With apologies to mumberg. The boomers were right all along.

I don't want to make an exhaustive summary of the arguments of this book because you ought to read it yourself, but I will say that although it's a bit shaky and haphazard in places, I have successfully been convinced that TV (in a perfect world) should, in fact, be eliminated.

Parts of the book reads like boomer ranting. The first point Mander makes relates to the "natural" and "unnatural." I always find this line of argument questionable; the author takes for granted that what is artificial is automatically bad. Supposedly, having constant lighting, air conditioning and weather protection dulls the senses, which rings true, but where does this stop? I am fond of wearing clothes because they are warm and keep me comfortable, but is this not "artificial?" I don't suppose Jerry Mander is saying we should all walk around naked. I quite like having lights to see by and a thermostat to control. If that's at the sacrifice of my senses, then I think it's a worthy trade off. Also, is humanity not natural? I understand technology is manmade, but is man not a natural being? So by extension, surely any desire we have can be called natural. Mander blows through these questions and produces an underdeveloped argument.

There are a few instances like this, but generally there are some good points in here. He talks about how TV puts you into a trance-like hypnotic state, bypassing the conscious brain into the unconscious. Images enter your head and are absorbed uncritically. And importantly the arbiters of this information do not have your best interests at heart, Mander claims the medium demands a certain kind of content which is immediate, vulgar and low. While you watch TV entranced, you allow these businessmen to project a commercialised, narrow and limited view of the world straight into your brain.

Media is taken out of context and put into the world in a reduced version. You only see what is communicable on a screen and condensable into short slots. I don't want to dox myself, but there was a news story of an event that took place right outside my house. I saw Tucker Carlson speaking in front of a green screen, which showed an image of my front door. What he said of the news item was completely incorrect and false, and I knew because what was happening right in front of my own eyes. But despite this, no one on the left objected, because they literally couldn't. It was impossible to get the full story because the TV only showed part of it.

Even paintings in museums have been divorced from their original context and function. You might see a Christian icon on the walls of the National Gallery, but there was a time when it would have hung in a church, aiding and aestheticising the worship and prayer of the Christian God. An ancient pagan totem, dug up from some bog and placed inside a museum display, has none of the mysticism and depth it would have had when its function was worship. This process is taken to the extreme when you interact with anything through a screen.

Another interesting part spoke about "technical events." Scenes where the camera performs shots that are impossible in the real world— zooms and cuts with graphics and noise— register in your brain as something abnormal or dangerous as they don't appear in the natural world. Because of this you are unconsciously inclined to snap your attention to it. This is how advertising, which you would naturally find uninteresting and even irritating, can capture your attention so effectively.

People learn conventions and social cues from other people, so it's natural that people and particularly children, would look at TV characters and see models of behaviour. And because TV is naturally inclined towards the vulgar (sex, violence and criminality), it's hard to make an argument that seeing these programmes has no effect at all on the psychology of the viewer.

This book was published in 1978 so it has inevitably become very outdated with the advent of the internet. The only point I can see being harmed by this, though, is the undemocratic nature of TV, since a few broadcast studios controlled what was played. Still, while regular people create TikToks and YouTube videos, I suppose the owners of these sites still fiddle with their algorithms to promote certain types of content.

Really, the internet seems to have taken all these issues and made them so much worse. If anyone knows of a book titled Four Arguments for the Elimination of the Internet, I would be interested.

Overall, this was a good read. Although there are some questionable parts, there is much more in this book that I haven't touched on. I also was not convinced that TV could possibly be banned, the same with the internet, but that's besides the point.

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Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television

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Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television (1978)

Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television (1978)