"I teach physics to undergraduates at a large American university, and there is a moment I dread every semester, when I'm forced to tell my students something they have a very hard time believing, and causes some of them to doubt my honesty. Namely, I own no television, and read for pleasure: about two hundred books a year, which is down a good bit from when I was their age. Quite possibly some of them would find it easier to assimilate my being Martian, on my mother's side."
Cosma Shalizi,
from his Bactra review
of In Bluebeard's Castle :
Some Notes Towards the Redefinition of Culture
by George Steiner
I should note that I don't agree with everything Mander says - some of his arguments are pretty "fringey" for me. But I think his general thesis is right, and he's at the center of antitelevisionism. (Those of you who know a better word, please tell me.)
Update -- 7 June 1999. Just reread Four Arguments for the first time in many years. I'd say the good bits are even better than I'd remembered, but the silly bits are even worse.
In particular, Mander's ideas on "The Ingestion of Artificial Light" (chapter 9) and on the perception of images ("a television image gains its existence only once you've put it together inside your head.", p. 193) are really weird.
"More nonsense has been written about television than about anything else in the last 30 years, perhaps in the whole of human history. ... Choosing the single most ridiculous book on the effects of TV is a challenge, but Jerry Mander's 1978 rant, Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television (Morrow), is in a class of its own.
Between the covers of this one book are assertions that TV: is a form of sensory deprivation; is addictive; "trains people to accept authority"; is physically unhealthy; suppresses the imagination; hypnotizes its public; is the equivalent of "sleep teaching"; "redesign[s] human minds into a channeled, artificial, commercial form"; and much, much more. Mander wanted TV banned--literally banned-- because it was turning people into passive zombies who would do anything they were told. ...
James B. Twitchell doesn't like TV much more than Mander does, but he understands it a lot better. "The purpose of television," Twitchell writes in Carnival Culture (Columbia, 1992), "is to keep you watching television." How does it try to achieve that goal? By showing us whatever it thinks we want to see."
"The problem is not that television presents us with entertaining subject matter, but that all subject matter is presented as entertaining, which is another issue altogether. ... There is no conspiracy here, no lack of intelligence, only a straightforward recognition that "good television" has little to do with what is "good" about exposition or other forms of verbal communication, but everything to do with what the pictorial images look like. ... The single most important fact about television is that people watch it, which is why it is called "television". And what they watch, and like to watch, are moving pictures -- millions of them, of short duration and dynamic variety. It is in the nature of the medium that it must suppress the content of ideas in order to accommodate the requirements of visual interest; that is to say, to accommodate the values of show business. ...
Television is our culture's principal mode of knowing about itself. Therefore -- and this is the critical point -- how television stages the world becomes the model for how the world is properly to be staged. It is not merely that on the television screen entertainment is the model for all discourse. It is that off the screen the same metaphor prevails. ...
I should go so far as to say that embedded in the surrealistic frame of a television news show is a theory of anticommunication, featuring a type of discourse that abandons logic, reason, sequence and rules of contradiction. In aesthetics, I believe the name given to this theory is Dadaism; in philosophy, nihilism; in psychiatry, schizophrenia. In the parlance of the theater, it is known as vaudeville. ... The damage is especially massive to youthful viewers who depend so much on television for their clues as to how to respond to the world. ... The result of all this is that Americans are the best-entertained and quite likely the least well-informed people in the Western world. ... And in saying that the television news show entertains but does not inform, I am saying something far more serious than that we are being deprived of authentic information. I am saying we are losing our sense of what it means to be well informed. Ignorance is always correctable. But what shall we do if we take ignorance to be knowledge? ... I do not mean that the trivialization of public knowledge is all accomplished on television. I mean that television is the paradigm for our conception of public information. ... "
pages 87, 88, 92, 105-108, 111
"Bush, as Mark Crispin Miller, the author of The Bush Dyslexicon, points out, is not stupid. ...--Update: OCT 2003
In father and son alike poor speech betrays a certain weightlessness of character, reflects lives so gilded that neither man ever had to worry about how he came across. ... what it really betrays is the psychology of the aristocratic slacker: a "Grand daddy earned the money, I don't even have to try" contempt for earnest striving. As Miller writes ... 'he is, of course, flaunting not his costly education but his disdain for it...'
Yet against the evidence of the Hunt story (A report of Bush reviling journalist Al Hunt in a restaurant because of Hunt's comments on Bush senior) , against the leer over the prospect of a triple execution, the frat-boy smirk, the grotesque jokes, the mocking of a woman on death row pleading for his mercy, the talking heads on TV pronounced Bush "likeable." They, Miller argues, are the true dyslexics ... "Likeable" is the desired category of the products sold on TV. ... They scorned Gore, Miller writes, 'for engaging the viewers in terms more complex than those of advertising, TV news, and other forms of supersimple propaganda....
Bush was literally more their style.... He spoke no language but the language of TV'."
"Populism used to mean defending the interests of ordinary people, championing the little guy. Now, new-styled right-wing populists ... claim to be close to the people -- not by defending the interests of the people, but simply by being uninformed, slow-witted, even inarticulate. ...
In this spirit, pundits declared Bush the winner of the 2000 presidential debate even though he seemed out of his depth debating the more articulate and well-informed Al Gore. The pundits didn't deny Gore's superior command of the issues, but concluded that Bush's apparent inadequacy showed he was more down to Earth, while Gore reminded people of the smartest kid in their high school class, the one they used to resent.
The notion that being smart and having a grasp of the issues is a liability for the job of running the world's most powerful country is, of course, interesting in itself. ...
This is no small achievement since they, in fact, represent big monied interests and, as Bush shows, can be counted on to deliver massive tax cuts for the rich.
The secret to the right's success in recent years has been its ability to disguise the fact that it does little but serve the interests of the financial elite.
It's been aided by frontmen who are simple talkers and action heroes and who successfully keep the focus elsewhere, while the rich help themselves to the nation's treasury."
"...just as alcoholics are only vaguely aware of their addiction, feeling that they control their drinking more than they really do ('I can cut it out any time I want -- I just like to have three or four drinks before dinner'), people similarly overestimate their control over television watching. Even as they put off other activities to spend hour after hour watching television, they feel they could easily resume living in a different, less passive style. But somehow or other, while the television set is present in their homes, the click doesn't sound. With television pleasures available, those other experiences seem less attractive, more difficult somehow."
The Plug-In Drug/Television, Children, and the Family
by Marie Winn
quoted at
ELECTRONIC HEROIN
"Most unsettling of all is this: the content of television is not a (mystical or imaginary) vision but a manufactured data stream that can be sanitized to 'protect' or impose cultural values. Thus we are confronted with an addictive and all-pervasive drug that delivers an experience whose message is whatever those who deal the drug wish it to be. Could anything provide a more fertile ground for fostering fascism and totalitarianism than this?
... no drug in history has so quickly or completely isolated the entire culture of its users from contact with reality. And no drug in history has so completely succeeded in remaking in its own image the values of the culture that it has infected.
"Television is by nature the dominator drug par excellence. Control of content, uniformity of content, repeatability of content make it inevitably a tool of coercion, brainwashing, and manipulation. Television induces a trance state in the viewer that is the necessary precondition for brainwashing."
Food of the Gods :
The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge :
A Radical History
of Plants, Drugs, and Human Evolution
by Terence McKenna
quoted at
ELECTRONIC HEROIN
(my parenthesis -- ed.)
"Big Brother has the telescreen. The telescreen is the key to everything else in 1984. The word "telescreen" (or "screen") occurs 119 times in Orwell's book, which is to say, on almost every other page. "Big Brother" appears only 74 times. Other related words get far fewer mentions ...Blinding ourselves with gin, to be sure, along with dozens of other alcoholic beverages; marijuana and various other street drugs; prescription psychoactives, notably antidepressants such as Paxil, Prozac, and Zoloft; trivial movies; violent computer games; spectator sports; and I would say above all else, television.
... Big Brother has the screens, which convey everything. You have Newspeak, which conveys nothing. Big Brother is watching, always watching, watching everyone, watching you. And you? You are blinding yourself on Victory Gin."
"... if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project -- every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in -- that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it's a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it's the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.
And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that's 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads."
"What our study revealed, in fact, is that TV news seems to confuse more than it clarifies. Even after controlling for all other variables, we discovered that the correlation between TV watching and knowledge was actually a negative one. Overall, the more TV people watched, the less they knew."Caveat -- I don't know what axes the authors of this study were grinding, or how they distinguished (presumably objective) "knowledge" from what the TV news was peddling.
"When you turn the TV on, in effect, you turn the world off.
...There is an old Zen analogy that the way to calm, clear and quiet the mind is similar to the way to clear a muddy pool -- not by action, by doing, by stirring it up, but by stillness, by letting it be, by letting it settle itself. The function of TV is to create, maintain and constantly reinforce what -- in the Zen tradition -- is often called "monkey-mind." The question to ask is: What is the good of a jumpy, volatile, scattered and hyper monkey-mind?
...Our culture and education conspire to condition us, to create a reliance on media to reinforce our actions, feelings and self-perceptions. When we seek media confirmation we acknowledge and assume that our personal experiences are not qualified as reality any longer. We lose the drive to pursue direct experience as well as the drive to participate in co-creating reality. We no longer do, we watch, and reality is someone else's creation.
... The problem is not that TV presents us with entertaining subject matter, but that TV presents all subject matter as entertaining. This transcends TV and spills over into our post-TV life experiences. TV trains us to orient toward and tune in to the entertainment quality of any experience, event, person. We look for that which is entertaining about any phenomenon rather than qualities of depth, social significance, spiritual resonance, beauty, etc.
... If one is alone in one's room and turns on the TV, one actually doesn't feel alone anymore. It's as if companionship is experienced, as if communication is two-way. We have achieved a new level of isolation, solipsism and withdrawal."
"News is entertainment. It is handled, spun, sanitized, massaged, and manufactured. No event is self-interpreting. Somalia no less than Michael Jordan. Then, before it gets to my front porch, it is sensationalized, personalized, packaged, and marketed.
... Very bright people are paid exceptional money to figure out what makes you and I tick -- what makes us feel accepted, loved, valuable, at home, secure, turned on sexually and otherwise, frightened, vulnerable, alive. We're talking identity here, shaping a spirit to conform to an image. They'll let us have our Sunday worship. They just want our identity the rest of the week."
"The average American home now has more television sets than people. That threshold was crossed within the past two years, according to Nielsen Media Research. There are 2.73 TV sets in the typical home and 2.55 people, the researchers said.
With televisions now on buses, elevators and in airport lobbies, that development may have as much to do with TV's ubiquity as an appliance as it does conspicuous consumption. The popularity of flat-screen TVs now make it easy to put sets where they haven't been before. ...
Half of American homes have three or more TVs, and only 19% have just one, Nielsen said. (Hey, where's the number for homes with no TV?)
In 1975, 57% of homes had only a single set and 11% had three or more, the company said. ...
In the average home, a television set is turned on for more than a third of the day -- eight hours, 14 minutes, Nielsen said. (I read somewhere a while back that in some homes the television is never switched off -- people bring it home, set it up, switch it on, and just leave it until it breaks. If I run across a source for that I'll include it here.) That's an hour more than it was a decade ago. Most of that extra TV viewing is coming outside of prime time, where TVs are on only four minutes more than they were 10 years ago.
The average person watches four hours, 35 minutes of television each day, Nielsen said. (Actually rather less than I'd expected, though of course half of all people watch more than that, and, assuming a 40-hour work week, the average American spends more than half as much time watching television as working.) "
"It seems important," he says, "to be able to discern whether a phenomenon really exists. We should not just accept the reality of something just because we have seen it on television."
-- critical thinking skills for our time --
"...entertainment programming -- that huge area of the media that's simply devoted to diverting people and making them more stupid and passive."
"You're lying to yourself. ...
Please, no excuses and no explanations. If you want to prove something wrong, you can. Just turn off the TV and keep it off for a week."
"Dan's sense that sitcom values are markedly different from his own was a bit misguided, and the simplistic nature of his attacks belie the complexity of the relationship between the producers and consumers of popular culture, but his belief that our popular culture reflects the values of the culture as a whole is absolutely correct.
What seems most ironic about the faux-battle being waged between Quayle and the entertainment industry is that, whether they admit it or not, they are on the same side."
"News is entertainment. It is handled, spun, sanitized, massaged, and manufactured. No event is self-interpreting. Somalia no less than Michael Jordan. Then, before it gets to my front porch, it is sensationalized, personalized, packaged, and marketed.
... Very bright people are paid exceptional money to figure out what makes you and I tick -- what makes us feel accepted, loved, valuable, at home, secure, turned on sexually and otherwise, frightened, vulnerable, alive. We're talking identity here, shaping a spirit to conform to an image. They'll let us have our Sunday worship. They just want our identity the rest of the week."
"It seems important," he says, "to be able to discern whether a phenomenon really exists. We should not just accept the reality of something just because we have seen it on television."
-- critical thinking skills for our time --
"To sum up: the introduction of television made kids more aggressive, harmed the acquistion of reading skills, decreased creativity scores, and cut participation in non-TV leisure activities."
"In November 1969, a researcher named Herbert Krugman, who later became manager of public-opinion research at General Electric headquarters in Connecticut, decided to try to discover what goes on physiologically in the brain of a person watching TV....
"Flicking on the TV, Krugman began monitoring the brain-waves of the subject. What he found through repeated trials was that within about thirty seconds, the brain-waves switched from predominantly beta waves, indicating alert and conscious attention, to predominantly alpha waves, indicating an unfocused, receptive lack of attention: the state of aimless fantasy and daydreaming below the threshold of consciousness. When Krugman's subject turned to reading through a magazine, beta waves reappeared, indicating that conscious and alert attentiveness had replaced the daydreaming state."
Further research revealed that the brain's left hemisphere, which processes information logically and analytically, tunes out while the person is watching TV. This tuning-out allows the right hemisphere of the brain, which processes information emotionally and noncritically, to function unimpeded. ... [Television is] a communication medium that effortlessly transmits huge quantities of information not thought about at the time of exposure.' "
cite is [p.p.
69-70, Joyce Nelson, THE PERFICT MACHINE;
New Society Pub., 1992, 800-253-3605; ISBN 0-86571-235-2 ]
Perfect Machine : TV in the Nuclear Age
by Joyce Nelson
The-Perfect-Machine : Television and the Bomb
by Joyce Nelson
Unread by me: I've no idea how reliable the quote
or anything else in Nelson is.
"This week, a father in Brentwood, California took away his 13 year old's TV because the boy was constantly faking illness so he could stay home from school and watch soaps. Within a few hours of the set's removal, the kid got his dad's revolver from the bedroom drawer, wrote a suicide note, and shot himself dead. The note said, "I can't stand a day without television. In my heart, I will take my TV with me. I love you."
"As Bad as it Gets", James Ehmann,
The Post Standard
10 Feb 1983, p. 2
quoted in
The Mall : An Attempted Escape from Everyday Life
by Jerry Jacobs
page 113
