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Four arguments for the elimination of television / by Jerry Mander.
LIBRA HE8700.8 .M348
Available from offsite location
- Format:
- Book
- Author/Creator:
- Mander, Jerry.
- Language:
- English
- Subjects (All):
- Television broadcasting--Social aspects--United States.
- Television broadcasting.
- Television broadcasting--Social aspects.
- United States.
- Television--Psychological aspects.
- Television.
- Physical Description:
- 371 pages ; 22 cm
- Place of Publication:
- New York : Morrow, 1978.
- Summary:
- A total departure from previous writing about television, this book is the first ever to advocate that the medium is not reformable. Its problems are inherent in the technology itself and are so dangerous -- to personal health and sanity, to the environment, and to democratic processes -- that TV ought to be eliminated forever.
- Weaving personal experiences through meticulous research, the author ranges widely over aspects of television that have rarely been examined and never before joined together, allowing an entirely new, frightening image to emerge. The idea that all technologies are "neutral, " benign instruments that can be used well or badly, is thrown open to profound doubt. Speaking of TV reform is, in the words of the author, "as absurd as speaking of the reform of a technology such as guns."
- Contents:
- I The Belly of the Beast 13
- Adman Manque
- Engulfed by the Sixties
- The Replacement of Experience
- The Unification of Experience
- II War to Control the Unity Machine 29
- Advancing from the Sixties to the Fifties
- Style Supersedes Content
- Television at Black Mesa
- The Illusion of Neutral Technology
- Before the Arguments: A Comment on Style
- Argument 1 The Mediation of Experience
- III The Walling of Awareness 53
- Mediated Environments
- Sensory-Deprivation Environments
- Rooms inside Rooms
- IV Expropriation of Knowledge 69
- Direction Education
- Motel Education
- V Adrift in Mental Space 86
- Science Fiction and Arbitrary Reality
- Eight Ideal Conditions for the Flowering of Autocracy
- Popular Philosophy and Arbitrary Reality
- Schizophrenia and the Influencing Machine
- Argument 2 The Colonization of Experience
- VI Advertising: The Standard-Gauge Railway 115
- The Creation of "Value"
- Redeveloping the Human Being
- Commodity People
- Breaking the Skin Barrier
- The Inherent Need to Create Need
- Buying Ourselves Back
- The Delivery System's Delivery System
- VII The Centralization of Control 134
- Economic Growth and Patriotic Consumption
- The Trickle-Down Theory
- Beneficiaries of the Advertising Fantasy
- The Effect on Individuals
- Flaws in the Fantasy
- The Depression Never Ended
- Domination of the Influencing Machine
- Argument 3 Effects of Television on the Human Being
- VIII Anecdotal Reports: Sick, Crazy, Mesmerized 157
- Invisible Phenomenon
- Dimming Out the Human
- Artificial Touch and Hyperactivity
- Television Is Sensory Deprivation
- IX The Ingestion of Artificial Light 170
- Health and Light
- Outdoors to Indoors
- Seeking the Light
- Serious Research
- X How Television Dims the Mind 192
- Hypnosis
- Television Bypasses Consciousness
- Television Is Sleep Teaching
- Television Is Not Relaxing
- XI How We Turn into Our Images 216
- Humans Are Image Factories
- The Concrete Power of Images
- Metaphysics to Physics
- Image Emulation: Are We All Taped Replays?
- Imitating Media
- XII The Replacement of Human Images by Television 240
- Suppression of Imagination
- The Inherent Believability of All Images
- All Television Is Real
- Scientific Evidence
- The Irresistibility of Images
- Argument 4 The Inherent Biases of Television
- XIII Information Loss 263
- Bias against the Excluded
- Fuzzy Images: The Bias against Subtlety
- The Bias away from the Sensory
- XIV Images Disconnected from Source 283
- The Elimination of "Aura"
- The Bias toward Death
- Separation from Time and Place
- Condensation of Time: The Bias against Accuracy
- XV Artificial Unusualness 299
- Instinct to the Extraordinary
- The Bias toward Technique as Replacement of Content
- In Favor of "Alienated" Viewing
- The Bias to Highlighted Content: Toward the Peaks, Away from the Troughs
- XVI The Pieces That Fall through the Filter 323
- Thirty-three Miscellaneous Inherent Biases
- XVII Television Taboo 347.
- Notes:
- Bibliography: pages 363-371.
- ISBN:
- 0688032745.
- 0688082742
- OCLC:
- 3240263
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