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 »
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 »
Films are seen in large, silent, darkened theaters, where intense light beams are projected from behind toward luminous surfaces i...n front. There is an enforced and anonymous collectivity of the audience because, for any screening, all viewers are physically present at the same time in the relatively enclosed space of the theater. In contrast to this cocoon-like, enveloping situation is the fragmentary, dispersed, and varied nature of television reception. The darkness is dissolved, the anonymity removed.... While the aura of cinema spectatorship produces hypnotic fascination, the atmosphere of television enables just the opposite--because the lights are more likely to be on, one can get up and return, do several things at once, watch casually, talk to other people, or even decide to turn the television off.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Picture a room. It can be a bar, a fraternity, a living room and there are thirty men in it, sitting around a television, watching... football. The door opens, and they turn, and you walk in. And you're staying. Here's what they think. A) Do we really want her here? B) Can we still do what we usually do? C) Why would she want to be here anyway?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Prejudice against women ... is many, many times intensified against older women. You are viewed not as an intellect but as a body....... Astonishingly, even women's liberation has paid extraordinarily little attention to the older woman and to the fact that her job is limited because she is [older]. They say that women shouldn't be sex objects, but you damned well better be a sex object if you want to get ahead in television.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Movies are a combination of art and mass medium, but television is so single in its purpose--selling--that it operates without tha...t painful, poignant mixture of aspiration and effort and compromise. We almost never think of calling a television show "beautiful," or even of complaining about the absence of beauty, because we take it for granted that television operates without beauty. When we see on the television photographic records of the past, like pictures of Scott's Antarctic expedition or those series on the First World War, they seem almost too strong for the box, too pure for it. The past has a terror and fascination and a beauty beyond almost anything else. We are looking at the dead, and they move and grin and wave at us; it's an almost unbearable experience. When our wonder or our grief are interrupted or followed by a commercial, we want to destroy the ugly box. Old movies don't tear us apart like that. They do something else, which we can take more of and take more easily; they give us a sense of the passage of life. Here is Elizabeth Taylor as a plump matron and here, an hour later, as an exquisite child.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A good way to think about television--in fact all the media--is as a kind of telescope in the sky, flying around, constantly looki...ng. Then from its perch in the sky, it zooms down to a single spot on the planet, a small group of people shooting each other. It takes this single event out of billions and billions of other little events and sends it zooming through space to television antennas, and then out through an electron gun into (on the average) 30 million people sitting at home in dark rooms with their eyes still. The event gets reconstructed in the brains of these people as an image. Recorded. All these 30 million people have recorded the same image from this single distant spot where they are not. This becomes their experience of that moment.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Much of what passes for quality on British television is no more than a reflection of the narrow elite which controls it and has a...lways thought that its tastes were synonymous with quality.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is my hope to be able to prove that television is the greatest step forward we have yet made in the preservation of humanity. I...t will make of this Earth the paradise we have all envisioned, but have never seen.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »