Four Arguments For The Elimination of Television: Colonizing Lived Experience

By Jerry Mander
Published on November 1, 1978
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PHOTO: ANDREACRISANTE/FOTOLIA
Jerry Mander argues television tries to colonize lived experience and sell it back to us.

Excerpted from Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television by Jerry Mander, copyright 1977 by the author. Reprinted with the permission of William Morrow and Company, Inc.

Argument Two: The Colonization of Lived Experience

It is no accident that television has been dominated by a handful of corporate powers. Neither is it accidental that television has been used to re-create human beings into a new form that matches the artificial, commercial environment. A symbiosis of technological and economic factors made this inevitable. This then is the thrust of Argument Two: The colonization of lived experience and concentration of power.

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We have seen how the natural environment has been transformed into secondary, artificial and abstracted forms. This process has been described as though it happened by accident, without purpose. I have been avoiding conspiracy theories.

It is true that no small group could successfully plot to dominate social and technological processes that take millennia to evolve. Yet at any one moment, some people may benefit considerably more than others from particular forms of social organization and the technologies that accompany them. These will be the people who sit at the hub of the most critical institutions at any given time. They will naturally seek to consolidate their own position by concentrating their control while widening its effect. In this way, a tendency that may have been going on for hundreds of years or longer, beyond the range of human conspiracy, gains power over time. And so the tendency, the social and technological line of development, becomes more monolithic, more dominant, more difficult to stop.

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