I absolutely cannot resist plucking a few morsels from the feast that is Jerry Mander's book "Four Arguments for the Elimination of Televsion." Granted, these morsels are taken out of context and they are often the conclusions of well-thought-out arguments he makes, but I offer them in the hopes of stimulating your thought and encouraging you to read the book yourself.
"People's minds seemed to be running in dogged, one-dimensional channels which reminded me of the freeways, office buildings and suburbs that were the physical manifestations of the same period....Could life within these new forms of physical confinement produce mental confinement?" (p. 23)
"America had become the first culture to have substituted secondary, mediated versions of experience for direct experience of the world." (p. 24)
"A new muddiness of mind was developing. People's patterns of discernment, discrimination and udnerstanding were taking a dive. They didn't seem able to make distinctions between information which was pre-processed and then filtered through a machine, and that which came to them whole, by actual experience." (p. 25)
Tuesday, November 16, 2010
More from Mander
"I was chiled at the thought, realizing that 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." (p. 27)
"One movement became the same as the next one; one media action merged with the fictional program that followed; one revolutionary line was erased by the next commercial, leading to a new level of withdrawal, unconern and stasis. In the end, the sixties were revealed as the flash of light before hte bulb goes out." (p. 33)
"When a messaage is squeezed through a twenty-second news spot, so much can be lost that what is left will fail to move anyone enough to make them turn off the set and actually do something." (pp. 37-38)
[preceded by a discussion of the folly of attempting to convey the way of life of indigenous cultures on TV]
"Understanding Indian ways enough to care about them requies understanding a variety of dimensions of nuance and philosophy. You don't need any of that to understand a product, you do not have problems of subtlety, detail, time and space, historiccal context or organic form. Products are inherently communicable on television because of their static quality, sharp, clear, highly visible lines, and because they carry no informational meaning beyond what they themselves are. They contain no life at all and are therefore not capable of dimension. Nothing works better as telecommunications than images of products." (pp. 42-43)
"To speak of television as 'neutral' and therefore subject to change is as absurd as speaking of the reform of a technology such as guns." (p. 47)
"two unfortunate conditions of modern existence: Human beings no longerf trust peronal observation--even of the self-evident, until it is confirmed by scientific or technological institutions; human beings have lost insight into natural processes--how the world works, the human role as one of many interlocking parts of the worldwide ecosystem--because natural processes are now exceedingly difficult to observe." (p. 54)
"Virtually every experience is mediated in some way." (p. 55)
"In three generations since Edison, we have become creatures of light alone." (p. 58)
[To this I comment: Some of the most profound experiences of my life have been alone in the wilderness at night. Fifty or more miles from the nearest dirt town in the desert, standing on the shore of an interior lake on Isle Royal in Lake Superior while the howl of a wolf pack penetrated me to the bones, or being the sole camper on Santa Cruz Island off the coast of Ventura. But how many people in the modern world have had such encounters with absolute isolation and absolute darkness?]
"The moon's cycle affects the oceans, they [the experts] say, but it doesn't affect the body. Does that sound right to you? It doesn't to me. And yet, removed from any personal awareness of the moon, unable even to see it very well, let alone experience it, how are we to know what is right and what is wrong? Most of us cannot say if, this very evening, the moon will be out at all." (p. 59)
This takes us only to p. 59 of the book's 367 pages. This is only the beginning of the journey, as Mander frist sets the stage for television by showing how the world we have created is ideally suited for television's havoc.
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