TV favors a mentality in which certain things no longer matter particularly: skills like the ability to enjoy a complex argument, for instance, or to perceive nuances, or to keep in mind large amounts of significant information, or to remember today what someone said last month, or to consider strong and carefully argued opinions in defiance of what is conventionally called “balance.” Its content lurches between violence of action, emotional hyperbole and blandness of opinion. And it never, never stops. It is always trying to give us something interesting. Not interesting for long: just for now. Commercial TV teaches people to scorn complexity and to feel, not to think. It has come to present society as a pagan circus of freaks, pseudo-heroes and wild morons struggling on the sands of a Colosseum without walls. . . .”
“Why Watch it Anyway?,” Robert Hughs, The New York Review of Books,
February 16, 1995, P. 38.
As someone who has pretty much given up TV, I love this post. It is so true. I don’t recall who said this, but someone said the future would not be Big Brother watching us, but us watching Big Brother.