Four Arguments for the Elimination of the TV

Does anyone else find it strange that the government is spending money on the new digital TV converters so that every house can keep watching there television? Do we need to spend our government money on digital converter boxes? It is one of the ways the government machine controls the population.  One can find many articles criticizing the content of TV shows, and rightly so, but we often don’t think about how we are affected by the medium of TV.

“The book Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television (1977) by Jerry Mander presents a compelling position that there are a number of problems with the medium of television. Its author argues that many of the problems with television are inherent in the medium and technology itself, and thus cannot be reformed. In specific, the technology of television is not a neutral, benign instrument, or tool. The author argues that in varied technologies and institutions such as militaries, automobiles, nuclear power plants, mass production, and advertising, the basic form of the institution and the technology determines its interaction with the world, the way it will be used, the kind of people who use it, and to what ends.

Mr. Mander maintains that far from being “neutral,” television predetermines who shall use it, how they will use it, what effects it will have on individual lives, and, if it continues to be widely used, what sorts of political forms will inevitably emerge. Mr. Mander’s four arguments are as follows:

• The first argument is that while television may seem useful, interesting, and worthwhile, at the same time it further boxes people into a physical and mental condition appropriate for the emergence of autocratic control.
• The second argument concerns the emergence of the controllers. That television would be used and expanded by the present powers-that-be was inevitable, and should have been predictable at the outset. The technology permits no other controllers.
• The third argument concerns the effects of television upon individual human bodies and minds, effects which fit the purposes of the people who control the medium.
• The fourth argument demonstrates that television has no democratic potential. The technology itself places absolute limits on what may pass through it. The medium, in effect, chooses its own content from a very narrow field of possibilities. The effect is to drastically confine all human understanding within a rigid channel.

What binds the four arguments together is that they deal with aspects of television that are not reformable. And this point must be understood by every well-meaning Orthodox parent who allows (and at times even encourages) the subjection of family youth to countless hours of television viewing.” Read the rest at Orthodoxinfo.

Christian Philosopher Douglas Groothuis has also made a similar point about the dangers of  the medium of TV. He says, “Indeed, no one can dispute television’s unrivaled immediacy, impact and entertainment capabilities. But it is exactly these features that make it a potent agent of truth decay in postmodernity. Television is an unreality appliance that dominates our mentality. We then take this unreality mentality and impose it on the rest of the real world. That is, we (mis)understand the world in terms of the mentality inherent to the form of communication that is television.” From Televison: Agent of Truth Decay