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" Competition between media contributes to the flowering of culture." Harold Innis |
" We must once again accept and harmonize the perceptual biases of both (the left and right brain) and understand that for thousands of years the left hemisphere has suppressed the qualitative judgment of the right, and the human personality has suffered for it." Bruce Powers |
| Sex, Time and Power › Art & Physics › | |||||||||
| The ominous mushroom cloud warned humankind of collective death. The first photograph of Earth taken from space flashed around the world in 1968, celebrating the interconnectedness of life. Like a Chinese ideograph, NASA's photograph of our blue marble conveyed multiple values simultaneously, values more intuitive than rational. The masculine perception of nature and the Earth itself as "things" to be conquered made the space program possible. The photo it generated began to instill in everyone who saw it an understanding that the Earth must be honored, protected, and loved. That many environmentalists are men confirms this change in orientation. NASA's photograph of the Earth floating in space provided people with "the big picture." One sees the big picture with the entire retina and the combined hemispheres. The inviting, mute image of the home planet floating in dark space did more to change the consciousness of its residents than the miles of type concerning the subject generated by the world's writers. Over the course of history, humankind has been profoundly influenced by the periodic emergence of powerful books. From the tablets Yahweh presented to Moses to the works of Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Paul, Augustine, Mohammed, Aquinas, Galileo, Calvin, Descartes, Newton, Kant, Jefferson, Hegel, Darwin, Marx, and Freud-each stamped their age with a unique imprimatur. Since the atomic blast in 1945 and the Earth image that followed, not a single book has come close to the degree of impact this one photo has had. The written word's influence has been declining for the last fifty years, counterbalanced by the increasing power of the image. The shift in orientation toward perceiving information with the right hemisphere instead of the left had significant ramifications for women's rights. The suffragette movement was just beginning to catch its second wind in the "flapper era" of the 1920s when it was overshadowed by two life-threatening events: the worldwide Depression of the 1930s threatened the survival of individual families; World War II threatened the survival of whole nations. Authorities drafted able-bodied men to bear arms. Women were called upon to build war machines. "Rosie the Riveter" flexed her muscles as women took over technical positions and mastered dangerous tasks that previously men had performed. Women savored their paychecks and realized that an independent income was the hacksaw blade hidden in the cake that would help them gain their freedom by loosening their dependence on male breadwinners. Yet, when the men returned from the war and elbowed them aside, most women once again donned their aprons. Gender relations might have reverted back to prewar conditions, except for one new factor-television. It was not mere coincidence that the most explosive feminist movement in the five-thousand-year history of patriarchy occurred during the first television generation. Certainly the birth control pill, with its power to disconnect sex from pregnancy, played an important role, but the advent of the pill does not explain why so many young men of the era were inclined to support their sisters' and girlfriends' aspirations. Boys who spent many hours of their childhood engrossed in the Howdy Doody show grew up to become the first generation of men that included many who applauded the aims of the women's movement. And what a movement-bold, courageous women of every age, color, and class altered the gender equation permanently. The meteoric rise of the image, resulting in an infusion of right-brained values into culture, was like a booster rocket that propelled the women's movement into stable orbit. Very few of society's prophets saw it coming. Looking to the past for models, they also missed clues that foretold cultural shifts that were to blast 1950s society to smithereens. In 1958, a few years before the first generation weaned on television was about to enter college, the president of Harvard, James Conant, castigated the buttoned-down psyches of that year's graduating class in Time magazine. He labeled the college students the "Silent Generation" and blamed their apathy on the mind-numbing pabulum of the seditious new medium. Pundits predicted that when the first really "television-addled" generation entered college in the 1960s, it would be catatonic from all the hours this cohort had spent staring at the cathode tube; pontificating sages predicted that these youngsters would behave even more passively than the transitionally literate generation of the late 1950s.
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