kill your tv

Why is TV so bad for us?
Jay Doubleyou: turn off your tv

For example:

Jay Doubleyou: the mean world syndrome

Jay Doubleyou: the men who made us spend: part three

Jay Doubleyou: english language media as propaganda in the ukraine
Jay Doubleyou: brexit, trump and dumbing down

And why is YouTube and everything else on the internet as bad for us as TV?

Here is an excellent article from Baffler which asks this:

Alexander Zaitchik No. 48

November 2019

R.I.P., Kill Your TV

Thinking outside the idiot box

WHEN HBO ANNOUNCED it was making a movie of Fahrenheit 451, it was a bit of a headscratcher. Ray Bradbury’s novel depicts a society gone numb on endless loops of home entertainment. Why would HBO, the nation’s great pioneer and name-brand purveyor of endless loops of home entertainment, produce a devastating critique of itself—that is, of television, a medium that Bradbury went to his grave calling an “insidious beast, that Medusa which freezes a billion people to stone every night”?

Only one answer was imaginable: HBO would do no such thing. It would instead gut Fahrenheit of its core idea, Kill Your TV, and remix the dystopia as an extended, slightly edgy ad for Barnes & Noble Classics. The network would switch out the primacy of the story’s ubiquitous television screens in favor of non-screen, non-entertainment gadgets like smart speakers. A remake along these lines would be roughly akin to a GlaxoSmithKline production of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World that used non-pharmaceutical stand-ins for the futurist all-purpose narcotic that Huxley called soma. In both cases, the deviations would serve to soften or remove any unsettling echoes with the latter-day cognates of the original plots—mood-enhancing drugs in Huxley’s case, and “peak TV” in Bradbury’s.

HBO did indeed deliver a Fahrenheit devoid of television—a Jaws without the shark. In the script written and directed by Ramin Bahrani, Bradbury’s “insidious beast” barely makes an appearance, much less turns anyone to stone. Cut from the story is a central character, Guy Montag’s TV-addicted wife, Mildred, who spends her waking hours engrossed in interactive serial dramas displayed on three giant “parlor” screens. In the original 1953 novel, Montag is distraught but resigned to the fact that “No matter when [he] came in, the walls were always talking to Mildred.” It’s during one of his wife’s regular viewing parties that Guy finally snaps, setting him on course to torch his boss with a flamethrower and flee the city’s boundless warren of living-room home box offices.

François Truffaut faithfully reproduced this pivotal scene in his 1966 adaptation of Fahrenheit, but the HBO version finds Montag curiously unmarried. The holographic parlor screens in his tranquil space-age bachelor pad appear only briefly; they feature no loud sitcoms or dramas, but a series of stills from a search on the history of firemen. In the monitor built into the bathroom mirror, a futuristic social media feed displaces the dramatic fare spit out by the televisions of the original story. Other depictions of indoor screens in the HBO remake are few, notably including a vintage Zenith-style turn-dial used by a resistance cell to screen video manifestos.

None of the critics who mostly panned the remake found it odd that HBO’s Fahrenheit presents a TV set as a symbol of the Resistance. Then again, since they most likely regard 30 Rockefeller Plaza as a strategic bunker in their own Trump-age version of the Resistance, why would they?

R.I.P., Kill Your TV | Baffler

Here's the trailer from the rather bad HBO version:

Fahrenheit 451 - Trailer - YouTube
Fahrenheit 451 (2018 film) - Wikipedia

And here's a scene from the much better Truffaut film:



Fahrenheit 451 (1966) - Futuristic Interactive TV - YouTube
Fahrenheit 451 (1966 film) - Wikipedia

And here are some nice references to other stuff on TV from the same article above:

It was Hollywood that provided some of the first pointed attacks on its upstart rival for America’s attention. The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit depicts the living room TV as a self-aware episode of The Twilight Zone might have done—as a hypnotizing, violent, undifferentiated disturbance. “Kick that television in,” says Frederic March. “Kick it in and stomp it if it gets in the way of the family...

Then there was the retarding influence of Marshall McLuhan, the Canadian celebrity academic who served as a hype-man for television throughout the decade. McLuhan famously believed sitting in front of television made people active participants in a shared drama, one told over the giant campfire of a global electronic village. He didn’t care much about this drama’s content or its sponsors, or that everyone in the audience was sitting alone in a dark room staring at a box, subjected to a stream of manipulative ads. McLuhan thought television’s visual immediacy, its “coolness,” made it inherently revolutionary...

In 1970, Gil Scott-Heron released the legendary proto-rap track, “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” which was soon followed by The Mothers of Invention’s “I’m the Slime,” in which Frank Zappa intones, “You will obey me while I lead you / And eat the garbage that I feed you. . . Have you guessed me yet? / I’m the slime oozin’ out from your TV set.”...

Marie Winn published the first critical investigation of television as a medium. Because so little research existed on the subject, The Plug-In Drug relied mostly on anecdote, interviews and conjecture. But its conclusions—that television was addictive, increased aggression, slowed cognitive development, decreased test scores, weakened families and enervated the innate human ability to play, to amuse ourselves, to sit still and fill our minds with our own thoughts—resonated with a national audience who suspected she was right, even if no one had ever made the case. The book was a bestseller.

A year later, Jerry Mander’s Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television offered a deeper, more radical critique, correcting what Mander called Winn’s failure to apply her findings “to the power drives of the wider society.” These were drives Mander understood well. He wrote as a repentant enabler of the TV plague after fifteen years as an ad and public relations man, including five years as the president of the San Francisco advertising agency Freeman, Mander & Gossage. His own Montag-like snap came during a 1968 cruise through the Dalmatian Straits, when he attempted to appreciate a brilliant natural scene before him—“rocky cliffs, rolling seas, dazzling sky, and colors as bright as a desert”—and realized he couldn’t. “I felt nothing,” he writes. “Something had gone wrong with me.” That something was television...

Mander framed Four Arguments around the planet’s deepening ecological emergency. The reigning paradigm of consumption and growth could not be questioned, let alone disrupted, he argued, so long as television was setting the terms of our thoughts and debates, not to mention limiting our very ability to think and debate. Four decades later, Mander’s arguments hold up all too well.

A sustained burst of anti-TV books followed the salvos by Winn and Mander. In his 1979 broadside against the terminal self-involvement of postwar American life, The Culture of Narcissism, Christopher Lasch referenced television often. The following year, Vance Packard updated his Eisenhower-era expose of television advertising, The Hidden Persuaders. In 1985, Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death warned that the West was entering the screen-and-pill entertainment coma described in Huxley’s Brave New World.[3] In 1986, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting began publishing its newsletter, Extra!, which continues to valiantly catalogue every new reason to avoid commercial broadcast news. In 1988, Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman published Manufacturing Consent, a narrow but damning study of the structural biases of the major networks’ news departments. [4]

In 1992, Bill McKibben’s The Age of Missing Information dug into the link between television and humanity’s accelerating glide-path toward environmental ruin. McKibben’s previous book, The End of Nature, had laid out the new science of climate change. Missing Information explored how TV made the changes mandated by the grim findings of environmental science difficult, if not impossible, to realize. The book was structured as a kind of diary documenting McKibben’s viewing of well over one thousand hours of cable television—nearly every minute of programming on 93 channels during a 24-hour period—and then comparing the experience with sitting on a remote mountaintop in the Adirondacks observing nature and contemplating humanity’s place within it. The result is a personal account of how the chaotic and never-ending “flow” of television cracks and cheapens our experience of the world, destroying our ability to form coherent narratives about what we are, and should be, doing here. Even after we shut the TV off, we are unable to process the information we most need to educate ourselves about “the physical limits of a finite world. About sufficiency and need, about proper scale and real time, about the sensual pleasure of exertion and exposure to the elements, about the need for community and for solid, real skills. About the good life as it appears on TV, and about other, perhaps better lives.”

It’s hard to imagine now, but the rise of on-demand and mobile platforms for TV content did cause a panic among those with stakes in the old television order. Beginning in 2010, viewing time in U.S. households started to dip for the first time since Nielsen began keeping track. It seemed possible that the “fourth screen” in our pockets—with its expanding universe of apps and streaming services—might weaken television’s long deathlike grip on our national attention, if only by replacing a mother source of commercial distraction with a million little ones. [5]

Alas, the panic was short-lived. Corporations quickly learned to control this new world and accomplish even deeper levels of “brand penetration” on a terminally distracted, screen-addled public. In 2013, a team at Innerscope Research, a marketing firm, published an article announcing the good news in the Journal of Advertising Research. The piece had a lurid Huxleyan title that no doubt would have caused Neil Postman, who died in 2003, to break out into a knowing grin: “Leveraging Synergy and Emotion In a Multi-Platform World: A Neuroscience-Informed Model of Engagement.” The researchers explained that, rather than threatening the power of television, a “flexible media environment” can actually facilitate “activation of brand associations from previous exposure across platforms.” ...

Our imaginations can no longer absorb a narrative in which Guy Montag is the hero, television the enemy, and his wife the tragic warning. The portals to this world were never on center stage, but they existed, in newsstands and zine racks, in books, in leaflets, in the boomboxes of high school parking lots. HBO, which has done more than most to make this world vanish, did nothing brave with its production of Fahrenheit 451. By scrubbing TV from Bradbury’s story, it papered over its own pixelated reflection and ours, sparing us from reckoning with the fact that we are all Mildred Montag now.

R.I.P., Kill Your TV | Baffler

.
.
.