This recent Associated Press article reminded me of an excellent book by Bill McKibben, The Age of Missing Information. The book is too dense to effectively summarize, but the bottom line is that the author recorded a single day of television on every channel available on his cable network, watched all 1,700 hours of it, and then compared his experience to spending a single day outside without televised stimulation (or, interference).
That being said, please allow me to recommend the witty and mature writing on Fox’s summer replacement, Keen Eddie, which airs at 8 PM Central on Fox.
Book on Banning TV Makes
Sense Much Later
“A few of the examples are a
little dated,” Mander acknowledges today.
Since 1977, much has happened
in the media world: camcorders, CNN, DirecTV, hi-def and TiVo,
along with a parallel course that has brought us PCs, e-mail and the Web.
Meanwhile, an attendant
explosion of media outlets is controlled by fewer and fewer companies in a
regulatory climate that seems to favor private enterprise over the public
interest. (As evidenced just this week, when the Federal Communications
Commission voted to relax decades-old rules restricting media ownership,
permitting a company to buy more television stations and to own a TV station
and a newspaper in the same city, among other provisions.)
Never mind The Fonz. A quarter-century later, Mander's
pioneering, often freewheeling book is, if anything, more applicable than ever.
“I don't know that things
aren't worse now,” says the adman-turned-activist, who still stands behind his
four arguments:
Many of these ideas - some
downright revolutionary when he published them - might be greeted with a
what-else-is-new shrug by today's media-inured generation. But maybe the time
is right to give them a fresh look.
Mander, by the way, never seriously advocated banishing television
from the landscape. He is practical, not quixotic, proposing not that we kill
our television, but that we approach it (and the powers behind it) with renewed
caution.
“The book makes the case that
life would be better if we didn't have TV,” he explains during a phone
interview from his home in
Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television caused a stir when it was published, and, still in
print, has found its place as a classic exegesis of the media.
If you have never heard of
this book or its author, the reason could be that Mander
has dealt himself out of TV's high-profile punditocracy:
He refuses to appear on television. But, now 67 and a senior fellow at the
nonprofit Public Media Center,
he has continued to warn against globalization and the tightening grip of business
and technology on social interaction.
“People should be aware of
what's going on: the domination of television by a few corporations, which was
just made profoundly worse by the FCC's ruling.
“We've moved our lives inside
an artificial, technologically contrived environment,” he says. “Many of the
images you see on television are impossible images, or a series of images
assembled in ways that are impossible, and it's controlled by a shrinking number
of companies. The majority of people spend the majority of their free time
immersed in this diet.”
The PC revolution hasn't
helped, he adds. For computer users, as with TV viewers, geographical distance
is irrelevant; “here” and “there” are disembodied notions. But however
convenient cyberspace may be, it raises false
expectations for the real world beyond.
“A certain awareness of being
interdependent with a natural system has been wiped out,” says Mander. “I think that goes hand-in-hand with the
destruction of nature and our lack of concern for the environment.
“We live with less and less
direct contact with the sources of our knowledge,” he declares. “We trust our
own senses less and less.”
What does it say that, a
quarter-century later in reruns, we still trust The Fonz?
EDITOR'S NOTE - Frazier Moore can be reached at fmoore@ap.org
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