Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television

by Jerry Mander

Overview

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."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780688082741
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	03/01/1978
Series:	Harper Perennial
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	384
Sales rank:	969,403
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.25(h) x 0.85(d)

About the Author

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, one of the most celebrated agencies in the country. 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 adevertising." In 1972 he founded the country's first non-profit ad agency, taking leave of that in 1974. Mander is co-author of The Great International Paper Airplane Book.

Table of Contents

	Introduction
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
	Postscript: Impossible Thoughts
XVII	Television Taboo	347
	Acknowledgments	359
	Bibliography	363