The Power of Television

In AS, we have been discussing TV tokenism and the power television has on the way people view different races. Recently, I came across a very interesting article from the New York Times that discussed an experiment conducted by French Researchers linking television and torture.

The article states that, "French documentary producers managed to trick dozens of people — who were told that they were taking part in a pilot for a new game show that, in fact, never existed — into administering what seemed like painful electric shocks to a fellow contestant."

The fellow contestant happened to be an actor, who was not actually shocked like the participants thought, but rather was acting like he was in serious pain.

What's even more "shocking" was that "only 16 of 69 people asked by the host to push levers that delivered a 'dangerous shock' of 460 volts refused."

That's approximately 23% of the participants who refused to deliver the shock to their fellow contestant.

The producer of the documentary who filmed this experiment, Christophe Nick, said in a statement to the Associated Press that "this experience shows that in certain circumstances, a power — the TV in this case — is able to make you [do] something you don’t want to do.”

Nick suggests that people tend to obey authority or the power, the TV in this experiment, over what they believe is morally right or wrong. Furthermore, they believed that the producers of the game show would not ask them to commit something morally wrong as what they appeared to be doing.

So if a TV show can cause people to electrocute others, what else is it capable of? How powerful is television really?

I believe that it has tremendous power to do good and to cause harm. As it says in the article, that "when people are in front of television cameras, somewhere in their minds they may always suspect that what appears to be reality may in fact be some sort of a hoax." People confuse what's right and what's wrong because they would rather receive their 15 minutes of fame. Just look at any reality TV show, like 16 and Pregnant on MTV. It has been reported that some of the girls on the show have gotten pregnant just to be on the show. It's sad what being on TV can do to some people.