Four Arguments for Elimination of Television

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What's the matter with our modern, technologically based society anyway? Why isn't it more satisfying? Why do so many of us now feel that some vague something hounds us, and diminishes us and makes us into something less than we should be? Most specifically of all, do we really use televisionand so many other "benefits" and "tools" of our technological age-or does it use us? Jerry Mander (see photo) speaks the unspeakable and asks the unaskable in a remarkable new book that is being completely serialized in this magazine. This is the third installment in the series.

From Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television by Jerry Mander, copyright 0 1977 by the author. Reprinted with the permission of William Morrow and Company, Inc. Available in paperback for $4.95 from any good bookstore or for $4.95 plus 95c shipping and handling from Mother's Bookshelf, P.O. Box 70, Hendersonville, North Carolina 28739.

ARGUMENT THREE: EFFECTS OF TELEVISION ON THE HUMAN BEING

Television technology produces neurophysiological responses in the people who watch it. It may create illness, it certainly produces confusion and submission to external imagery. Taken together, the effects amount to conditioning for autocratic control.

ANECDOTAL REPORTS: SICK, CRAZY, MESMERIZED

During the years I was preparing this book, occasional pieces of publicity appeared about it. With each exposure mail would arrive in my home. From one article alone I received more than two hundred fifty letters. Most were passionate and troubled. It became clear that watching TV was an experience that an amazing number of people were eager to describe.

I also kept an informal record of the terms people used in ordinary conversation to describe how they felt about television. In all, I recorded about two thousand conversational and written descriptions.

While I make no claims about this amounting to any kind of bona fide scientific sampling, the phrases people chose had a definite consistency. To give you an idea, I'm going to list the fifteen phrases most frequently used.

If you could somehow drop all preconception of television and read this list as though people were describing some instrument you'd never seen yourself, I think the picture you would obtain is of a machine that invades, controls and deadens the people who view it. It is not unlike the alien-operated "influencing machine" of the psychopathic fantasy.

1) "I feel hypnotized when I watch television."
2) "Television sucks my energy."
3) "I feel like it's brainwashing me."
4) "I feel like a vegetable when I'm stuck there at the tube."
5) "Television spaces me out."
6) "Television is an addiction and I'm an addict."
7) "My kids look like zombies when they're watching."
8) "TV is destroying my mind."
9) "My kids walk around like they're in a dream because of it."
10) "Television is making people stupid."
11) "Television is turning my mind to mush."
12) "If a television is on, I just can't keep my eyes off it."
13) "1 feel mesmerized by it."
14) "TV is colonizing my brain."
15) "How can I get my kids off it and back into life?"

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