Comments on Television

by Judita Šalgo

Translated from the Serbian by John K. Cox

Text Read by a Window at the Independent Association of Journalists of the Vojvodina

September 5, 1991

Every day I ask myself this question while watching television: are war and fact-based news really incompatible? Is it the same with patriotism and the desire to be fully informed? Does concern for one's own community have to defend itself by the rigid selection of current events and people, of reports and reporters? Is hatred the only thing that triggers self-defense?

My first window on the world, several decades ago, looked out onto a wall, onto bulletin boards with newspapers. Now that I need to say what I see out this window, what’s there? The wall has been demolished; behind it yawns an abyss; but those newspapers are still floating in the air, their letters are still vibrating on the screen, and their spirit, although the words are different, is still suspended above the void. The wall-mounted newspapers that ushered us out of that war are now leading us into a new one.  Their long-range electronic cry to millions of people is more efficient than the whoop of any warlord, more credible and persuasive than the whisper of one's own brother. Television is, even when it is broadcasting from a war zone, distant from its viewer, from its warrior, and is not responsible for their lives; it is not responsible for anything. Long-distance management of people is enjoying a bloody boom. Television is becoming death-o-vision, murder-vision, not because of the horrors to which it bears witness but because it convinces us that the horror is unavoidable, and because, whether it recognizes this or not, whether it wants this or not, it is itself serving death, the sovereign and long-term interests of death; it is turning into a dead vision, the medium of destruction of our intellect, our common sense, our need for a comprehensive picture of the world and our own place and prospects in it. It is a means of ruining souls and spirituality, everything that is life-giving, and that comprises life.

If I understood correctly the meaning of this window (which perhaps still looks out onto Zmaj Jovan Street today), its purpose was, while at least the facades were integral, to see something constituted there, improvised, a millimeter away from the precipice—a new, regenerated medium that is not remotely controlled, not tele-anything, and instead is a “close vision,” so to speak, a medium of living encounters, face to face, a life-vision that will try to translate the incoherent call of higher interests into the language of clear consequences. That’s the role of little windows in big history.