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A Proposal submitted to the President of the French Republic and to French Citizens

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A Proposal submitted to the President of the French Republic and to French Citizens
In May 2007, Frederic Zimmerman and Dimitri Chistakis published an article in the journal Pediatrics, demonstrating, on the basis of a survey of over 3,300 American families, that premature exposure of children to audiovisual media provokes serious ailments leading in particular to the appearance of symptoms described in American nosology as proper to the pathology of attention deficit disorder.
In the course of the year 2007, the television station Baby First attempted to gain a foothold in France. This attempt was opposed by diverse public figures and associations. In the follow-up to these initiatives, the CSA adopted, on July 22nd, 2008, a resolution forbidding French broadcasters from proposing programs specifically aimed at children 3 years old or less, and requiring that stations broadcasting from abroad include a message warning parents of the dangerous nature of such programs.
Those concerned individuals who rose up in protest against these TV stations based their act on various studies from the fields of pediatrics, child psychiatry, criminology and psychotherapy. All these studies show that television has become a question of public health. The dangerous effects of television consumption do not affect only young children, of course. This is so true that in his argument for the suppression of publicity on public channels and the modification of its missions to the public, the President of the Republic insisted on the deleterious nature of the constraints that publicity exercises not only on the directors of programs but on the minds of viewers: this is what he called, on June 30th 2008, in the course of a news program on Channel 3, “the tyranny of audience ratings monitored every quarter of an hour” – the same tyranny which engenders  “available brain time.”
This proposition of the President of the Republic opens an essential debate: it puts the question of the place of television in contemporary society on the agenda. It poses the question of knowing what television is all about, and, we might say, what game television is playing with the time of consciousness of children, adolescents and adults.
There is no doubt now that the time of the capture of juvenile attention by audiovisual media can, in certain circumstances, be an obstacle to the educative mission of parents, teachers, and we know how much more difficult the mission of National Education has become for teachers, and more crucial than ever for youth as for society as a whole. We know to what extent the tyranny of audience ratings submitted to the demands of announcers are now targeting the youngest publics, and that they aim to increase the influence of these youngsters on the consumption habits of their parents, destabilizing the latter’s authority in general, short-circuiting it and putting society as a whole on a course toward generalized infantilization.
If we are to seriously examine the question posed by the President of the Republic, then it will have to be put not only to the public audiovisual services, but to the totality of the audiovisual enterprises of our country. Television has become the primary social organ. It has played a crucial role in the reconstitution of industrial economies in the wake of the Second World War. Its influence skyrocketed between 1947 and 2008.  But everybody senses that it is at a crossroads. Its programs as well as its image have been seriously degraded in the minds of the public, and its legitimacy has tanked, while a significant part of the youngest elements of the population now seems to have dropped television – the channels for babies having, precisely, the aim of creating a precocious and irreversible dependence on the part of infants in order to stave off this disaffection.
For the fact is that new media have made their appearance on this scene. And they require a rethinking of the organization, the finalities and the role that the audiovisual domain could and will have to have in tomorrow’s society. Television, with digitalization, is now mutating in its characteristics as well as in its finalities. More than any other, the question of the future of the audiovisual media in the era of digitalization is an affair of political will, which fundamentally concerns youth in terms both of public health and of education: more than any other question it concern’s our country’s future. As for the new media, they can just as well contribute to degrading even more the present situation as they can to the formation of a modern democracy based on education.
In the midst of these on-going mutations, television extended onto the internet network should assume a much more important and positive social role than the one it has progressively been obliged to accept in the course of the previous decades, which has turned it into the arm of marketing and publicity, pushing it further along toward a toxic and tyrannic dead-end. This is why we are proposing to public officials that the year 2009 be a time of reflection, through serious debates, on what could and should become of television tomorrow as well as the new media that extend it and transform it in depth, and are asking the President of the Republic and his government to delay the decision now being debated concerning the future of the public audiovisual system. These debates cannot be undertaken without an independent global reflection on the role of tomorrow’s television, whether public or private.

 

trad. Georges Collins