You are here: Home > May 2006 > No Truer Words . . .
« Lesbians' Brains Respond Like Straight Men | Main | My Workout »
May 09, 2006
No Truer Words . . .
Posted at May 9, 2006 04:40 PM in Television .
I received this little diddy in an email today. I agree wholeheartedly.
Television is a very poor substitute for a life.Not only is "experience" via TV secondhand (and thereby worthless in terms of life- and character-building), but it's rarely real at all.
Its content is either:
1. undisguised fantasy ("How you, too, can live the lives of the rich and famous [and fictional] instead of your own dreary grey existences"), or is
2. "truth" (a.k.a. "news") so dramatised, sensationalised, filtered, and depersonalised that it better qualifies as gratuitous violence, thinly disguised pornography or, even more today, propaganda in "patriotic" clothing, or is
3. advertising (another form of lies and fantasy: "You, too, will be popular if you use our product").
I'm regarded as a fully functional and well informed person, aware of what's going on around me in both micro- and macro-worlds, yet I evicted the tv from my life in 1977 - about 1450 weeks ago. I don't think I've missed anything essential.
If people can't give up TV for a day - or a week! - then they ought seriously to examine their lives - and go get one (each) of their own. Smoking opium would be far less destructive of lives and brains than the electronic opiate of the masses.
"Everybody’s got values . . . The thing that frightens me is the way that an eroding public school system . . . and television on all over the place is leading to a steady dumbing down of the American public and a corrosion of basic critical thinking in the population."
-- Jamie Raskin, American University law professor, November 2004 on the Democracy Now! radio program
Trackback
You can ping this entry by using http://www.femmenoir.net/cgi-bin/mt/mt-t.cgi/421 .