Teleindignidad, o el cadalso electrónico

Abstract

Television has created a territory of impunity at the margins of society, of any society. Television admits and transmits behaviours that we would not tolerate except on screen. As an electronic socializing agent, it creates, as Aristotle would tell us, habit: through the systematic and interminable repetition of certain types of behaviour and of certain human profiles, the audience tends to perceive them as habitual, as normal. Entertainment programs erode one of the fundamental concepts of democratic society: dignity, which is the illustrated translation of honour, of fame. Tele-indignity attacks people’s privacy which is the political conquest of liberal democracy. Television thus becomes an electronic scaffold, a medieval spike which returns us, at a blow, to pre-modernity.