Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television
by Mander, JerryEdition: Reprint
Format: Paperback
Pub. Date: 2010-02-11
Publisher(s): HarperCollins Publications
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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."
Author Biography
Jerry Mander holds B.S. and M.S. degrees in Economics, spent 15 years in the advertising business, including five as president and partner of Freeman, Mander & Gossage, San Francisco. After quitting commercial advertising, he achieved national fame for his public service campaigns, leading the Wall Street Journal to call him "the Ralph Nader of advertising." In 1972 he founded the country's first non-profit ad agency
Table of Contents
| Introduction | |
| The Belly of the Beast | p. 13 |
| Adman Manque | |
| Engulfed by the Sixties | |
| The Replacement of Experience | |
| The Unification of Experience | |
| War to Control the Unity Machine | p. 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 | |
| The Mediation of Experience | |
| The Walling of Awareness | p. 53 |
| Mediated Environments | |
| Sensory-Deprivation Environments | |
| Rooms inside Rooms | |
| Expropriation of Knowledge | p. 69 |
| Direction Education | |
| Motel Education | |
| Adrift in Mental Space | p. 86 |
| Science Fiction and Arbitrary Reality | |
| Eight Ideal Conditions for the Flowering of Autocracy | |
| Popular Philosophy and Arbitrary Reality | |
| Schizophrenia and the Influencing Machine | |
| The Colonization of Experience | |
| Advertising: The Standard-Gauge Railway | p. 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 | |
| The Centralization of Control | p. 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 | |
| Effects of Television on the Human Being | |
| Anecdotal Reports: Sick, Crazy, Mesmerized | p. 157 |
| Invisible Phenomenon | |
| Dimming Out the Human | |
| Artificial Touch and Hyperactivity | |
| Television Is Sensory Deprivation | |
| The Ingestion of Artificial Light | p. 170 |
| Health and Light | |
| Outdoors to Indoors | |
| Seeking the Light | |
| Serious Research | |
| How Television Dims the Mind | p. 192 |
| Hypnosis | |
| Television Bypasses Consciousness | |
| Television Is Sleep Teaching | |
| Television Is Not Relaxing | |
| How We Turn into Our Images | p. 216 |
| Humans Are Image Factories | |
| The Concrete Power of Images | |
| Metaphysics to Physics | |
| Image Emulation: Are We All Taped Replays? | |
| Imitating Media | |
| The Replacement of Human Images by Television | p. 240 |
| Suppression of Imagination | |
| The Inherent Believability of All Images | |
| All Television Is Real | |
| Scientific Evidence | |
| The Irresistibility of Images | |
| The Inherent Biases of Television | |
| Information Loss | p. 263 |
| Bias against the Excluded | |
| Fuzzy Images: The Bias against Subtlety | |
| The Bias away from the Sensory | |
| Images Disconnected from Source | p. 283 |
| The Elimination of "Aura" | |
| The Bias toward Death | |
| Separation from Time and Place | |
| Condensation of Time: The Bias against Accuracy | |
| Artificial Unusualness | p. 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 | |
| The Pieces That Fall through the Filter | p. 323 |
| Thirty-three Miscellaneous Inherent Biases | |
| Postscript: Impossible Thoughts | |
| Television Taboo | p. 347 |
| Acknowledgments | p. 359 |
| Bibliography | p. 363 |
| Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved. |
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