TEN REASONS WE SMASHED TEN TVS

national | miscellaneous | news report Monday April 29, 2002 16:32 by rowan

in descending order of importance

On fri 26th April in NCAD, Dublin, we sacrificied 10 tvs using a sledgehammer, an axe, an aluminium baseball bat and a pick axe. Here we list ten good reasons why.

much of this paraphrased or taken from
http://www.turnoffyourtv.com/
http://www.adbusters.org/campaigns/tvturnoff/toolbox/zentv.html
http://www.aloha.net/~jhanson/page24.htm

10. turning everything into entertainment
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The problem is not that TV presents us with entertainment, but that it presents everything as entertainment.
What this means is that if it doesn’t contain contain sex, violence, drug, guns or car chases, it’ll probably get relegated to early afternoon tv. When we watch the news, only those events which have a high entertainment value get airtime, and other important events get pushed to short announcements before the weather.

9. Tv is the centerpiece of the living room
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Walk into any living room in Ireland. The furniture will all be arranged nicely so that every chair and couch points towards the centre of attention: the tv.
As a classroom is designed for schooling, a living room is designed for television schooling. Each piece of furniture is arranged so that no matter where you sit, it’s more effort to look at someone to a conversation, than it is to watch tv. Your head will always automatically fall back to the tv.
Next time your in this situation, keep making conversation with someone, and see how their head will always be drawn, like a magnet, back to the tv.

8. TV is the world
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(from zentv.html

Marshall McLuhan says TV opens out onto an electronic global village. It would seem, rather, that it gives us only the illusion of being. It reinforces security by presenting danger, ignorance by presenting news, lethargy by presenting excitement, isolation by promising participation. The media confines reality to itself. And it limits knowledge by giving the illusion of knowledge. In the same way that the most effective way to deflect, diffuse and terminate a social movement is to announce that it has been achieved (the feminist movement must contend with this on an almost daily basis), the most effective way to deflect inquiry is to present it as fulfilled. TV acts in this guise as a thinking presentation device which offers non- experience as experience and not-knowingness as knowing.

In the words of Mat Maxwell, "Television becomes the world for people.... The world becomes television." The overall and cumulative effect of the media is to heighten our insensitivity to reality. Rather than breaking the chains of ignorance, political domination and illusion in our Platonic cave, something insidiously similar yet different is going on. Instead of actually turning away from the shadows to see the realities, instead of actually leaving the darkness of the cave and going up into the sunlight, we merely watch an image of ourselves doing this, we fantasize about doing it and think it's the same.

7. Selling Dissatisfcation
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TV tries to make us feel dirty, smelly, hairy, too tall, too small, too fat, too skinny, unfulfilled, unsatisfied, and incomplete. And then it promises to cure the aching dissatisfaction in our hearts, with its perfect cleaning solutions, its cure-all-instant-wipe-away-all-your-problems quick-fix solutions. Advertisers need to make us feel bad about ourselves to make us buy their products.
So, television is a happy happy land where everbody is spectacularly good-looking. No program is complete without good-looking women and men.
After hours of watching television, images of these "Beautiful People" will become burned into your mind, and your concept of what is ‘natural’ will become altered to the new ‘everybody is beautiful, I am not’ mantra.
And the result of all this is two things.
1: Advertisers sell their products. Think this doesn’t have an effect on you? think what’s in your bathroom right now: a load of pantene and garnier products…
2. Widespread dissatisfaction. Dislike of your figure, dislike of your hair, dislike of your nose, your ears, your eyebrows, your legs, your arms, dislike of yourself. How many people do you know that are completely satisfied with their body?

6. Replacement for Human Companionship
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TV has become such a mechanical friend, such a substitute for social interaction, that one's solitude becomes acutely magnified, doubly experienced and doubly reinforced if one is deprived of its glowing, life-like presence (as if one wouldn't still be alone if it were on). If one is alone in one's room and turns on the TV, one actually doesn't feel alone anymore. It's as if companionship is experienced, as if communication is two-way

5. Promotion of world domination
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The global media system is now dominated by nine giant firms. The five firms are AOL Time Warner, Disney, Bertelsmann, Viacom, and Rupert Murdoch's News Corp.
These few corporations have massive holdings not only in tv but also in films, video rental, books, magazines, newspapers and internet sites. The entire system has little interest in issues that may be important to the world at large but fail to serve the interests of the business and upper-middle classes.
The main point to remember is that all these media firms are hierarchic. Control of each firm ultimately comes back to one person, usually a man, who sits at the top of the hierarchy. But he in turn is controlled simply by the whim of the advertisers. Any issues not conducive to good business don’t get shown on tv. This means the views of a small handful of men are broadcast worldwide into the homes of literally billions of people.
MTV may have once stood for music television, but it now stands for Money television.

4. Propaganda
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Probably every conflict is fought on at least two grounds: the battlefield and the minds of the people via propaganda. The "good guys" and the "bad guys" can often both be guilty of misleading their people with distortions, exaggerations, subjectivity, inaccuracy and even fabrications, in order to receive their support. While we can often see obvious propaganda from other countries, especially from "enemies", we sometimes don't notice, or acknowledge propaganda in our own nations and from our own friendly nations.

3. Brainwashing
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It may be a mild form, but TV brainwashing follows the same rules as full mind control techniques. The first step in the process of brainwashing is deprogramming: the removal of any previous belief systems, literally, washing the victim’s brain clean. Russian psychologist Pavlov documented that the first stage, whether it comes from an army sergeant or a cult leader, is characterised by continuous exposure to sound and light. Television (the defendant), though it may be a mild form, is guilty of this through fast choppy edits and cuts, flashy, shiny hypnotic images, entrapping our attention, excluding any outside influences from the real world.
This deprogramming breaks down our concept of what is 'real'. The cleaner our brains are washed, the more ready we are for the next stage: reprogramming.
As we are brought into the dozing, hyonotic, tv watching state, any messages conveyed will sink deep into our subconscious. The deeper the trance, and the more repitions of the message, the deeper it will sink. Perfect for advertisers to etch their the names of their products deep into your brain.
Why do you think they’re called programs?

2. Advertising
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Advertisers and networks don't want the viewers to think. They want them to just be good consumers and spend money on their products.
Sales, by definition, is the process of convincing someone to purchase what they don't need. Advertising tries to convince someone that the solution to a problem or the fulfillment of a desire can only be achieved through the purchase of a product
Perhaps there is a need for cleanliness. But that is not what advertisers sell," Mander explains. "Cleanliness can be obtained with water and a little bit of natural fiber, or solidified natural fat. Major world civilizations kept clean that way for millennia. What is advertised is whiteness, a value beyond cleanliness; sterility, the avoidance of all germs; sudsiness, a cosmetic factor; and brand, a surrogate community loyalty."
As the C.E.O. of Westinghouse, a nuclear power plant company that is also one of the top 9 world media corporations put it "We are here to serve advertisers. That is our raison d'etre."

the no. 1 reason for television's death by sacrifice:

1. Zombification
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A long time age, humans were active, dynamic beings who actually moved from place to place while doing things. Our lives once consisted of work, play and rest. It was an idyllic scene: people outside, in their gardens, children playing. Now life consists of work, and tv. Play and rest have joined to become one activity: zombie-izing
If you monitor the brain activity of a person reading a book or peforming some active task, the subject’s brain will appear in the beta wave state, indicating alert and conscious attention. If you then turn on a tv for the subject to watch, within about 30 seconds or so, the brain will enter the alpha state, an unfocused, aimless, daydreaming, subconscious level, half way between awake and asleep.
Television has been called a form of sleep teaching.
If you turn the tv off and let the subject go back to reading a book, the active, alert, beta wave state reappears.
Life used to be based around activity, around doing things, creating, inventing, observing nature, exploring the land. Now we don’t need to explore. Tv can do the exporing for us, while our bodies and minds sit passively in the alpha state, zombified.