Since intelligence in defined as one's ability to grasp truth, and truth is imparted through communication, our cultural definition of intelligence is derived from the character of our communication techniques.

I believe such a responsible citizenry never seized to exist, but only with the appearance of the web, and the blogosphere in particular, did it obtain a larger tribune. Of course, those involved citizens gave a good example for many other people, who are certainly blogging not because they feel a civil obligation to do it, but rather for the sake of their own ego. This, I believe, is a good thing, because the result of their effort is accessible to more and more people, and this creates a somehow competitive environement, to which every participant is contributing, and in which everyone is awaiting audience.

I also do believe that the notion that TV makes us stupid is a little exaggerated. This could be true if someone is taking too much of it, but too much of anything is bad, not only television. It all depends on the audience and their values. Moreover, I think that TV is a great invention, and I owe all due respect to the ones who are making it.

And I would love to read that book. Do you know if it's available in Bulgaria too?


I can resist anything but temptation.- Oscar Wilde

The problem with TV, according to Postman, and I completely support him, is not WHAT people watch. It is THAT we watch.

i respectfully disagree, it's the other way around.

we need to chill, stop running around, and start filling in the holes in our knowledge, both scientific and cultural.

tv is a low-entropy solution to the problem of what to do with the leisure time increasingly robotised futures will guarantee us.

they don't break down often, they don't use much juice, and they can relax a nervous, dissatisfied populus addicted to bauble-chasing.

even junk tv keeps them on the couch and out of trouble!

upgrade the content, and bob's yer uncle!

an open mind craves knowledge...there is a growing plethora of wonderful programming whuich eventually will displace the mindless shlock presently enriching the pap-peddling murdochs of this world.

international news is gradually making folks aware of realities their parents were clueless about, most importantly the tremendous, needless suffering going on elsewhere that is the consequence of our stupid fascination with possessiveness and accumulation of status symbols: 'he who dies with the most toys wins'.

reversed this leads to the one tv showing the likes of 'dallas' to a whole village of hungry africans, who then set about walking across the sahara and risking their hides on rubber rafts to come walk on europe's streets of gold.

it's the content that is the problem, and the banal evil of consumerism that rules the present memes of this potentially mega-useful medium.

it's just a tool, but a hypnotic one, so let's use it, not abuse it!

"That millions of people share the same form of mental pathology does not make those people sane." Eric Fromm

I would say that for most people political perception and its symbolism are created in other areas and that TV can only, listened and watched at the proper time, reinforce one of the options. Once the symbolism is fixed, TV is useless for changing minds. it is only useful for pandering the base, create a noise machine and, if you control it broadly, set the terms of what "can be thought" (it can not control the limits of the debate becuase you already have your universe )

That said, there is always roughly 10-20 % of subjects extremelly affected by the latest general political perception. They are people who are mildly into politics but not strongly. They normally have a very strong feeling about some subject outside politics running their lifes but they do care about the general political situation in fuzzy terms because their relational role in the society (imagine a mother going to work for the administraton, or a taxi driver listening to the radio all the time). Unfortuantely this is a percentage that can easily swing an election....

The left needs a left wing noise machine to make the base strong, spread the message....but it also needs to enhance the symbolic resources to generate supporters when it matters..and this is out of TV....in high school years. Yes, it is there.. from 14 to 20 that your political symbolic universe is created independently..meaning you can have strong swings (do not tell anybody since only the right-wingers are supposed to know) while earlier the political universe is non-existent or strongly fixed (yes you can be 12 and have a very strong political universe... but do not say that to anyone since childs are supposed to be stupid)

A pleasure

I therefore claim to show, not how men think in myths, but how myths operate in men's minds without their being aware of the fact. Levi-Strauss, Claude

Does the Net, and blogging in particular, revive the willingness of the public to participate in the political life, and stimulate serious political discourse? Or does it create a new form of responsible and involved citizenry, woken up after the lethargic sleep caused by television? Or, perhaps, the notion that TV makes us stupid is an exaggeration, and, thus, civil society never disappeared?

One point that I find important is that the internet, especially in the blogosphere, has given individuals an outlet to discuss politics on a much larger scale.  Television news is now taking its cues from bloggers, who are able to push certain stories into the spotlight.  Television news, of course, will put those stories in the spotlight, because they're the stories that so many viewers are talking about.  The bloggers make up a critical source of the audience for tv news, I'm guessing, and if the bloggers are not satisfied, they will switch to a channel that will discuss the stories they want to discuss.

Note, for example, that Keith Olbermann of MSNBC has been enjoying one of the few shows to see a substantial jump in ratings, while Fox News's ratings have been falling at an astonishing rate.  I think that's because most of the big stories are originating on the Left's side of the blogging world, and Olbermann is willing to cover it, while Fox runs away from it.  I think it helps -- and, by the way, I have no evidence to back this up -- that cable news viewers seem to have a tendency to switch from channel to channel, looking for interesting news stories.  So, while Fox is reporting about the latest diet to hit bookshelves (as a means to distracting viewers from the latest Bush scandal), CNN is reporting on the Plame investigation and the latest causalty figures from Iraq.

Viewers will, I think, naturally swing towards CNN, in that case.

It's impossible to overstate the importance of two-way communication, too, in my opinion, and this connects with what I mentioned above.  People want to participate, and tv news just can't offer that in a way that might allow it to compete with the blogs and the emerging indy news organizations.  That's why Daily Kos, which is (I think) still the largest blog in America (and perhaps the world), is able to attract one or two million hits everyday, while MSNBC only pulls in about 100,000 viewers on average for each show.

Blogging has been incredibly healthy for politics, at least in America.  Americans are, for the first time in a long time, largely paying attention in non-election years.  (I think over 70% of Americans are paying either "very" or "somewhat" close attention to the Plame case, for example.)  America had it's highest voter turnout (59%) in Christ-knows-how-long back in 2004.  I know we had the highest youth turnout since 1972.  And my guess is that, the higher turnout reaches, the more likely progressives are to win elections.

All in all, I think television is going to evolve, but it will be a much smaller piece of the communications puzzle.  The internet is such a powerful force that it's really impossible to explain it properly.  I've watched it evolve since the early months of 2003, when Howard Dean began kicking the living hell out of the other Democratic contenders.  (As I've said in the past, he was the reason I left the Libertarian Party and became a Democrat, and he remains my political hero to this day.)  And it has been amazing.  Dean raised $40m in 2003, alone, before the primaries even began -- mostly through the bloggers.  Kerry was able to raise and spend more money than Bush, and with contributions averaging below $200.  That would've been unthinkable -- a Democrat beating a Republican on fundraising -- tens years earlier.

I don't see a conflict between the internet and television.  They go hand-in-hand.  Bloggers are better equipped to keep reporters and politicians on their toes.  The press is able to follow the bloggers and get the real stories out to the people.  They're complements, not substitutes.  And I think it's fantastic.

Where's your motherf*%&ing flag pin?

OTOH there is something qualitatively different about television.  we burn fewer calories per hour watching tv than reading a book.  it has a sedative effect, not sure why.  maybe it takes us back to the flickering firelight of the kin-group encampment.  maybe the relaxed, semisedated brain is less critical?

my feeling is that television works excellently for two things:  the ubiquitisation of theatre, and instructional video.  there are techniques and mechanisms that can be explained in a few minutes of video that would have taken dense pages of text and reams of unsatisfactory illustrations to convey in print media.  but... for the conveyance of ideas, it falls somewhat short except as a recording medium for lecturers/presenters of sterling ability.

tv's strength -- the ubiquitisation of theatre -- gets us back into its weakness, the presentation of image and surface appearance.  when we read a book or even a blog entry we tend not to know or care what the author looks like;  we are, in the realm of print, briefly divorced from some of our most primal bigotries, the bigotry of the eye.  we don't dismiss the author's words just because s/he is fat or Black or pale, old or young, short or tall, female or male or swishy or butchy, well dressed or ill dressed, blind or sighted or walking with a cane, a chain smoker or a vegan.  TV, presenting us with image and sound (far more primal inputs than the later development of abstract words on a page) tends I think to play to our bigotry of the eye, and thus the slide into "packaging" (prettiness of spokesbots and pols and anchors) which has reached a peak of intensity in our time.

I can remember when politicians, news anchors and other talking heads were distinct from actors and actresses;  they did not need to be cute or telegenic.  the fact that we now expect public figures to be telegenic, and that on both Left and Right we resort to snide comments  in their physical appearance as a way of expressing our fedupness with their ideas or policies, says something to me about a regression in discourse that TV somehow encourages as a medium...

and this may connect somehow to the fad for "laddish" or (I would say) thuggish politicos... but OTOH this could just be some kind of cultural cyclic phenomenon;  it seems a trifle odd that we have Putin and Bush and Berlu all swaggering and posturing like upscale fratboys during the same decade(s) -- all showing the kind of "tinpot" qualities which we in the West would like to associate with "those other lesser countries."

The difference between theory and practise in practise ...

For Berlusconism's strong point is not so much in the direct propaganda of right-wing values - God, family, homeland - as in the perfect implementation of audience-conditioning mechanisms. The conservative ideological imprint that characterizes RAI's present fictions, centered on the saints, the carabinieri, heroes, the family and the rereading of fascism through a more "human" angle is more the expression of other constituents of the government: the Northern League, the Alleanza Nazionale, the fundamentalist Catholicism of the remnants of the former Christian-Democrats. [RAI is the Italian state television station.]

In any case, the rhetoric, propaganda and censorship came after the electoral victory. The phenomenon to study is consequently Berlusconism as a plebiscitary political outcome of a televisual logic based on one-track thinking. Even today, the Mediaset [Berlusconi family-controlled] channels are overall more modern, more secular and more in conformity with public tastes than RAI. Their matrix is not Berlusconian rhetoric, but the deep, the true audience.

    We know that television does not function like other media that have to differentiate themselves, to exalt their differences to sell. Commercial television must level, must promote equality - not of rights, but of behavior and consumption. After the introduction of commercial channels, television transformed itself into a mechanism for the production of desires. And those are desires for material consumption, since advertising is geared to that. But the mechanism instigated by the reading of the audience has quickly taken on wider and more worrying aspects, to the point of subjecting politics itself to its logic.

And I should re-read this book before I comment.

As I recall, the big problem with Postman (and it can perhaps be seen here in comments about the "special" nature of TV as a medium) is that it puts equivalence between books and TV, when (for example) a better equivalent from my Grandfather's time might be sitting in the rocking chair, staring at the fire with a little nip of whisky and his pipe...

(My grandfather read a lot at times, but then, so do I.)

(Funnily enough, the anecdotal evidence for the brainwave state is really strong. My father, who grew up in a land without TV will fall asleep if he is at all tired and the TV is on. It clearly goes straight in and switches the brain off.)

and read more books, and watch good movies, and great blogs like this one!

so i'm all primed for the leisure revolution...

perhaps instead of 'time is money', it should be :'money is time'!

"That millions of people share the same form of mental pathology does not make those people sane." Eric Fromm

This teacher's guide explains a little of why, but it's much more fun to read the book itself.

One statistic that illustrates that is that last year according to this new study Americans watched on average four hours and 39 minutes of television per day-and that's up four minutes from the previous year,even with the increased use of the Internet. And the vast majority of Internet users are watching television while they're using the Internet. I have a television network. I've spent a lot of time looking into these things. And the characteristic of television that is so different from the printing press that was the medium dominating America's birth is that television is one-way. The individual has no way to get into the conversation. My point is that television may not be dominant in 2008, but I wouldn't bet on that. I think that it is still the most powerful medium, and the reason is it's quasi-hypnotic. One of the most valuable things in the television business if you're a content creator is to have a good lead-in show before you. Why?

    People don't get up.

    Not only do they not get up - a significant percentage are incapable of moving a thumb muscle to hit the remote because there's a quasi-trance that sets in. I don't want to overdramatize it, but the fact is that people just sit there entranced - and that's why most of the money in politics goes to television.

Who is being interviewed?  don't cheat now, guess before clicking...

The difference between theory and practise in practise ...