RTV Theory and Practice - Special Issue

with the charitable help of that most ancient of human media language, and its first female off-spring literature. Between the independent television image and its language which is vainly attempting to harmonise with it, there exists a gap. This gap repeatedly makes itself felt in numerous situations during programme preparation. The language which comes out of the television image, like its painted reflection, is too often rejected by the viewers as being over-descriptive and digressive. For this reason many consider the norm of television language, what TV has specifically brought to language, to be conciseness. However, although we can speak of a certain mysterious consiseness in the many well-known cries to be heard in good programmes, the succinctness of speech and language, the Spartan lapidary style, the deathbed clairvoyance of шапу communicators of the short lightning utterance, like Goethe’s »Mehr Licht« - none of these are new. And it should be pointed out too that when there is a crisis social situation, when the attention of tlie whole of society is focussed on the awaited outcome of development of problems, expecting conciseness and the hnguistic simplicity of a food recipe, the eager television audience suddenly stops acting the spoiled anti-philosopher and is quite capable of listening to and taking in speeches as long as уоиг arm. And it is this fact that in certain situations TV can give out wordy statements and have them accepted which indicates the specific nature of TV as a language platform. The speaker who attracted the attention of a TV audience of millions with a long speech must have presented new solutions to those problems which society was facing in reahty. In communicating this new information he obeyed the ruie of surprise (serendipity). In offering solutions to social problems he made sure that his language reflected a contrasting polarisation, and the principle of echo which is the third spiecific feature of television language was revealed at that moment when the viewers reahsed that the TV image, a picture of a man with a face at the same time worried and determined. exactly corresponded to the gravity of the real situation. If the speaker had contracted his face in a frown (MacLuhan alluded to this concrete example from a telecast of one of Nixon s election defeats and used it co show television's ignorance and ineptitude) or if he had given a theatrical smile, the echo effect would have been lost and everyone would immediately have shouted: »Too much detail. Make it shorter!«

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