Quotes About Media

The literate mind has sown the seeds of its own destruction through the creation of media that render irrelevant those "traditional skills" on which literacy rests.

Thus, we have here a great loop of impotence: The news elicits from you a variety of opinions about which you can do nothing except to offer them as more news, about which you can do nothing.

But to the modern mind, resonating with different media-metaphors, the truth in economics is believed to be best discovered and expressed in numbers. Perhaps it is.

the concept of truth is intimately linked to the biases of forms of expression.

I am also aware of television's potential for creating a theater for the masses (a subject which in my opinion has not been taken seriously enough).

all television news programs begin, end, and are somewhere in between punctuated with music...It is there, I assume, for the same reason music is used in theater and films - to create a mood and provide a leitmotif for the entertainment...as long as the music is there as a frame for the program, the viewer is comforted to believe that there is nothing to be greatly alarmed about; that, in fact, the events that are reported have as much relation to reality as do scenes in a play.

people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.

The number of hours the average American watches TV has remained steady, at about four and a half hours a day, every day (by age sixty-five, a person will have spent twelve uninterrupted years in front of the TV).

Politics, he tells him, is the greatest spectator sport in America. In 1966, Ronald Reagan used a different metaphor. "Politics," he said, "is just like show business."1 Although

television can be used to support the literate tradition.

The television commercial has mounted the most serious assault on capitalist ideology since the publication of Das Kapital.

For on television, discourse is conducted largely through visual imagery, which is to say that television gives us a conversation in images, not words. The emergence of the image-manager in the political arena and the concomitant decline of the speech writer attest to the fact that television demands a different kind of content from other media. You cannot do political philosophy on television. Its form works against the content.

The phrase is a means of acknowledging the fact that the world as mapped by the speeded-up electronic media has no order or meaning and is not to be taken seriously.

I will try to demonstrate by concrete example that television's way of knowing is uncompromisingly hostile to typography's way of knowing; that television's conversations promote incoherence and triviality; that the phrase "serious television" is a contradiction in terms; and that television speaks in only one persistent voice-the voice of entertainment.

Our television set keeps us in constant communion with the world, but it does so with a face whose smiling countenance is unalterable. The problem is not that television presents us with entertaining subject matter but that all subject matter is presented as entertaining, which is another issue altogether.

The result of all this is that Americans are the best entertained and quite likely the least well-informed people in the Western world.

This perception of a news show as a stylized dramatic performance whose content has been staged largely to entertain is reinforced by several other features, including the fact that the average length of any story is forty-five seconds. While brevity does not suggest triviality, in this case it clearly does. It is simply not possible to convey a sense of seriousness about any event if its implications are exhausted in less that one minute's time.

If the press was, as David Riesman called it, "the gunpowder of the mind," the computer, in its capacity to smooth over unsatisfactory institutions and ideas, is the talcum powder of the mind.

There is no denying that the technicalization of terms and problems is a serious form of information control.

Walter Lippmann, for example, wrote in 1920: "There can be no liberty for a community which lacks the means by which to detect lies.

o prayer, the alternative is penicillin; to family roots, the alternative is mobility; to reading, the alternative is television; to restraint, the alternative is immediate gratification; to sin, the alternative is psychotherapy; to political ideology, the alternative is popular appeal established through scientific polling.

The distance between rationality and advertising is now so wide that it is difficult to remember that there once existed a connection between them.

pseudo-event," by which he means an event specifically staged to be reported—

Now ... this" idea: the phenomenon whereby the reporting of a horrific event—a rape or a five-alarm fire or global warming—is followed immediately by the anchor's cheerfully exclaiming "Now ... this," which segues into a story about Janet Jackson's exposed nipple or a commercial for lite beer, creating a sequencing of information so random, so disparate in scale and value, as to be incoherent, even psychotic.