television

the really good tv i have is in storage. has been for over a year.

the tiny tv in my rented room belongs to my girlfriend. she watches it more than i do. when i do use it, it's to watch videos.

ever, btw, watched a video called 'the big hit' that's on tv tonight, I wonder is it worth my time.

It's pretty good.... Not like some masterpiece movie or anything, but I mean, it's entertaining and funny, if I remember correctly..

Only TV I watch is cartoon network & ifc....

I don't watch TV at all.

Excepting since I lost my job, one hour around seven AM to which I won't admit in public.

i put the TV on in the background only. i hardly ever just sit and focus on the TV.

where i live my tv is my only entertainment so i would say 5 hours maybe

I watch Leno every couple of days, sometimes the news.

Anything else either seems to inane. And something about the Simpsons weirds me out, visually.

Since the 24 finale, 0(insert unit of time). I watch DVDs and VHS only.

I watch Court TV during the day when the live trials are on. I also like CSI and Law & Order but I just Tivo those and watch them when I feel like it rather than at the regular times. Oh, and Survivor.

I started following Real World Las Vegas but I lost track of it. I *love* Real World but I never watch it.

I watch Letterman and Conan. Besides that not much, I get movie chanels and watch those sometimes if something good is on. Besides that I barely ever watch it anymore as opposed to like eight hours a day a year ago, thankfully. I love Scrubs but I never know when it's on so i never see it. Clone High and Mission Hill are great but are never on anymore. Same with Futurama and Family Guy. Showcase hasn't got the last season of Oz yet so I'm stuck with nothing to watch. Thankfully I have the internet and books. Both of which promote inactivity as much as television. I watch ifc but I basically never leave my room when I'm at home and I don't get it in here.

When -is- Scrubs on? I used to love that show but it was one of those ones that if you missed an episode or two you were out of the loop for the rest of the season, damn them.

Mirkah: Law & Order rocks the house.

mission hill rocked. wholly shit i loved that show

The movie episode of Mission Hill was fucking brilliant.

Maybe it's just because I'm a film geek but still.

THEY CANCELLED CLERKS! FUCKERS!1!

sorry, I was just looking at knox's avatar as I wrote this.

hah ha ha ha ha h im buying the clerks animated dvd soon

Oh man, I want that so bad. I have episodes 2, 4 and 6 ripped. Episode 4 might just be the most brilliant thing ever aired on televsion, ever.

4-6 are so funny. 1-3 are ok, but still you gotta go buy them. wholly shit when they parody beverly hills cop, i never laughed so hard. to this day i still do the eddie murphey laugh with a banana in my hand. lol fuck i love that show

what was episode 4?? the plot? i rememebr all of them juts not what episode they belong to

4 is the trial with the anime ending!! The only good anime on the face of the earth, dang it! It has the part you were talking about, the Beverly Hills Cop thing with the banana in the tail pipe.

I kept thinking about the line "Your car with your AM/FM radio, and your seatbelts that actually work" whenever I read the thread about cars.

And the best line from that episode? "That's odd. I could've sworn I got game."

man i do the eddie murphey laugh so good. me and my cuz sit around laughing for hours whenever i do it

Yeah, man.. Frickin Scrubs was great. My friend always taped it and we'd all watch it, cos being a total asshole is the funniest thing in the world - so yeah.. that show was a favorite of ours. Mostly that main doctor guy, god damn, he was such a dick - a true role model.

[QUOTE][i]Originally posted by jane s. [/i]
[B]4 is the trial with the anime ending!! The only good anime on the face of the earth, dang it! It has the part you were talking about, the Beverly Hills Cop thing with the banana in the tail pipe.

I kept thinking about the line "Your car with your AM/FM radio, and your seatbelts that actually work" whenever I read the thread about cars.

And the best line from that episode? "That's odd. I could've sworn I got game." [/B][/QUOTE]

You're killing me, Jane. I've only seen one episode of Clerks, this is it, and it IS the only decent anime on the face of the earth.

"Who is driving car?? Bear is driving car??!!! How can this be???"

I knew if anyone would appreciate that, it would be you.

"Car full of midgets!!!"

kaboom. i watch law and order, simpsons and then my girlfriend's grinding ass on a hot summer night.

Where can I get that episode, Jane?

Umm....if you had a hacker brother like me, I think you could get them off Kazaa. Other than that, they sell them on DVD. Somewhere.

Gucci, you sure have a way with teh insults. I seriously hope we're on the same side when the revolution comes, as I don't wish to be insulted to death.

No, I kind of suck at the insults, sadly. I think my only defense in a war against humanity would be to nice them to death.

Which would reall just not work, in all honesty.

Passive aggression can work wonders. Guilt is a fantastic human motivator.

I am not passive aggressive, dear Lord, no. I don't really have any hidden antagonisms to speak of. I'm just really nice. And it kind of kills me. But I doubt it would kill anyone else.

I only watch T.V. on Fridays. I love watching stand up comedy on Comedy Central.

Gucci, shut the fuck up and make ME a sandwich.

Suuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuure.

See, my problem is that I used to be really nice, the nicest guy ever, and then I got what's called "Nice Guy" syndrome in which people walked all over me and didn't look at me as dating material so I got bitter. Now I have what's called "Stereotypical Writer's Personality" where I'm a freakishly mean jerk to most people. Nice people finish last for no reason. At least I know now I'm lonely because I'm an asshole, not because I'm the nice cute guy a person can ask for rides and talk to about their abusive boyfriends.

Maybe [i]I[/i]have some hidden antagonisms...

But watch out for Nice [Girl] Syndrome
Don't let it happen to you.

Oh yes I did! Don't make me, you vanilla mothafucka!

[QUOTE][i]Originally posted by prototype [/i]
[B]But watch out for Nice [Girl] Syndrome
Don't let it happen to you. [/B][/QUOTE]

Oh honey.
It's too late for me.
Let me die in peace.

You want a eulogy or anything? Some Irish Catholic priest drunk off his ass mouthing naughty limericks maybe?Or I could do the speech from the end of Boondock.

Proto: I would have to become Catholic first, but thank you for the kind offer.

Gucci: Please don't cut me. *hands him a sammich*

Mothafucka.

I watch Mad About You every morning if I wake up, even though I've seen them all five times. I love that show for some reason.

Scrubs is good too, and Malcolm in the Middle sometimes, Simpsons definitely, and George Lopez can be funny.

Other than that, the only thing I really watch are gameshows. I used to have better cable when we had a cheaper apt, and got the gameshow network. I love games, I have 100 board games, and I love playing on pogo.com. I'm addicted to meaningless games. (but how can something be meaningless if it's entertaining you.)

I would really love to watch Social Distortion on television, but unfortunately it's a band.

tv is fucking garbage
read 'five arguments for the elimination of television' to see how insidious tv really is-scary stuff

By whom, or where can I recieve such important knowledge?

I mean watching TV is 1 but writing the five arguments for the elimination of television is scary stuff... stop doing both and listnen to Ween, Social Distortion and whatever you like a bit more....'Come On Die Young'

i *do* have to watch the daily show every day. forgot about that.

[QUOTE]read 'five arguments for the elimination of television' to see how insidious tv really is-scary stuff[/QUOTE]

who is this by? where can we find it?

from Four [NOT FIVE ASSMUNCH] Arguments for the Elimination of Television

"What we see, hear, touch, taste, smell, feel and understand about the world has been processed for us. Our experiences of the world can no longer be called direct, or primary. They are secondary, mediated experiences.

When we live in cities... virtually all experience is mediated in some way. Concrete covers whatever would grow from the ground. Buildings block the natural vistas. the water we drink comes from a faucet, not from a stream or the sky. All foliage has been confined by human considerations and re designed according to human tastes."

"Most of us give little importance to this change in human experience of the world, if we notice it at all. We are so surrounded by a reconstructed world that it is difficult to grasp how astonishingly different it is from the world of only one hundred years ago, and that it bears virtually no resemblance to the world in which human beings lived for four million years before that. That that would affect the way we think is rarely considered." (pp. 55-56)

Our artificial environment is there and we can experience it, yet it has been created on purpose by other humans...We are left with no frame of reference untouched by human interpretation.

"When people cannot distinguish with certainty the natural from the interpreted, or the artificial from the organic, then all theories of the ideal organization of life become equal. None of them can be understood as any more or any less connected to planetary truth. And so the person or forces capable of speaking the most loudly or most forcefully, or with some apparent logic--even it it is an unrooted logic--can become convincing within the void of understanding. (pp 87-88)

"Whoever recognizes that...people's minds are appropriately confused and receptive, can speak directly into them without interference.

Television is the ideal tool for such purposes because it both confines experience and implants simple, clear ideas. (pp96-97)

"Advertising exists only to purvey what people don't need. Whatever people do need they will find without advertising if it is available. This is so obvious and simple that it continues to stagger my mind that the ad industry has succeeded in muddying the point.

No single issue gets advertisers screaming louder than this one. They speak about how they are only fulfilling the needs of people by providing an information service about where and how people can acheive satisfaction for their needs. Advertising is only a public service, they insist.

Speaking privately, however, and to corporate clients, advertisers sell their services on the basis of how well they are able to create needs where there were none before.... The only need that is expressed by advertising is the need of advertisers to accelerate the process of conversion of raw materials with no intrinsic value into commodities that people will buy.

In fact, advertising intervenes between people and their needs, separates them from direct fulfillment and urges them to believe that satisfaction can be obtained only through commodities..(pp 126-127)

"The goal of all advertising is discontent or, to put it another way, an internal scarcity of contentment. This must be continually created, even at the moment when someone has finally bought something. In that event, advertising has the task of creating discontent with what has just been bought, since once that act is completed, the purchase has no further benefit to the market system. The newly purchased commodity must be gotten rid of and replaced by the 'need' for a new commodity as soon as possible. The ideal world for advertisers would be one in which whatever is bought is used only once and then tossed aside. Many new products have been designed to fit such a world." (Cigarettes)

"Thousands of psychologists, behavioral scientists, perceptual researchers, sociologists and others have found extremely high salaries and steady, interesting work aiding advertisers..(in finding) nuances of artificial discontent" (in consumers). (pp. 128-129)

"By entering the human being's inner sanctum (the family), our inner wilderness, advertising effectively pulls our feelings up out of ourselves, displays them and sells them back to us like iron from the ground. (p. 131)

"Though television passes for experience, it is really more like 'time out'. Its interaction with the human body and mind fixes people to itself, dulls human sensibility and and dims awareness of the world. This enhances the commodity life by reducing knowledge of any other. (p. 132)

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

New Material (8.3.96)

The Inherent Believability of all Images

Seeing is believing.
Like many an axiom, this one is literally true. Only since the ascendancy of the media has this been opened to question....

Whatever information the senses produce the brain trusts as inherently believable. If the sense could not be relied upon, then the world would have been an utterly confusing place. Humans would have been unable to make any sensible choices leading to survival. If there were no concretely true information, there could have been no sane functioning; the species could not have survived.

This is not to say there is no illusion. There is animal camouflage. Animals use it to fool each other, including humans. In this way images become processed images, deliberately altered, and may serve to fool an observer whose senses and interpretations are not sufficiently sharp.

These are classical exceptions which prove the point, because the basis of success for camouflage and illusion is that humans will believe what they see. In this sense, camouflage is a kind of sensory jujitsu that only confirms the original point: the senses are inherently believable.

Without the human bias toward belief, the media could not exist. What's more, because the bias is so automatic and unnoticed, the media, all media, are in a position to exploit the belief, to encourage you to believe in their questionable sensory information. This bias has commercial value for the media since it allows them to keep your attention.

The natural evolutionary design is for humans to see all things as real, since the things that we see have always been real." Distinguishing real from unreal on television has to be learned. "Yet how is a child to understand that? When the child is watching a television program, he or she has no innate ability to make any distinction between real and not real.

The Bionic Mans's movements, his way of speaking, his attitudes, his way of relating to people, are in the child's mind no matter what we tell him about reality and unreality.

"Volume IV of Television and Social Behavior, prepared by the National Institute of Mental Health for the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, reports that a majority of adults, nearly as high a percentage as children, use television to learn how to handle specific life problems: family routines; relationships with fellow workers, heirarchical values...

""...practical knowledge and methods of problem solving lead the list of knowledge reported acquired through these programs...""

"Heavy viewers of television were more likely to overestimate the percentage of the world population that lives in America; they seriously overestimated the percentage of the population who have professional jobs; and they drastically overestimated the number of police in the U.S. and the amount of violence....The more television people watched, the more their view of the world matched television reality." (pp 254, 255)

"We all know that advertising cannot be considered truthful. In fact, it is by nature one-sided. Advertising always reflects only the facts and opinions of the people who pay for it. Why else would they pay for it?

"Our thinking processes can't save us. To the degree that we are thinking as we watch television, a minute degree at most, the images pass right through anyway. They enter our brains. They remain permanently. We cannot tell for sure, which images are ours and which came from distant places. Imagination and reality have merged. We have lost control of our images. We have lost control of our minds.(pp 246-260)

"The liquid quality of television imagery derives from the simple fact that television sets its own visual pace. One image is always evolving into the next, arriving in a stream of light and proceeding inward to the brain at its own electronic speed. The viewer has no way to slow the flow, except to turn off the set altogether. If you decide to watch television, then there's no choice but to accept the steam of images as it comes.

"The first effect is to create a passive mental attitude. Since there is no way to stop the images, one merely gives over to them. More than this, one has to clear all channels of reception to allow them in more cleanly. Thinking only gets in the way."

Artificial Unusualness and the Technical Events Test

To get an idea of the extent to which television is dependent upon technical tricks to maintain your interest (lacking real content), try the 'Technical Events Test':
Put on your television set and simply count the number of seconds between each cut, zoom, superimposition, voice-over, dissolve- a technical event of some kind. Very rarely will you be able to count more that about eight seconds without some video-magic alteration of reality.

Each technical event- each alteration of what would be natural imagery- is intended to keep your attention from wandering as it might otherwise. The effect is to lure your attention forward like a mechanical rabbit teasing a greyhound.

The luring forward never ceases for very long. If it did, you might become aware of the vacuousness of the content that can get through the inherent limitations of the medium. Then you would be aware of the boredom. Commercials have roughly double the amount of these interruptions per minute.

"Television is an extremely odd phenomenon. On the one hand it offers non-unique, totally repetitive experience. No matter what is on television, the viewer is sitting in a darkened room with almost all systems shut down, looking at a flickering light. But within this deprived, repetitive, inherently boring environment, television producers create a fiction that something unusual is going on, thereby fixing attention. (p 301)

Leaving the television to go outdoors, or to have an ordinary conversation, becomes unsatisfying. One wants action! Life becomes boring, and television interesting, all as a result of a system of technical hypes.(pp 303,304)

This begins to explain Attention Deficit Disorder and the drastically declining skills in written and verbal articulation that are becoming so rampant now in society.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television, By Jerry Mander, Morrow Quill Paperbacks, New York, 1978. "Jerry Mander holds BS and MS degrees in Economics, spent 15 years in the advertising business, including five as president of Freeman, Mander, & Gossage, San Francisco, one of the most celebrated agencies in the country. The Wall Street Journal called him "the Ralph Nader of Advertising".
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

This just in:

Theater is Life
Film is Art
Television is Furniture

And here's another Favorite:
Television must be a Medium
Because it's not Rare,
and it's Certainly not Well Done
Television has helped to create the ironic cynicism that permeates western culture. On TV reality is constantly re-arranged to suit the advertiser's needs, and everything has a snappy, one line answer - people who are indoctrinated by Television acquire this mental habit of putting all of life into surface-only flash cards. By being constantly ironic, Television preempts our own instinctual derision of it. By being coy and silly, and mocking itself, it poses as an ally to our uncertainty - our doubts about Television in general.

Television drives a wedge between reality and fantasy, putting us in a dream world, and creating an inability to differentiate between real bullets and fantasy bullets. "Pulp Fiction" is a film that could not have existed if Television had not been there first.

A constant diet of the television con-game turns its watchers into con artists. A fusion of crass commercialism and witless sentimentality, television has created a nation of credulous wheedlers, impressed by one dimensional surface displays, like stretch limos and cell phones, designed to prove that the owners of these objects are "somebody," and to hopefully impress someone even more vulgar than themselves.

hey so i said five instead of four
shit relax!

h.

[QUOTE][i]Originally posted by hobo [/i]
[B]hey so i said five instead of four
shit relax!

h. [/B][/QUOTE]

I just felt like calling someone an assmunch, and since you're the equivalent of a frosh, you need some hazing... I need me one of those giant homoerotic wooden frat paddles to give this dude some licks...

aw man life can be so cruel!

h.

[QUOTE][i]Originally posted by Brock Landers [/i]
[B]I just felt like calling someone an assmunch, and since you're the equivalent of a frosh, you need some hazing... I need me one of those giant homoerotic wooden frat paddles to give this dude some licks... [/B][/QUOTE]

EEEEJ! I'm (like many others, I hope) here to get drunk not read, what the m^%^#k are you doing to my brains, dude!

Just kidding, gotta run, I'll read this later!

[QUOTE][i]Originally posted by Brock Landers [/i]
[B]from Four [NOT FIVE ASSMUNCH] Arguments for the Elimination of Television

"What we see, hear, touch, taste, smell, feel and understand about the world has been processed for us. Our experiences of the world can no longer be called direct, or primary. They are secondary, mediated experiences.

When we live in cities... virtually all experience is mediated in some way. Concrete covers whatever would grow from the ground. Buildings block the natural vistas. the water we drink comes from a faucet, not from a stream or the sky. All foliage has been confined by human considerations and re designed according to human tastes."

"Most of us give little importance to this change in human experience of the world, if we notice it at all. We are so surrounded by a reconstructed world that it is difficult to grasp how astonishingly different it is from the world of only one hundred years ago, and that it bears virtually no resemblance to the world in which human beings lived for four million years before that. That that would affect the way we think is rarely considered." (pp. 55-56)

Our artificial environment is there and we can experience it, yet it has been created on purpose by other humans...We are left with no frame of reference untouched by human interpretation.

"When people cannot distinguish with certainty the natural from the interpreted, or the artificial from the organic, then all theories of the ideal organization of life become equal. None of them can be understood as any more or any less connected to planetary truth. And so the person or forces capable of speaking the most loudly or most forcefully, or with some apparent logic--even it it is an unrooted logic--can become convincing within the void of understanding. (pp 87-88)

"Whoever recognizes that...people's minds are appropriately confused and receptive, can speak directly into them without interference.

Television is the ideal tool for such purposes because it both confines experience and implants simple, clear ideas. (pp96-97)

"Advertising exists only to purvey what people don't need. Whatever people do need they will find without advertising if it is available. This is so obvious and simple that it continues to stagger my mind that the ad industry has succeeded in muddying the point.

No single issue gets advertisers screaming louder than this one. They speak about how they are only fulfilling the needs of people by providing an information service about where and how people can acheive satisfaction for their needs. Advertising is only a public service, they insist.

Speaking privately, however, and to corporate clients, advertisers sell their services on the basis of how well they are able to create needs where there were none before.... The only need that is expressed by advertising is the need of advertisers to accelerate the process of conversion of raw materials with no intrinsic value into commodities that people will buy.

In fact, advertising intervenes between people and their needs, separates them from direct fulfillment and urges them to believe that satisfaction can be obtained only through commodities..(pp 126-127)

"The goal of all advertising is discontent or, to put it another way, an internal scarcity of contentment. This must be continually created, even at the moment when someone has finally bought something. In that event, advertising has the task of creating discontent with what has just been bought, since once that act is completed, the purchase has no further benefit to the market system. The newly purchased commodity must be gotten rid of and replaced by the 'need' for a new commodity as soon as possible. The ideal world for advertisers would be one in which whatever is bought is used only once and then tossed aside. Many new products have been designed to fit such a world." (Cigarettes)

"Thousands of psychologists, behavioral scientists, perceptual researchers, sociologists and others have found extremely high salaries and steady, interesting work aiding advertisers..(in finding) nuances of artificial discontent" (in consumers). (pp. 128-129)

"By entering the human being's inner sanctum (the family), our inner wilderness, advertising effectively pulls our feelings up out of ourselves, displays them and sells them back to us like iron from the ground. (p. 131)

"Though television passes for experience, it is really more like 'time out'. Its interaction with the human body and mind fixes people to itself, dulls human sensibility and and dims awareness of the world. This enhances the commodity life by reducing knowledge of any other. (p. 132)

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

New Material (8.3.96)

The Inherent Believability of all Images

Seeing is believing.
Like many an axiom, this one is literally true. Only since the ascendancy of the media has this been opened to question....

Whatever information the senses produce the brain trusts as inherently believable. If the sense could not be relied upon, then the world would have been an utterly confusing place. Humans would have been unable to make any sensible choices leading to survival. If there were no concretely true information, there could have been no sane functioning; the species could not have survived.

This is not to say there is no illusion. There is animal camouflage. Animals use it to fool each other, including humans. In this way images become processed images, deliberately altered, and may serve to fool an observer whose senses and interpretations are not sufficiently sharp.

These are classical exceptions which prove the point, because the basis of success for camouflage and illusion is that humans will believe what they see. In this sense, camouflage is a kind of sensory jujitsu that only confirms the original point: the senses are inherently believable.

Without the human bias toward belief, the media could not exist. What's more, because the bias is so automatic and unnoticed, the media, all media, are in a position to exploit the belief, to encourage you to believe in their questionable sensory information. This bias has commercial value for the media since it allows them to keep your attention.

The natural evolutionary design is for humans to see all things as real, since the things that we see have always been real." Distinguishing real from unreal on television has to be learned. "Yet how is a child to understand that? When the child is watching a television program, he or she has no innate ability to make any distinction between real and not real.

The Bionic Mans's movements, his way of speaking, his attitudes, his way of relating to people, are in the child's mind no matter what we tell him about reality and unreality.

"Volume IV of Television and Social Behavior, prepared by the National Institute of Mental Health for the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, reports that a majority of adults, nearly as high a percentage as children, use television to learn how to handle specific life problems: family routines; relationships with fellow workers, heirarchical values...

""...practical knowledge and methods of problem solving lead the list of knowledge reported acquired through these programs...""

"Heavy viewers of television were more likely to overestimate the percentage of the world population that lives in America; they seriously overestimated the percentage of the population who have professional jobs; and they drastically overestimated the number of police in the U.S. and the amount of violence....The more television people watched, the more their view of the world matched television reality." (pp 254, 255)

"We all know that advertising cannot be considered truthful. In fact, it is by nature one-sided. Advertising always reflects only the facts and opinions of the people who pay for it. Why else would they pay for it?

"Our thinking processes can't save us. To the degree that we are thinking as we watch television, a minute degree at most, the images pass right through anyway. They enter our brains. They remain permanently. We cannot tell for sure, which images are ours and which came from distant places. Imagination and reality have merged. We have lost control of our images. We have lost control of our minds.(pp 246-260)

"The liquid quality of television imagery derives from the simple fact that television sets its own visual pace. One image is always evolving into the next, arriving in a stream of light and proceeding inward to the brain at its own electronic speed. The viewer has no way to slow the flow, except to turn off the set altogether. If you decide to watch television, then there's no choice but to accept the steam of images as it comes.

"The first effect is to create a passive mental attitude. Since there is no way to stop the images, one merely gives over to them. More than this, one has to clear all channels of reception to allow them in more cleanly. Thinking only gets in the way."

Artificial Unusualness and the Technical Events Test

To get an idea of the extent to which television is dependent upon technical tricks to maintain your interest (lacking real content), try the 'Technical Events Test':
Put on your television set and simply count the number of seconds between each cut, zoom, superimposition, voice-over, dissolve- a technical event of some kind. Very rarely will you be able to count more that about eight seconds without some video-magic alteration of reality.

Each technical event- each alteration of what would be natural imagery- is intended to keep your attention from wandering as it might otherwise. The effect is to lure your attention forward like a mechanical rabbit teasing a greyhound.

The luring forward never ceases for very long. If it did, you might become aware of the vacuousness of the content that can get through the inherent limitations of the medium. Then you would be aware of the boredom. Commercials have roughly double the amount of these interruptions per minute.

"Television is an extremely odd phenomenon. On the one hand it offers non-unique, totally repetitive experience. No matter what is on television, the viewer is sitting in a darkened room with almost all systems shut down, looking at a flickering light. But within this deprived, repetitive, inherently boring environment, television producers create a fiction that something unusual is going on, thereby fixing attention. (p 301)

Leaving the television to go outdoors, or to have an ordinary conversation, becomes unsatisfying. One wants action! Life becomes boring, and television interesting, all as a result of a system of technical hypes.(pp 303,304)

This begins to explain Attention Deficit Disorder and the drastically declining skills in written and verbal articulation that are becoming so rampant now in society.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television, By Jerry Mander, Morrow Quill Paperbacks, New York, 1978. "Jerry Mander holds BS and MS degrees in Economics, spent 15 years in the advertising business, including five as president of Freeman, Mander, & Gossage, San Francisco, one of the most celebrated agencies in the country. The Wall Street Journal called him "the Ralph Nader of Advertising".
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

This just in:

Theater is Life
Film is Art
Television is Furniture

And here's another Favorite:
Television must be a Medium
Because it's not Rare,
and it's Certainly not Well Done
Television has helped to create the ironic cynicism that permeates western culture. On TV reality is constantly re-arranged to suit the advertiser's needs, and everything has a snappy, one line answer - people who are indoctrinated by Television acquire this mental habit of putting all of life into surface-only flash cards. By being constantly ironic, Television preempts our own instinctual derision of it. By being coy and silly, and mocking itself, it poses as an ally to our uncertainty - our doubts about Television in general.

Television drives a wedge between reality and fantasy, putting us in a dream world, and creating an inability to differentiate between real bullets and fantasy bullets. "Pulp Fiction" is a film that could not have existed if Television had not been there first.

A constant diet of the television con-game turns its watchers into con artists. A fusion of crass commercialism and witless sentimentality, television has created a nation of credulous wheedlers, impressed by one dimensional surface displays, like stretch limos and cell phones, designed to prove that the owners of these objects are "somebody," and to hopefully impress someone even more vulgar than themselves. [/B][/QUOTE]

read it when you want dude... i didn't write the shit... I just produced it since someone was curious. It has some good points...

I will...

[QUOTE][A constant diet of the television con-game turns its watchers into con artists. A fusion of crass commercialism and witless sentimentality, television has created a nation of credulous wheedlers, impressed by one dimensional surface displays, like stretch limos and cell phones, designed to prove that the owners of these objects are "somebody," and to hopefully impress someone even more vulgar than themselves.][/QUOTE]

THAT is so true, is that from mander or your owN?
-thanks for posting this and the rest that i didnt copy here.
h

more info on the book here-
[URL]http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0688082742/qid=1054569231/sr=2-1/002-0173182-0492868?v=glance&s=books[/URL]