"Do you know we are ruled by TV?"-- from the poem An American Prayer by Jim Morrison
"They put an off button on the TV for a reason. Turn it off . . . I really don't watch much TV."-- President George W. Bush, C-SPAN interview, January 2005
"American children and adolescents spend 22 to 28 hours per week viewing television, more than any other activity except sleeping. By the age of 70 they will have spent 7 to 10 years of their lives watching TV."-- The Kaiser Family Foundation
"You watch television to turn your brain off and you work on your computer when you want to turn your brain on."-- Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple Computer and Pixar, in Macworld Magazine, February 2004
Kill Your Television TurnOffYourTV.com
"Everybody’s got values . . . The thing that frightens me is the way that an eroding public school system . . . and television on all over the place is leading to a steady dumbing down of the American public and a corrosion of basic critical thinking in the population."-- Jamie Raskin, American University law professor, November 2004 on the DemocracyNow! radio program
Peter Finch/Howard Beale: "We're as mad as hell, and we're not going to take this anymore."
Network - YouTube
Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television (1978) is a book written by Jerry Mander which argues that there are a number of problems with the medium of television. Mander argues that many of the problems with television are inherent in the medium and technology itself, and thus cannot be reformed.
Mander spent 15 years in the advertising business, including five as president and partner of Freeman, Mander & Gossage, San Francisco, a nationally-known advertising agency.[1]
... television has effects, very important effects, aside from the content, and they may be more important. They organize society in a certain way. They give power to a very small number of people to speak into the brains of everyone else in the system night after night after night with images that make people turn out in a certain kind of way. It affects the psychology of people who watch. It increases the passivity of people who watch. It changes family relationships. It changes understandings of nature. It flattens perception so that information, which you need a fair amount of complexity to understand it as you would get from reading, this information is flattened down to a very reduced form on television. And the medium has inherent qualities which cause it to be that way.
Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The revolution will not be televised: Gil Scott Heron
Gil Scott HeronThe Revolution Will Not Be Televised with lyrics - YouTube
"Winston turned a switch and the voice sank somewhat, though the words were still distinguishable. The instrument (the telescreen, it was called) could be dimmed, but there was no way of shutting it off completely . . . Winston kept his back turned to the telescreen."-- from 1984 by George Orwell
Television is advertising. It is a medium whose purpose is to sell, to promote capitalism. In 1977, Jerry Mander, a former advertising executive in San Francisco, published Four Arguments For The Elimination Of Television. In the book, Mander reveals how the television networks and advertisers use this pervasive video medium for sales.
Four Arguments talks about a lot more than just advertising. Mander attacks not only the contents of the television images, but the effects television has on the human mind and body. His discussion includes: The induction of alpha waves, a hypnotizing effect that a motionless mind enters. How viewers often regard what they see on television as real even though the programs are filled with quick camera switches, rapid image movement, computer generated objects, computer generated morphing and other technical events. The placement of artificial images into our mind's eye. And the effects that large amounts of television viewing have on children and the onset of attention deficit disorder.
However, at the heart of Mander's arguments, lies advertising. In the words of writer Charles Bukowski: "[America is] not a free country -- everything is bought and sold and owned."
Kill Your Television-Jerry Mander
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