Four Arguments for The Elimination of Television

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As we go, however, I hope it will become apparent that the most compelling outcome of these sudden changes in the way we experience life is the inevitable political one.

Living within artificial, reconstructed, arbitrary environments that are strictly the products of human conception, we have no way to be sure that we know what is true and what is not. We have lost context and perspective. What we know is what other humans tell us.

Therefore, whoever controls the processes of re-creation, effectively redefines reality for everyone else, and creates the entire world of human experience, our field of knowledge. We become subject to them. The confinement of our experience becomes the basis of their control of us.

The role of the media in all this is to confirm the validity of the arbitrary world in which we live. The role of television is to project that world, via images, into our heads, all of us at the same time.

EXPROPRIATION OF KNOWLEDGE

The moment the natural environment was altered beyond the point that it could be personally observed, the definitions of knowledge itself began to change. No longer based on direct experience, knowledge began to depend on scientific, technological, industrial proof.

Scientists, technologists, psychologists, industrialists, economists and the media which translate and disseminate their findings and opinions became our source. Now they tell us what nature is, what we are, how we relate to the cosmos, what we need for survival and happiness, and what are the appropriate ways to organize our existence.

There is little wonder, therefore, that we should begin to doubt the evidence of our own experience and begin to be blind to the self-evident. Our experience is not valid until science says it is. ( Mother's milk is healthy!)

It is also little wonder that we feel removed from participation in the larger issues which shape our lives. We feel removed because we are removed.

As we continue to separate ourselves from direct experience of the planet, the hierarchy of techno-scientism advances.

This creates astounding problems for a society that is supposed to be democratic.

In democracies, by definition, all human beings should have a say about technological developments that may profoundly change, even threaten, their lives: nuclear power, genetic engineering, the spread of microwave systems, the advance of satellite communications, and the ubiquitous use of computers, to name only a few. And yet, in order to participate fully in discussions of the implications of these technologies one must have training in at least physics, psychology, biology, philosophy, economics, and social and political theory. Any of these technologies has profound influence in all those areas. Because most of us are not so trained, all discussion takes place among our unelected surrogates, professionals and experts. They don't have this full range of training either, but they do have access to one or another area of it and can speak to each other in techno-jargon—"tradeoffs," "cost-benefits," "resource management"—and they therefore get to argue with each other over one side of the question or the other while the rest of us watch.

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