In White Noise by DeLillo, the new abundance of technology enters human life to create distractions and constant background noise. The protagonist, Jack, often refers to the television as the "voice" from the other room. In the supermarket, the loudspeaker muffles conversations between customers. Technology is seen as a presence and character that interrupts human life and conversation in the novel, and as the average American family watches 6.12 hours of television per day (Rue), television in turn disrupts the majority of the real life of American families. When the TV becomes an inanimate, additional member of the family, its purpose ends up being to capitalize on people's suffering and alienate family members from each other. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an Original Essay In today's fast-paced culture, several distractions lead to distance between family members and people in general. Especially in a capitalist culture, most people are driven to have the highest level of education, the most successful career, and the most luxurious possessions. With such motivations, traditional values ​​such as marriage and family are somewhat swept under the rug, and stress is pervasive in everyone's lives. When another distraction enters the family, the television, even the youngest members are greatly affected. Although it is impossible to determine to what extent children are affected by watching television, the fact that they are affected is indisputable. In an article on the role television plays in a child's life, Richard Fabes argues that television falls far short of what it could accomplish: "The Potential of Television to Shape Conceptualization of family life by viewers is also quite strong given the number of television programs. programs that describe families and their interactions” (2). Healthy television programs have the ability to impact viewers; Unfortunately, it's not these family sitcoms that influence people the most, and they're certainly not what most people remember from watching television. Anyone who has sat down to watch a local news channel can attest to the fact that violence, tragedy and crime capture the public's attention. As gruesome as the images are, DeLillo confirms that "it's more or less universal to be fascinated by televised disasters [...] If something happens on television, we have every right to find it fascinating, no matter what." 'there be' (DeLillo 66). No matter how morbid, tragic, or gory a topic is, as long as it's on television, it's normal for anyone to be entertained by it. In Amusing Ourselves to Death, a book that describes the effect of media on American society, Neil Postman describes America as "a culture whose information, ideas, and epistemology are shaped by television and not by the written press” (29). Television is accessible, it informs its audience much more quickly than reading the same information would do and it captures the viewer's attention. Unfortunately, television is not known for being an educational tool as much as it is for its consistent, violent, sexual, and gory images. Both Postman and DeLillo agree that the overwhelming number of negative images has an effect on viewers. Postman admits that the normal theory behind television is that its purpose is to captivate: "Theentertainment is the supra-ideology of all discourse on television. No matter what is depicted or what point of view, the overriding presumption is that it is there for our amusement and pleasure” (87). With most news programs covering negative events on a daily basis, it's no wonder people turn to atrocities in their own communities for entertainment. In general, viewers are not only desensitized to the horrors shown on television: they also expect such things to happen in their own communities. As Jack Gladney says of foreign countries, "they have enormous potential with their famines, monsoons, religious conflicts, train crashes, shipwrecks, et cetera" (DeLillo 66). This American father can't even understand why other countries don't broadcast their tragedies as entertainment for their masses, because he is so used to disasters being shown as entertainment. If what Postman says is true, that "television is our culture's primary means of self-knowledge" (92), and that television is constantly criticized for broadcasting horrific violence, then perhaps that American culture is to blame, not television. Either way, the more heinous the images, the more viewers will be attracted to them. Most people have heard the saying "sex sells," but violence, blood, and tragedy also attract a paying audience. Of course, for those who have experienced tragedy, suffocating and invasive media attention is not what they want. . But at the same time, the media coverage proves that the victim's disaster is worth knowing about. After the toxic airborne event of White Noise, a man walks around carrying a television, unable to understand why a terrifying experience seems unworthy of broadcast: shouldn't the streets be teeming with cameramen, sound recordists and journalists? Shouldn't we shout out the window: "Leave us alone, we've been through enough, get out of here with your vile instruments of intrusion." » Do they have to have two hundred deaths, images of rare disasters, for them to arrive en masse on a given site... Even if there was no great loss of human life, let us not deserve to do we not have a certain attention to our suffering, our human concerns, our terror? Isn’t fear news? (DeLilllo 155) Even though this man knows that journalists would intrude and capitalize on their pain, he feels as if his distress is not recognized by others. Although this incident did not have a high mortality rate, he and many others at the shelter felt they suffered greatly from the confusion of leaving home and the uncertainty that they are confronted. However, without journalists covering their pain, those in the shelter felt like their feelings were not justifiable, which made them even more scared and angry than the tragedy itself. In an essay on White Noise, Duvall addresses the lack of media coverage of this toxic event: “The fear and terror of this man-made disaster can only be validated by electronic media” (Duvall 436). The people who were going through this situation didn't necessarily want answers, they wanted attention to the displacement they were experiencing. As the man on TV pointed out in White Noise, journalists will "flock to a site" competing with each other to have the best. blanket. Information programs areruthlessly greedy for money and their insensitivity towards victims reinforces the postmodern idea that capitalism devalues ​​individuals. In American culture in particular, the basis of the economy and daily life is capitalism, and this also applies to the way television programs are broadcast. As Duvall openly puts it, "network and cable news programs, competing for a market, operate under capitalism's demand to make them newer, thereby transforming 'news' into another genre of entertainment." (437). By attracting the attention of viewers with the most attractive presenter, the catchiest jingle and the most convenient airtime, news programs accumulate money in their pockets, sometimes at the expense of their viewers. Yet Duvall shows how one television network may not be entirely responsible: "As the disaster becomes aestheticized, another line blurs, that between the depiction of violence in television news and the violence in the film, thereby creating a homogeneous imaginary space available for consumption” (437). . Without American consumerism, news programs would make no profit. Even though so many people blame television (among other things) for the deterioration of our culture, they fail to recognize that they are partly to blame for this conspiracy. The love/hate relationship that the characters of White Noise feel for television is partly due to the fact that they practically include the idiot box as a member of their family. As Duvall says: “Throughout the novel, the voice of the television breaks in at odd moments, almost as if the television were a character” (447). It becomes humorous for a reader to notice that television has obscure and arbitrary outbursts throughout the novel, and in continuing the theme of postmodernism, a reader understands that these interjections make no sense and knows not to examine them too much. By the way, the amount of information a person unconsciously absorbs through the background noise of the television is somewhat shocking, but this occurs throughout the novel. One of the White Noise girls, Steffie, even goes so far as to recite "Toyota Celica" in her sleep, and she probably learned this from the many commercials that aired. In an essay on the effects of television viewing on children, Rice notes that "television viewing is so ingrained in American families that it should be considered an important social influence, comparable to that of family, school, church and other institutions” (Fabes). 1). In fact, “At the end of their secondary education, young people spent more time watching television than on any other activity, except sleeping” (Fabes 1). So it's incredibly naive to think that children don't learn and shape their thinking from watching TV. Again, in White Noise, the children take cues from the media when, during a toxic airborne event, they experience the symptoms the radio tells them they should experience. Even a family that communicates well will go from a socially interactive unit to a viewing audience. if there is a television in the room. In an essay on the effects of television on a family, Vincent M. Rue states: "In the presence of television, the family tends to observe behavior that is more parallel, or individually oriented, than interactive" (Walters and Stone, cited above). in the street). When a family unknowingly welcomes a television as a new member, the human members of the family become,/