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Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television

Metadata

  • Author: Jerry Mander
  • ASIN: B00DTTEDPC
  • ISBN: 0688082742
  • Reference: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00DTTEDPC
  • Kindle link

Highlights

Advertising expresses a power relationship, Gossage said. One person, the advertiser, invades; millions absorb. And to what end? So that people will buy something! A deep, profound and disturbing act by the few against the many for a trivial purpose. — location: 102 ^ref-57286

the effect that the mere possession of money has upon the kind of information that is dispensed through the media. — location: 126 ^ref-51010

Only the very rich buy mass national advertising. And they do this to become richer. What other motive could they possibly have? — location: 136 ^ref-18282

a distortion was taking place in the quality and kind of information offered to the public. To a larger and larger extent, people’s minds were being occupied by information of a purely commercial nature. — location: 142 ^ref-18051

Corporations are inherently uninterested in considerations aside from the commercial. — location: 172 ^ref-62200

these conditions of television viewing—confusion, unification, isolation, especially when combined with passivity and what I later learned of the effects of implanted imagery—were ideal preconditions for the imposition of autocracy. — location: 250 ^ref-27745

The young child of three or four years old is in the stage of the greatest emotional development that human beings undergo. And we only develop when we experience things, real-life things: a conversation with Mother, touching Father, going places, doing things, relating to others. This kind of experience is critical to a young child, and when the child spends thirty-five hours per week in front of the TV set, it is impossible to have the full range of real-life experience that a young child must have. Even if we had an overabundance of good television programs, it wouldn’t solve the problem.” — location: 3567 ^ref-63554

We believe ourselves to be living in a democracy because from time to time we get to vote on candidates for public office. Yet our vote for congressperson or president means very little in the light of our lack of power over technological inventions that affect the nature of our existence more than any individual leader has ever done. — location: 4762 ^ref-14412

Without our gaining control over technology, all notions of democracy are a farce. If we cannot even think of abandoning a technology, or thinking of it, affect the ban, then we are trapped in a state of passivity and impotence hardly to be distinguished from living under a dictatorship. — location: 4764 ^ref-27541

all technologies should be assumed guilty of dangerous effects until proven innocent. No new technology should ever be introduced, he has said, until its ultimate effects are known and explained to the population. This is necessary, he feels, because once it has been introduced, getting rid of any technology is practically impossible— — location: 4769 ^ref-10603

freedom. In democratic terms, this individual act is meaningless, as it has no effect at all upon the wider society, which continues as before. In fact, this act disconnects us from the system and leaves us less able to participate in and affect it than before. — location: 4791 ^ref-18344

As the person who gazes at streams becomes streamlike, so as we watch television we inexorably evolve into creatures whose bodies and minds become television-like. — location: 4810 ^ref-12564

What is lost by the unavailability of escape from what may be the painful conditions of many people’s lives, might be more than offset by the concrete realization that life has been made painful, more to some than to others, and the desire to do something about this, to attack whatever forces have conspired to make this so. — location: 4834 ^ref-29832