling - which has arguably risen in direct relation to their TV exposure. For example, the televising of House of Commons debates only began airing in 1989, where the topic of the first speech was the televising of the speech, but once the doors opened to the glare of the TV screen, they could not be shut. Today, parliamentary channels may not attract major audiences, but politicians do. They appear competitive and ego-centric; some even stooping so low as to make crude political points out of public tragedies.
And the world of sport, which inspires so many of young, and which portrayed itself so admirably by amateurs at the London Olympics last year, sees its professionals behave less so. Sports of all kinds are important televised events that draw large audiences. Super Bowl weekend is the slowest of the year for marriages in the US, for instance. And yet, we watch the news fill with shamed professional athletes, who have disgraced their sport, attempt to redeem themselves, while a proliferation of corruption allegations against top European football clubs has not helped the image of that sport, either.
In Britain, football is TV's most widespread sport, on national and international levels. The most watched TV event of 2004 was England playing Portugal in the European Championships, in 2006 it was when England played against Sweden in the World Cup, while just under 24 million viewers watched England play Argentina in 1998. So, why does integrity and a hard-working ethic seem to go when money and fame joins sport? Is it because of the pressure of fear of losing them?
Meanwhile, as America suffers an epidemic of gun violence, we watch at how the people in our world, instilled with a fear of the "other" react against differences - not with tolerance but with murderous intent to exterminate. We see how in America, Nazi prison gangs have become powerful outside of their bars, with the murder of three US justice officials who tackled white supremacist prison gangs. Few would doubt, however, that groups like this still have to potential to demonstrate to the outside world their potential for sheer barbaric savagery - a capacity that has long been all too familiar to those on the inside.
Like TV, the heightened reality of prison which we have fostered, is beginning to leak out into the world. Rather than focusing on fear and hate, if we let it become the focus, then they cannot be contained. In the UK, a police force has begun recording attacks on members of subcultures, such as goths and emos, as hate crimes. Previously hate crimes were only registered for offences against race, religion, disability, sexual orientation or transgender identity - now we have added one more to the list.
Again, is this so surprising in a society where we divide each other up depending on wealth, and calculate our value on the back of it as human beings? But we don't just kill strangers we perceive to stand across some ideological divide, we murder our loved ones for profit and gain. Because gain has become all important, and war is all about gain. We have a games industry currently dominated by action and war games, that has been instilling in our young the art of violent posturing, while in real time enemy countries play their own version of the game.
And so it has been in our human history that constantly seems to have one finger on replay button; each decade feels like we are on the brink, or coming back from it - and here we are again in 2013, in the second decade of the 21st Century, and countries are still posturing, and our hates and fears own us, rather than we showing the requisite courage to own them. It all seems hopeless, but it is at such times, we must look to hope - or else any valid criticism we make of giving into our fears will ring hollow. For fear is but an alternative; fear is a choice.
As mentioned in the second part to this series on fear, the problems we are facing in our society are being counterbalanced by a spiritual awakening - when the dark rises, so does the light in response. It's about people power, and community spirit. People do show their protest; they start campaigns to oppose the wrongs and to right them when they can. After the Newtown school shooting, the state legislature in Connecticut approved gun control measures which campaigners say are the most comprehensive in America. Although this will not make guns go away, and it cannot bring back the murdered children, it can make their deaths stand for something - for the protection of other young life in their name, to bring some meaning to a meaningless killing. It is a shift from fear to love - and when occurs, miracles can happen.
Fear will never be eradicated, and that shouldn't be our cause. In the "game" of karma, for example, believers discover the role of fear and how to keep it from undermining their efforts. No matter where we are in the ascension process, it's believed we clear and release levels of fear. This is normal and to be expected; this clearing and releasing process of levels of fear happens to everyone. And as soon as a truth is known the fear dissolves; science has shown us that there are fears pre-programmed in us necessary for our survival as a species, but fear, like anger, and any emotion we perceive as negative, can be turned into a force for good.
Fear can actively contribute to the betterment of life; if we face our fears, we can understand ourselves better, and strive to be better as a result of those fears. And there are always going to "bad" events in our lives, but rather than fear them, we can turn them around to a greater good. Some experts say we just need to release ourselves from the tendency to find simplistic explanations for things that happen to us in hindsight.
The book's position is that a Black Swan Event depends on the observer - using a simple example, what may be a Black Swan surprise for a Christmas turkey is not a Black Swan surprise for its butcher - hence the objective should be to "avoid being the turkey" by identifying areas of vulnerability in order to "turn the Black Swans white". Taleb contends that banks and trading firms are very vulnerable to hazardous Black Swan Events and are exposed to losses beyond those that are predicted by their defective financial models.
Although in some ways, Taleb seems to have tried to employ as much simplicity as he criticises our human tendency for doing by placing things into block perceptions of "black" or "white", the main idea in Taleb's book is not to attempt to predict Black Swan Events, but to build robustness to negative ones that occur, while being able to exploit positive ones. He began his theory for businesses to protect them against economic crises, but updated his theory to extend it for usage in our personal lives. Turning impact events from black to white is a useful model to help us with the issue of fear in our lives - turning fear to love during impact events - but life is not "black or white".
Some say that such dual thinking is what has religions struggling to keep up with the times, as they are failing to represent the varied and diverse tapestry of life. Often TV and film - or its baser examples - portray the world in black and white, because it is easier to understand or portray in the allotted time. Too much complexity, or too much reality, can often get in the way of good drama. But for those of us that live our lives in the everyday - we know that the real drama is out in the true complexity of the real world - and it was only a matter of time until reality TV materialised on our screens in one deformed way or another.
Don't fear the dark, be the light
We share our good news and bad news with the people we're closest with, but sometimes we're too afraid to share our deepest fears with ourselves. But if you keep your fears close, then like true friends, you will take them with you wherever you go in your heart. It is best to dig out your fears when you can, embrace them, accept them, love them, but do all you can not to be a slave to them. Keep those that serve you, release those that hold you back. Learn that even in fear, we have hope - it is what makes us human.
And as humans, we can discover there are many universal themes that bind us together, with modern societies across the world, and ancient civilisation across the sands of time. In the first part of this series, we touched upon the ordinary life of ancient Egyptians, who were just as preoccupied with work, sex and love as we are today. But so focused were they on death in life, fearful to make the right burial preparations for the afterlife, that in the end they accumulated treasured possessions and stuck them in tombs to honour the dead and gather dust, until grave robbers or archaeologists dug them up. Living life in the shadow of death does not always bring appreciation of the preciousness of the time we have - it can sometimes be akin to living every moment in fear. But we should live every living moment not in fear, or in the face of fear, but despite our fears.
We should live every moment in appreciation that it might be the last, not in fear of it. It is a fine distinction - but it is a distinction nevertheless. Before we make a decisive act, we should consider whether we are we coming from fear, or coming from love for our own good, because fear makes us shrink back, love moves us forward. So we look for ways to connect with this new spiritual awakening, to help us gain mastery over our fears. Some experts often recommend using mindfulness/awareness meditation as a way to connect with one's basic goodness and confidence - and it is also said to calm our "flight or fight" response, which can train us to fear. We can look to nature as aid, for anyone can be calmed in an instant by looking at the ocean or the stars when we feel like it is all getting a bit too much.
Read about the power of meditation.
Whenever we give into our fears, we leave a behind a little hint of what might have been, the hint of a future that became a past without being a present. That is the real thing to fear, that we are given a life, and we waste it simply because we didn't have the courage to live it. We have a limited lifespan on this planet, and every day we face a choice as to how we use that time, and spend that time most effectively and usefully for ourselves and for the world. And life is here to be lived to the full; we still have many modern mysteries to solve, many campaigns to sign our name to, and to help bring value to a world we want to preserve for future generations.
Because when we effectively show mastery over our fears, there is nothing we cannot accomplish. Life always tap into our energy and divinity, as long as we're not afraid to use it for our true purpose, to help us make the most of ourselves, and in such instances the results of our bravery will remain even after we pass over to our homecoming. Throughout this article I have made mention of the "ordinary" man or woman, but the truth is that is just a label, too. Fear makes us ordinary, but love teaches us we are made of something more than our fears.
Having genuine, authentic love for yourself, being honest with yourself, is the way you can be a positive outlet for the world. It can also be an aid to happiness, which many of us find so elusive. Investing in your happiness by doing something for yourself at least once a month is definitely worth it; happier people do better at work and have stronger personal relationships. Perhaps our preoccupation with focusing on others so negatively instead of caring for ourselves is a sign that life has become routine and lacking in excitement. To remedy this, make an effort to do things you've always wanted to do, or use it as an opportunity to embrace your fears.
Afraid of flying? Taking a flying lesson. Always wanted to perform in public? Learn how to fly the trapeze, sing in a band or audition for a bit-part in a movie. These experiences will make us feel excited about life, and we'll bring that excitement to our work and our relationships. It is said there are no happy endings, sometimes even no happy beginnings, but there are happy moments. The more you can accumulate, rather than simply cold hard cash, some believe, the more chance you have at a happy life. Consequently, we find that through the universal energy that joins us all, we become connected to our purpose and to a different notion of time.
In our usual notion of time, we parcel things into years, dates, numbers - but because we have those separations people use it as an excuse to hold off on growth and change, saying "I'll wait for this or that day", instead of starting right now to make change. This is just an example of how we give in to our fears. But if we see time as all one lifespan, and our individual life as just one moment in it, then putting things off until some distant "tomorrow" is unrealistic. Living in the now is the most important thing; we worry about the past and fear the future, but we need to let go and not be afraid to be in a whole lifetime of now.
Some people will tell you things in life really are unpredictable; there are forces out there greater than humans, but one of the greatest mysteries life ever throws up is the mystery of the nature of love. Love is not something separate from happiness or found in suffering. Love is a charm that only allows good things to enter the screen of our lives.
Real love teaches you that to despair is a sin against life; feeling good about yourself and your life makes you the luckiest of all. The birth and unfolding of love in human life has affected the world so radically and monumentally that C.S. Lewis, one of history's most famous Christians, said that the invention of romantic love was far more momentous and more broadly influential for the development of the West than the Protestant Reformation. In essence, love is literally in every breath we take. And every breath we take is unique, like a fingerprint pressed on time - and time is always continuing no matter what we do.
There is no use in worrying about the past, the past is today, there is no sense in fearing the future, the future is today. It's believed by using this approach we can cultivate real, radical change in our lives and in the world. It's about releasing the fears that holds us grounded to a certain moment in time that has gone, or that may never happen, and to move on in the present with the accumulated wisdom of all moments that will come and go. It is about getting off our settees, switching off the TV, and going outside to make a real change in the world.
But it must be real change, from the inside out. When people are uncomfortable with the present moment, they fidget with their hands or their minds. They become restless. It's the same if we think we are below average, but try to act as though we are above average - we become uncomfortable with genuine interactions from others, being generally terrible at accepting compliments and offers of help. But this real change will be underpinned by a new consciousness which will not allow our fears to dictate how we act or respond in a crisis.
We will have a new morality, not according to any commandments, but according to our consciousness. We will have a new religiousness; it will not belong to any organised religion, which we stick to like a football team, win, lose or draw. Religiousness is a private and personal phenomenon. It is just like love, it cannot be organised. Some thinkers have said that human organisation functions almost like a poison on organic feelings - the moment you attempt to organise love, you kill it.
The Bible quotes: What does it profit anyone if they gain the whole world but lose their own soul? Indeed, organised religions, in trying to conquer the entire planet has lost its soul, some would say. By treating so many people as outcasts for the way they were born, alienating people because of gender, creating divides within our human family instead of bridging them, have all helped to disgrace traditional religions. The new thought is that people will simply be religious, a state of being that is not divided by denomination or creed, because religiousness will not be taken as a belief, but a way of life. A graceful, beautiful, responsible way, a way full of consciousness and full of love, full of sharing and friendliness; and a way of creating one world without any boundaries.
This isn't about throwing away old values. There are no such things as "old" values that we must return to, there are only old fears we cling on to. If something is of value, it is timeless, no religion has a patent on it. Like having a true feeling of love and joy for self, and for all living things, it is universal - and sadly we have seen how some of the most "religiously minded" of us have ignored the best of them during the worst times in humanity. With this aim, best-selling author Alain de Botton unveiled his "Manifesto for Atheists" in an attempt to promote overlooked virtues including resilience and humour. Botton advocates we take the "best bits" out of religion, and the best from ourselves to build a better life. He lists them as:
- Resilience. Keeping going even when things are looking dark.
- Empathy. The capacity to connect imaginatively with the sufferings and unique experiences of another person.
- Patience. We should grow calmer and more forgiving by getting more realistic about how things actually tend to go.
- Sacrifice. We won't ever manage to raise a family, love someone else or save the planet if we don't keep up with the art of sacrifice.
- Politeness. Politeness is very linked to tolerance, the capacity to live alongside people whom one will never agree with, but at the same time, can't avoid.
- Humour. Like anger, humour springs from disappointment, but it's disappointment optimally channelled.
- Self-Awareness. To know oneself is to try not to blame others for one's troubles and moods; to have a sense of what's going on inside oneself, and what actually belongs to the world.
- Forgiveness. It's recognising that living with others isn't possible without excusing errors.
- Hope. Pessimism isn't necessarily deep, nor optimism shallow.
- Confidence. Confidence isn't arrogance, it's based on a constant awareness of how short life is and how little we ultimately lose from risking everything.
De Botton, whose work includes a stint as a writer in residence at Heathrow Airport, said he came up with the idea in response to a growing sense that being virtuous had become "a strange and depressing notion", while wickedness and evil had a "peculiar kind of glamour". He said:
There's no scientific answer to being virtuous, but the key thing is to have some kind of list on which to flex our ethical muscles. It reminds us that we all need to work at being good, just as we work at anything else that really matters.I see Botton's manifesto as the 10 commandments for the new religious consciousness, it's a good framework to follow, because when we attain this, we will realise that no borders are needed, no organisations on our beliefs are needed, no armies are needed to fight our ideologies, no weapons are needed to maintain the might of our armies - for during the times we get disconnected from the light, our love - plain, simple and extraordinary - will quickly shine the way back again.
All that is needed is a little meditativeness, a little silence, a little love, a little more humanity to let go of our fears; just a little more, and existence will come alive with something so totally unique and new that we will wonder why we were so afraid to embrace it in the first place. We will ultimately come to realise the futility of fear, and the longevity of love.
Television and digital media statistics provided by leading market research company Ipsos MORI.
Read more in this series: -1 -2
Yours in love,
