TV informational?

Doane claims that “TV thrives on its own forgettibility” (226) of each fragment as it strings segments together to form one unifying stream, a cohesiveness that dictates the “liveness” of television. Doane notes that this unification exemplifies television’s attempt to make our chaotic world more orderly by “render[ing] ‘natural’ the logic and rhythm of the social order” (233). One of the key contributors to this unification is the charismatic broadcaster who has the “ability to cover the event with words” (232). I find the duality of the term “cover” intriguing here. In one sense, it implies the broadcaster’s purpose to provide a unifying blanket over fragmented events and information, yet it also indicates a feeling of hiding the truth or “covering” the event with their (either the broadcaster or the station as a whole) own interpretation. And the intentionality of this influenced interpretation is arbitrary – information is constantly being transformed, and, in a sense, television, and media as a whole, undergoes (what I would like to refer to as) an inevitable “telephone effect.”

TV’s “telephone effect” makes me question’s Doane’s comparison between television and cinema in terms of representation. Doane claims that while cinema “represents” reality, a quality achieved by its use of Renaissance space, “TV does not so much represent as it informs” (225). She continues to state that TV is a flat, two-dimensional realm of information – a blunt medium that that “make[s] visible in the invisible” (226). However, I don’t see how it is ever possible to achieve a totally two-dimensional state of pure information export. As Doane says in contradiction to her previous argument, TV “acknowledges the limits of the eye in relation to knowledge, information is nevertheless conveyable only in terms of simulated visibility” (227). It is this “simulated visilibility” and the idea that “television is a construct” (227) that is key to the contradiction – through the act of “constructing” television, one inevitably peels it away from the realm of pure information and automatically renders it a representation.

My question is: isn’t representation a key attribute of media? Since information is intangible and transient, one must use representation in order to spread it – therefore automatically intertwining influence and interpretation. However, surveillance seems to be under its own category entirely separate from media since it does not involve any interpretation. Therefore, I disagree with Doane’s assertion that TV is informational - surveillance is the only pure form of information, rendering it the most intriguing form of spectacle for any viewer.