TV WILL Do What It Does

Whoever controls the media, the images, controls the culture.
- Allen Ginsberg

... [T]he matter of defining what is real - that is a serious topic, even a vital one. And in there somewhere is the other topic, the definition of an authentic human. Because of the bombardment of psuedorealities begins to produce inauthentic humans very quickly, spurious humans - as fake as the data pressing them from all sides. My two topics are really one topic; they unite at this point. Fake realities will create fake humans. Or, fake humans will generate fake realities and then sell them to other humans, turning them, eventually, into forgeries of themselves. So we wind up with fake humans inventing fake realities and then peddling them to other fake humans. It is just a very large version of Disneyland.
- Philip K. Dick, How to Build a Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later, 1978

Mankind’s "self-alienation" has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order.
- Jerry Mander (Four Arguments for the Abolition of Television)

All television is educational television. The question is: what is it teaching?
- Nicholas Johnson

Children’s television and MTV, in fact, are the easiest places to launch counterculture missiles. The more harmless or inane the forum, the more unsuspecting the audience.
- Douglas Rushkoff (Media Virus)

If you came and you found a strange man... teaching your kids to punch each other, or trying to sell them all kinds of products, you'd kick him right out of the house, but here you are; you come in and the TV is on, and you don't think twice about it.
- Jerome Singer

…In boy’s advertising…antisocial behavior in pursuit of a product is a good thing.
- Disney Marketing Executive

Television is simply automated day-dreaming.
- Lee Lovinger

The television, that insidious beast, that Medusa which freezes a billion people to stone every night, staring fixedly, that Siren which called and sang and promised so much and gave, after all, so little.
- Ray Bradbury, The Golden Apples of the Sun

Television has done much for psychiatry by spreading information about it, as well as contributing to the need for it.
- Alfred Hitchcock

It is difficult to produce a television documentary that is both incisive and probing when every twelve minutes one is interrupted by twelve dancing rabbits singing about toilet paper.
- Rod Serling

Television should be the last mass communication medium to be naively designed and put into the world without a surgeon-general's warning.
- Alan Kay

Television is an anesthetic for the pain of the modern world.
- Astrid Alauda

What compels you to stare, night after night, at all the glittering hokum that has been deliberately put together for you?
- J.B. Priestley, about Americans

The smallest bookstore still contains more ideas of worth than have been presented in the entire history of television.
- Andrew Ross

Why are sex and violence always linked? I'm afraid they'll blur together in people's minds - sexandviolence - until we can't tell them apart. I expect to hear a newscaster say, "The mob became unruly and the police were forced to resort to sex."
- Dick Cavett, 1978

Theatre is life. Cinema is art. Television is furniture.
- Unknown

I believe television is going to be the test of the modern world, and that in this new opportunity to see beyond the range of our vision, we shall discover a new and unbearable disturbance of the modern peace, or a saving radiance in the sky. We shall stand or fall by television - of that I am quite sure.
- E.B. White

Television is not the Truth. Television is god-damned amusement park. Television is a circus, a carnival, a traveling troupe of acrobats, storytellers, dancers, singers, jugglers, sideshow freaks, lion tamers and football players. We're in the boredom killing business.
- Paddy Chayefsky

The marvels - of film, radio, and television - are marvels of one-way communication, which is not communication at all.
- Milton Mayer

Signs and symbols control the world, not phases and laws.
- Confucius (551-479 BC)

Philo began laying out his vision for what television could become. Above all else... television would become the world's greatest teaching tool. Illiteracy would be wiped out. The immediacy of television was the key. As news happened viewers would watch it unfold live; no longer would we have to rely on people interpreting and distorting the news for us. We would be watching sporting events and symphony orchestras. Instead of going to the movies, the movies would come to us. Television would also bring about world peace. If we were able to see people in other countries and learn about our differences, why would there be any misunderstandings? War would be a thing of the past.
- Evan I. Schwartz, The Last Lone Inventor, about Philo T. Farnsworth, the inventor of television

Imagine what it would be like if TV actually were good. It would be the end of everything we know.
- Marvin Minksy

The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words. George Orwell made this clear in his novel 1984. But another way to control the minds of people is to control their perceptions. If you can get them to see the world as you do, they will think as you do. Comprehension follows perception. How do you get them to see the reality you see? After all, it is only one reality out of many. Images are a basic constituent: pictures. That is why the power of TV to influence young minds is so staggeringly vast. Words and pictures are synchronized. The possibility of total control of the viewer exists, especially the young viewer. TV viewing is a kind of sleeplearning. An EEG of a person watching TV shows that after half an hour the brain goes into a hypnoidal twilight state, emitting alpha waves. This is because there is little eye motion. In addition, much of the information is graphic and therefore passes into the right hemisphere of the brain, rather than being processed by the left, where the conscious personality is located. Recent experiments indicate that much of what we see on the TV screen is received on a subliminal basis. We only imagine that we consciously see what is there. The bulk of the messages elude our attention; literally, after a few hours of TV watching, we do not know what we have seen. Our memories are spurious, like our memories of dreams; the blank spaces are filled in retrospectively. And falsified. We have participated unknowingly in the creation of a spurious reality, and then we obligingly fed it to ourselves. We have colluded in our own doom.
- Philip K. Dick, How To Build A Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later, 1978

Another possible source of guidance for teenagers is television, but television's message has always been that the need for truth, wisdom and world peace pales by comparison with the need for a toothpaste that offers whiter teeth and fresher breath.
- Dave Barry

When television came roaring in after the war (World War II) they did a little school survey asking children which they preferred and why - television or radio. And there was this 7-year-old boy who said he preferred radio "because the pictures were better."
- Alistair Cooke

They say that ninety percent of TV is junk. But, ninety percent of everything is junk.
- Gene Roddenberry

Television hangs on the questionable theory that whatever happens anywhere should be sensed everywhere. If everyone is going to be able to see everything, in the long run all sights may lose whatever rarity value they once possessed, and it may well turn out that people, being able to see and hear practically everything, will be specially interested in almost nothing.
- E.B. White

...Today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups - and the electronic hardware exists by which to deliver these pseudo-worlds right into the heads of the reader, the viewer, the listener. Sometimes I watch my eleven-year-old daughter watch TV; I wonder what she is being taught. The problem of miscuing; consider that. A TV program produced for adults is viewed by a small child. Half of what is said and done in the TV drama is probably misunderstood by the child. Maybe it’s all misunderstood. And the thing is, just how authentic is the information anyhow, even if the child correctly understood it? What is the relationship between the average TV situation comedy and reality? What about the cop shows? Cars are continually swerving out of control, crashing and catching fire. The police are always good and they always win. Do not ignore that one point: The police always win. What a lesson that is. You should not fight authority, and even if you do, you will lose. The message there is, Be passive. And - cooperate. If Officer Baretta asks you for information, give it to him, because Officer Baretta is a good man and to be trusted. He loves you, and you should love him. So I ask in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing.
- Philip K. Dick, How To Build A Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later, 1978