Total Pageviews

Tuesday, December 22, 2009

Why I hate television

Maybe it is just because I am a cranky old curmudgeon.  I dunno.  I have found my life MUCH richer, though, since getting rid of my TV.  I am not less informed.  I would argue that I am MORE informed than most of my contemporaries, although I cannot name the latest lover of Tiger Woods, nor who that British star was who just died.

I was scouting around and found this reference.

 In his book Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television (1978), Jerry Mander (after reviewing totalitarian critics such as George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, Jacques Ellul, and Ivan Illich) compiled a list of the "Eight Ideal Conditions for the Flowering of Autocracy."

Television helps create all eight conditions for breaking a population. Television, he explained, (1) occupies people so that they don't know themselves -- and what a human being is; (2) separates people from one another; (3) creates sensory deprivation; (4) occupies the mind and fills the brain with prearranged experience and thought; (5) encourages drug use to dampen dissatisfaction (while TV itself produces a drug-like effect, this was compounded in 1997 the U.S. Food and Drug Administration relaxing the rules of prescription-drug advertising); (6) centralizes knowledge and information; (7) eliminates or "museumize" other cultures to eliminate comparisons; and (8) redefines happiness and the meaning of life.

No comments: