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When George Steiner gave CBC Radio's 1974 Massey Lectures his theme was our twentieth - century nostalgia for absolutes: how Western religious decline witnessed the ascendance of secular mythologies like those of Freud and Marx. Missing from the vogueish, absolutist world views noted by Steiner, perhaps for Eurocentric or intellectualist reasons, was McLuhanism, then consolidating outside the CBC gates.
Toronto's own media mythologizer, Marshall ("I'm the only one who knows what the hell is going on around here") McLuhan, proved as passionate about "electric age" mediacentrism as any Euroanalyst or political economist espousing the power of the unconscious or the proletariat. For him, television imagery returned us to an earlier state of grace, the lost Eden of tribal orality where "we begin again to structure the primordial feelings and emotions from which 3000 years of literacy divorced us. We begin again to live a myth ..." (McLuhan, 1969, pp. 16 - 17).
But if Canada's contribution to media discourse failed to make the Massey Lectures, 20 years later CBC Television made amends. It gave three hours of national prime time to Moses Znaimer, something of a McLuhan absolutist on the subject of television himself (though in TVTV, not so much of a nostalgic, apart from a touch of Mordecai Richler sensibility in the boyhood television scene).
The program's thesis is incontestable. Television's technology, storytelling forms, and image journalism have changed the way we view and experience the world. Television has restructured the public sphere of discourse, reframed our political processes, intensified our celebrity culture, redefined our private pleasure from participant to voyeur, and rearranged the living and bedroom furniture along the way.
Thereafter, Znaimer's television essay rests on a shaky proposition: a late twentieth century gripped by a struggle between the forces of darkness (the printed word) and forces of light (the television image). A face - off that prompts the question: If text is so passe, why not use a silent, captionless television movie to make the case? Behind the dialogue explicating the image, we find a brilliant entrepreneur and visionary showman unpacking a mixed bag of...