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TELEVISION PROSPECT 187
tious. I have said that television cannot carry the false conventions which are often unconsciously assimilated in the public cinema. Yet vision allied to sound. makes a vivid and'persuasive medium ; and there are quite certainly other ways, adapted to television's own stylistic demands, of using the medium for subtle propaganda. The very ease of the act of viewing, which could be so potent a force for useful information and entertainment, can be turned to insidious and perverted use. There are all too many people who are only too pleased to swallow ready-made judgements and opinions and who would welcome the easy way out of thinking for themselves that television could offer ; and it is not hard to imagine the television set as the voice and image, the symbol even, of authority, doubly persuasive because it can be seen as well as heard. Even the apparently harmless audiencesurvey can be used to justify continuing the mediocre which is all that many people have had the opportunity to get acquainted with in our society at the expense of the best, the original, the experimental.
As with bacteriology or physics, so with television this example of modern ingenuity can be put to good use or bad. The television worker who cannot be bothered to examine the effect of his job on the society he influences, the viewer who is content to receive television passively, without thought or criticism, may each be abandoning the medium to those who see in it a convenient instrument for moulding, rather than stimulating, thought. Style and technique, however they develop, will always stem from the uses to which television is put ; the sociology will determine the aesthetic and we discover that in making judgements about this latest means of human communication we are, as always, faced with a moral decision.