switch it off » «
Selina Scott this week branded British TV “abysmal”. I believe that all TV is abysmal. It is addictive and crass. It consumes time better spent on almost anything else. The flickering light of the idiots lantern is really the dim grey fog from a cultural Hades. It is the nemesis of the individual. Listen to the chat of TV watchers: it is the chat of people who have seen the same things at exactly the same time as the rest of the world. They are happy to have their intellectual, cultural and spiritual agendas dictated to them by others. They get the information allowed to them in bite sized chunks and they lose interest in more serious intellectual food.
Real analysis takes time, so TV is not interested. It eventually ablates in its victims the capacity for sceptisicm, reflection and concentration. Its power to convince is out of all proportion to its power to inform, so it creates convictions hugely stronger than the evidence underpinning them. It follows that a TV saturated society is a manipulable one. Any real democrat should be worried sick by the viewing figures. And if all this pompous philosophising fails to convince, there’s a final reason to repudiate TV: the glow of self righteousness you get when you say that you’re not one of the gawping horde is worth any amount of social alienation
Charles Foster The Times
Did I mention that I threw my TV out over three years ago? I’ll just go for a little sit down in the smug chair…
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