Television

[flexibeast]

A recent article in the LA Weekly described how Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 was not about government censorship, but about people abandoning reading in favour of radio and television:

Bradbury, a man living in the creative and industrial center of reality TV and one-hour dramas, says it is, in fact, a story about how television destroys interest in reading literature.

"Television gives you the dates of Napoleon, but not who he was," Bradbury says, summarizing TV’s content with a single word that he spits out as an epithet: "factoids." He says this while sitting in a room dominated by a gigantic flat-panel television broadcasting the Fox News Channel, muted, factoids crawling across the bottom of the screen.

His fear in 1953 that television would kill books has, he says, been partially confirmed by television’s effect on substance in the news. The front page of that day’s L.A. Times reported on the weekend box-office receipts for the third in the Spider-Man series of movies, seeming to prove his point.

"Useless," Bradbury says. "They stuff you with so much useless information, you feel full."

Indeed.

'Information' provided by television is often - usually? - low-density and context-deficient, at least in the case of commercial television. If you rely on commercial television as your source of 'news', you'll be up-to-date on the latest homicide, or the latest drug scandal in the AFL, but you won't know about the barbaric activities of the Lord's Resistance Army in Uganda, the US Congress voting to withhold reconstruction funds from Iraq unless the latter privatises their oil resources (at a time when the majority of Iraqi lawmakers reject the continued occupation of their country), the politics surrounding the proposed Iran-Pakistan-India oil pipeline, and the fact that President Bush recently granted himself dictatorial powers in the event of a national emergency - not to mention the major political and social upheavals, whether for good or ill, currently occurring in Bolivia and Venezuela.

i don't think it's too much of a stretch to suggest that if Karl Marx were alive today, he'd write:

Television is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.

Comments

[penguinpusher.livejournal.com]

Have you heard the Frank Zappa song "I'm the Slime"?

Here are the lyrics

I am gross and perverted
I'm obsessed 'n deranged
I have existed for years
But very little has changed
I'm the tool of the Government
And industry too
For I am destined to rule
And regulate you

I may be vile and pernicious
But you can't look away
I make you think I'm delicious
With the stuff that I say
I'm the best you can get
Have you guessed me yet?
I'm the slime oozin' out
From your TV set

You will obey me while I lead you
And eat the garbage that I feed you
Until the day that we don't need you
Don't go for help . . . no one will heed you
Your mind is totally controlled
It has been stuffed into my mold
And you will do as you are told
Until the rights to you are sold

That's right, folks . . .
Don't touch that dial

Well, I am the slime from your video
Oozin' along on your livin' room floor

I am the slime from your video
Can't stop the slime, people, lookit me go

I am the slime from your video
Oozin' along on your livin' room floor

I am the slime from your video
Can't stop the slime, people, lookit me go