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October 13, 2007
I remember Neil Postman arguing that television confounds serious issues with entertainment thereby demeaning and undermining political discourse by making it less about ideas and more about image. He also argued, from memory, that television is not an effective way of providing education, as it provides only passive information transfer, rather than the interaction that he believes is necessary to maximize learning.
Gary Sauer-Thompson, Ari, Encounter Bay,Victor Harbor 2007
I was thinking about Postman after watching some television for a couple of hours or so on Saturday night after, I'd returned from walking the dogs and taking a few snaps. I was bored by the production line action sequences and over-reliance on fireballs and explosions.
Gary Sauer-Thompson, Ari + Agtet on the Victor Harbor Rd 2007
Postman argued that television is the primary means of communication for our culture and it has the property of converting conversations into entertainment so much so that public discourse on important issues has disappeared. Since the treatment of serious issues as entertainment inherently prevents them from being treated as serious issues and indeed since serious issues have been treated as entertainment for so many decades now, the public is no longer aware of these issues in their original sense, but only as entertainment.
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Gary,TV is not about communication and never has been. It has always been a propaganda tool for the rich and powerful. Even more so now when you look at how the PBS has been gutted in the USA. And how the "conservatives" here in OZ would like to abolish the ABC. And Berlusconis Italy.
And these are just 3 examples of "free" countries.
I still very much like Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television by Jerry Mander and his follow up book In The Absence of The Sacred. TV is the means for initiating everyone into the modernist techno-trance---the "real" world.
Thus having been initiated, and thereby profoundly crippled in our intelligence,we find it almost impossible to find the necessary individual and collective strength and mutually shared energy to
even begin to do things differently.
Real communication is a two way process of mutual imput and feedback. A process in which both parties participate in or in which they commune even to the degree of COMMON UNION or of sharing the same mind-heart space.
A space of mutually agreed upon and freely arrived at consensus.
I also like the arguments against TV in two chapters titled Play and Play's End in a marvellous book titled Evolution's End by Joseph Chilton Pearce.
It is about how TV permanently damages the neural pathways of the developing brains of babies, toddlers,children etc. And thereby cripples them for life. They/we have become entranced.
The chapter play has a telling quote from Einstein: "If you want your children to be brilliant, tell them fairy tales. If you want them to be very brilliant, tell them even more fairy tales".