In written communication, the imagination converts codes into a version of reality, and the mind reasons its way to judgments, con...victions, and actions. With television, by contrast, movement, sound, and color rush experiences directly to the senses. The process moves from image to impression, to emotional impulse, and then to action. Sensation and emotional intensity dominate. The reflection and reasoning which verbal communication demand are bypassed. Another profound difference between television and writing is the way they collect and disseminate knowledge. Television absorbs the scenes within the range of its lenses, records the images, then diffuses them like a gas. It creates the illusion of reproducing life in its natural, multidimensional state. Lan guages, by contrast, convert life into artificial codes and organize them into artificial patterns.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Television is an excellent system when one has nothing to lose, as is the case with a nomadic and rootless country like the United... States, but in Europe the affect of television is that of a bulldozer which reduces culture to the lowest possible denominator.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Cultural expectations shade and color the images that parents- to-be form. The baby product ads, showing a woman serenely holding ...her child, looking blissfully and mysteriously contented, or the television parents, wisely and humorously solving problems, influence parents-to-be.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
He could jazz up the map-reading class by having a full-size color photograph of Betty Grable in a bathing suit, with a co- ordina...te grid system laid over it. The instructor could point to different parts of her and say, "Give me the co-ordinates."... The Major could see every unit in the Army using his idea.... Hot dog!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The television screen, so unlike the movie screen, sharply reduced human beings, revealed them as small, trivial, flat, in two ban...al dimensions, drained of color. Wasn't there something reassuring about it!--that human beings were in fact merely images of a kind registered in one another's eyes and brains, phenomena composed of microscopic flickering dots like atoms. They were atoms--nothing more. A quick switch of the dial and they disappeared and who could lament the loss?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Anyone who has breast-fed knows two things for sure: The baby wants to be fed at the most inopportune times, in the most inopportu...ne places, and the baby will prevail.... And so the baby should, and the mom, too. Sometimes a breast is a sexual object, and sometimes it's a food delivery system, and one need not preclude nor color the other.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A few days ago, while seated snugly in an airplane seat on my way back to New York from Chicago,... it occurred to me that a rathe...r striking similarity existed between the situation I found myself in then, flying in a modern airplane, and what I've often felt as I watch television. To begin with, both experiences are largely passive, or at any rate they have been transformed into passive experiences. But this shared passivity is itself more complicated than it seems, for though it produces in both cases an obvious condition of quiet and inactivity, it also demands from the passenger or viewer a very definite emotional commitment. One might call it a commitment to specifically nonaggressive and uninvolved behavior.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The system was breaking down. The one who had wandered alone past so many happenings and events began to feel, backing up along th...e primal vein that led to his center, the beginning of hiccup that would, if left to gather, explode the center to the extremities of life, the suburbs through which one makes one's way to where the country is.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Television could perform a great service in mass education, but there's no indication its sponsors have anything like this on thei...r minds.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »