In a society like 1999 France, nearly everybody is aware that television entertainment mostly resorts to fiction, the "willing suspension of disbelief". Fiction is part of our cultural tradition and was used before television and movies in novels, plays, operas and other forms of art. When we watch a play, we know that the plot is fictional but we play the game as though it were "real-life". It is pure convention. Thus, we are rather well-equipped to confidently appreciate the discrepancies between television content and the "real-life" because the basic cultural and situational elements are familiar to us. Fictions are recognised as what they are and there is in our minds a pretty clear distinction between television's frankly entertainment or commercial functions and its informational function. However, in some particular cases such as reality-shows, docudramas or infomercials, this distinction becomes blurry because fiction is made to look like reality and vice-versa.
    Now, let us consider a people such as the Inuit, who lacked thorough, authentic background information about the cultural framework from which television content originates. For them, what television would present as truth was perceived as truth.
    This cultural difference led to lots of misunderstandings, uncertainties and even anxieties as to whether television materials were real or fictional, particularly among the youngest and oldest Inuit who assumed fictional entertainments to be accurate portrayals of social realities in a world they were not familiar with. In December 1974 (after 14 months of television experience), Linvill Watson asked Rankin Inlet students "what shows they [liked] because they [had] real people and [were] about things that [were] real". Out of 58 mentions of "real" programs, 26 (45%) were actually fictions in grades 4, 5 and 6 (age 10 to 14).
    As for young adults, their reaction was also a generalisation but it was totally opposed to that of the young and old generations. When they realised that everything that was on television was not necessarily true, they became sceptical and tended to believe that about everything on television was "just lies". This overreaction was due to the feeling they had of having been fooled by television.
    Then, even if fiction is recognised as such, the situation it portrays are real (for instance, Lieutenant Columbo does not exist but cops and robbers do) only, they are magnified by television. This magnification and violent representations of southern cities such as Toronto or Los Angeles in cops-and-robbers shows had a great detrimental effect. Television encouraged Inuit to see violence as being part of everyday life in the Qablunait's world in southern Canada and US large cities...

    Before any theoretical considerations, violence has to be considered in terms of volume. A 1993-1994 comparison between three different countries (France, Canada and the USA) enables us to relativise the Canadian situation and the amount of violent programs on CBC (it was pretty much the same in the 1970s) and realise what this amount represents in concrete terms thanks to a comparison with our own situation in France:

Comparaison France-Canada-USA(11)

 

France

Canada

États-Unis

Chaînes privées

Chaînes publiques

Réseaux privés

Réseaux publics

Les networks

Le

câble

% d'émissions contenant de la violence

68.5

59.2

69.8

34.4

77.7

68.1

Séquences violentes/heure

9.3

8.2

11.1

6.4

9

10.3

    After considering these figures, it is quite obvious that we have to be very careful when speaking about violence on CBC because it represents only half the amount of violence we can see on French private networks (TF1, Canal Plus and Métropole 6), CBC and the CRTC being particularly vigilant in the matter of violence. This table also shows that US television (especially the four main networks: ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox Television) is particularly violent and this is no coincidence since 98% of its works of fiction are produced in the US.
    Why is there so much violence in US fictions? This question gives us the opportunity to denounce a preconceived idea. It is often argued that viewers like violence and that television just tries to satisfy them but violence's presence on the small screen seems to follow a completely different logic.
    As early as the 1960s, when television became an industry, Hollywood producers began to impose violence in fiction for economic reasons. The cost/audience ratio accounts for this phenomenon. As Divina Frau-Meigs explains, the use of violence as one of fiction's main code made it possible to economise on scenarii:

Cette logique explique l'agressivité des studios hollywoodiens. [...] Ce sont eux qui ont créé de toutes pièces cette relation soi-disant inséparable entre image et violence. La violence, notamment dans les films à effets spéciaux et les séries policières, est devenue la définition de l'action et du mouvement: elle passe bien. Elle peut être comprise par une population américaine très hétérogène et perçue comme méfiante à l'égard de tout intellectualisme. Ces mêmes caractéristiques internes au marché américain s'exportent aisément, vers des marchés hétérogènes et friands de divertissements. Ainsi, et quoiqu'aux Etats-Unis comme en France la comédie plaise et fasse partie des choix prioritaires du public, elle est moins mise en avant que la violence parce que son scénario demande plus de travail et que sa traduction est plus difficile. D'après les producteurs hollywoodiens, le contenu humoristique serait trop difficile à faire passer à cause de l'ancrage conjoncturel et trop marqué de l'humour.

(Frau-Meigs & Jehel, 1997, pp. 146-147)

    It is true that viewers like exciting forms of entertainment and we have to keep in mind that according to Linvill Watson, Inuit like "exciting action" (sports, comedy, series) as opposed to "talking heads". However, "exciting action" and "violence" are two different things. Hence, we can say that the misrepresentations of the Qablunait's world caused by the magnification and repetition of violence in television series were imposed on the Inuit via action-packed fictions mainly for economic reasons. These misrepresentations were not the only consequences of violence on television: Hockey Night in Canada also led Inuit to look on hockey as a gladiators show more than as a sport. Hockey is not a violent sport basically but the NHL traditionally includes rough play, tripping and fighting. Then, if Canada's best players were doing so, it was good and it was quite normal that it should develop in the local high school hockey league.

    The elements discussed in this chapter show that the Inuit cannot be considered as a separate group: they have "normal" reactions, only the phenomena they had to face took place earlier and more progressively in western societies (e.g. during the Renaissance or the Industrial Revolution). Television worked as a catalyst and introduced the Inuit into modern society.
    In the 1950s, a sociologist named Daniel Lerner studied the transformation of the Middle East from traditional to modern society. As he explains, this development was one instance of a long worldwide process and "western men need only reflect on the titanic struggle whereby, over the course of centuries, medieval lifeways were supplanted by modernity.(12)"
    The experience he described in The Passing of Traditional Society is indeed quite similar to the experience of the Inuit in the Canadian North over the last twenty-five years. Each community was brought into the world of modern communication technologies and away from its traditions. According to Lerner, the concepts of traditional and modern societies revolves around one key concept: participation, i.e. whether or not citizens are participants within the entire nation which they inhabit.

Traditional society is non-participant - it deploys people by kinship into communities isolated from each other and from a center; without an urban-rural division of labor, it develops few needs requiring economic interdependence; lacking the bonds of interdependence people's horizons are limited by locale and their decisions involve only other known people in known situations.

Modern society is participant in that it functions by "consensus" - individuals making personal decisions on public issues must concur often enough with other individuals they do not know to make possible a stable common governance.

(Lerner, 1964[1958], p. 50)

    With the introduction of television, the Inuit were integrated into the rest of the Canadian society, i.e. into a media system as opposed to an oral system. Lerner sums up the main differences in the following tables:

 

Media Systems

Oral Systems

1 - variable

Channel

broadcast (mediated)

personal (face-to-face)

Audience

heterogeneous (mass)

primary (groups)

Content

descriptive (news)

prescriptive (rules)

Source

professional (skill)

hierarchical (status)

2 - sector

Socio-economic

urban

rural

Cultural

literate

illiterate

Political

electoral

designative

 

(Lerner, 1964[1958], pp. 55-57)

    According to Daniel Lerner's theories, television's arrival in the Arctic was the last and the most important stage of the modernisation process which follows an "autonomous historical logic":

    - The first stage is urbanisation, i.e. the "transfer of populations from scattered hinterlands to urban centres" (The Inuit were a nomadic people, they settled in centres such as Rankin Inlet with the developing of the mining industry).

    - Literacy, the second step, is closely connected to the third one, media participation (we know that most Inuit were already literate in their own language and partially in English before television's introduction and that television contributed to complete literacy within a few years).

    Watching television is a form of media participation but it is a passive one. Active involvement in media is necessary to fully integrate the system but also to avoid an external domination by an exogenous culture. To cut a long story short, the Inuit had to run their own television...

NOTES:

1. Cees Hamelink, "Dependency and Cultural Choice", in Approaches to International Communication, Ullamaija Kivikuru & Tapio Varis eds., Finnish National Commission for UNESCO (Helsinki, 1986) p. 223

2. Werner Severin & James Tankard, Communication Theories: Origins, Methods, and Uses in the Mass Media, Longman (New York, 1992) p. 269

3. Cross-cultural programming is an essential part of CBC's mandate (see pp. 8-9). A reflection of Canadian reality, its purpose is to help anglophones become better acquainted with the rich cultural life of francophone communities and promote mutual understanding.

4. Gail Valaskakis, Media and Acculturation Patterns: Implications for Northern Native Communities, Concordia University (Montreal, 1976) p. 9

5. Nelson Graburn, "Television and the Canadian Inuit", in Inuit Studies n°6, (1982) p. 11

6. Wolfgang Klein, L'acquisition de langue étrangère, Armand Colin Editeur (Paris, 1989 [1984]) p.16-17

7. According to Sylvie Audette, a CBC communication officer interviewed at CBC headquarters in Toronto in April 1998, Sesame Street is dubbed by CBC because of spelling and pronunciation differences (e.g. "z" [zi] in the US and [zed] in Canada).

8. Gerhard Dohrn-van Rossum, L'histoire de l'heure: l'horlogerie et l'organisation moderne du temps, Editions de la Maison des sciences de l'homme (Paris, 1997)

9. Jean Baudrillard, La société de consommation: ses mythes, ses stuctures, Folio essais / Denoël, (Paris, 1987 [1970]) p. 18

10. Edmond Marc Lipiansky, Identité et communication, P.U.F. (Paris, 1992) p. 157

11. Divina Frau-Meigs & Sophie Jehel, Les écrans de la violence, enjeux économiques et responsabilités sociales, Economica (Paris, 1997) pp. 58-59

12. Daniel Lerner, The passing of Traditional Society: Modernizing the Middle East, Free Press Collier - MacMillan Canada (Toronto, 1964[1958]) p. 43

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