Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television

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What' 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 television—and 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 unshakable in a
remarkable new book that is being completely serialized in this magazine. This is the seventh installment in the series.

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

ARGUMENT FOUR: THE INHERENT BIASES OF TELEVISION

Along with the venality of its controllers, the technology of television predetermines the boundaries of its content. Some information can be conveyed completely, some partially, some not at all. The most effective telecommunications are the gross, simplified linear messages and programs which conveniently fit the purposes of the medium's commercial controllers. Televisions highest potential is advertising. This cannot be changed. The bias is inherent in the technology.

INFORMATION LOSS

A good way to think about televisionin fact all the media is as a kind of telescope in the sky, Dying around, constantly looking. Then from its perch in the sky, it zooms down to a single spot on the planet, a small group of people shooting each other. It takes this single event out of billions and billions of other little events and sends it zooming through space to television antennas, and then out through an electron gun into (on the average) 30 million people sitting at home in dark rooms with their eyes still. The event gets reconstructed in the brains of these people as an image. Recorded. All these 30 million people have recorded the same image from this single distant spot where they are not. This becomes their experience of that moment.

Bias Against the Excluded

If the telescope has selected for broadcast relay a shooting from an entire planet's worth of activities, in the next moment it may just as easily choose a Super Bowl game, or a threatening remark by a Middle Eastern leader, or a program of people trying to win prizes, or a movie about the Old West. All other subjects were not selected, at least at this moment. The telescope did not select views of the ocean as the tide comes in, or people sitting on front porches, or young people knocking on doors to tell a neighborhood about a zoning hearing.