Article: 311 of sgi.talk.ratical
From: (dave "who can do? ratmandu!" ratcliffe)
Subject: Television is Sensory Deprivation
Organization: Silicon Graphics, Inc.
Date: Wed, 16 Oct 1991 14:16:04 GMT
Lines: 65


Article: 7383 of alt.conspiracy
Xref: odin alt.tv.antagonists:68 alt.conspiracy:7383
From: fox@ROBOCOP.NYU.EDU (David Fox)
Subject: Television is Sensory Deprivation
Date: 7 Oct 91 02:22:57 GMT
Sender: daemon@cmcl2.nyu.edu (Mr Background)
Organization: New York University
Lines: 43
    
    excerpts From "Four Arguments for the *Elimination* of Television"
			      by Jerry Mander
        (co-author of "The Great International Paper Airplane Book")
    
    "Artificial envrionments reduce and narrow sensory experience to fit
    their own new confined reality.  The effect and purpose of this
    narrowing is to increase awareness and focus upon the work,
    commodities, entertainments, spectacles and other drugs that society
    uses to keep us within its boundaries.
    
    We can consider television to be an advance on that already
    prevalent condition.  Sitting in darkened rooms, with the natural
    environment obscured, other humans dimmed out, only two senses
    operating both within a very narrow range, the eyes and other body
    functions stilled, staring at light for hours and hours, the
    experience adds up to something nearer to sense deprivation than
    anything that has come before it.
    
    Television isolates peole from the environment, from each other, and
    from their own senses.  In such a condition, the two semioperative
    senses cannot benefit from the usual mix of information that humans
    employ to deduce meaning from their surroundings.  All meaning comes
    from this very narrow information field.
    
    We know that it is an accepted truth about sensory-deprivation
    conditions that subjects have no recourse but to focus on the images
    in their brain.  And we know that in sensory deprivation conditions,
    having no resources aside from mental images, the subject is
    unusually susceptible to suggestion.
    
    When you are watching TV, you are experiencing mental images.  As
    distinguished from most sense-deprivation experiments these mental
    images are not yours.  They are someone else's.  Because the rest of
    your capacities have been subdued, and the rest of the world dimmed,
    these images are likely to have an extraordinary degree of influence.
    Am I saying this *is* brainwashing or hypnosis or mind-zapping or 
    something like it?  Well, there is no question but that someone is 
    speaking into your mind and wants you to do something.
    
    First, keep watching.
    Second, carry the images around in your head.
    Third, buy something.
    Fourth, tune in tomorrow."
    
    
--
                                             daveus rattus   

                                   yer friendly neighborhood ratman

                              KOYAANISQATSI

   ko.yan.nis.qatsi (from the Hopi Language)  n.  1. crazy life.  2. life
       in turmoil.  3. life out of balance.  4. life disintegrating.  
         5. a state of life that calls for another way of living.