Below is the appendix from Truth Decay, by Douglas Grothius.
Television: Agent of Truth Decay
TV Guide published a short manifesto
- actually, an advertisement by ABC - on the goodness of television, just in
case anyone doubted it.
For years the pundits, moralists and self-righteous, self-appointed preservers of
our culture have told us that television is bad. They've
stood high on their soapbox and looked condescendingly on our innocuous pleasure....
Well, television is not the evil destroyer of all that is right in this world.
In fact, and we say this with all the disdain we can muster for the elitists
who purport otherwise - TV is good.
TV binds us together. It makes us
laugh. Makes us cry. Why, in the span of ten years, TV brought us the downfall
of an American president, one giant step for mankind and the introduction of
Farrah Fawcett as one of "Charlie's Angels." Can any other medium
match TV for its immediacy, its impact, its capacity to entertain?[1]
Indeed, no one can dispute
television's unrivaled immediacy, impact and
entertainment capabilities. But it is exactly these features
that make it a potent agent of truth decay in postmodernity. Television
is an unreality appliance that dominates our mentality. We then take this
unreality mentality and impose it on the rest of the real world. That is, we (mis)understand the world in terms of the mentality inherent
to the form of communication that is television.
Throughout this book, I have
distinguished between postmodernity as a truth-decaying social condition and
postmodernism as a truth-decaying philosophy, as well as emphasizing that these
reinforce each other in various ways. One primary engine or dynamo for truth
decay is the cultural system of television. I will highlight five ways in which
television contributes to the loss of truth, and then give three practical
suggestions for overcoming these effects.
Television seldom, if ever, directly
addresses postmodernist philosophy (or any other philosophy). However, its very
nature contributes to a loss of truth by reinforcing certain crucial themes in
postmodernism. Television has become a commercial and cultural institution in
American life; as such, it is unproblematic to the vast majority of Americans
and, therefore, highly influential. Jacques Ellul is
right that 'television acts less by the creation of clear notions and precise
opinions and more by enveloping us in a haze.'[2] Neil
Postman captures our sad situation: 'Television has achieved the status of a
'meta-medium' - an institution that directs not only our knowledge of the
world, but our knowledge of the ways of knowing as well.'[3] While many
have noticed and object to the content of television fare (too much sex,
violence, anti-Christian material, etc.), television's nature as a medium is
largely ignored, thereby granting it a kind of epistemological immunity from
criticism. Yet Scripture calls us to 'test everything. Hold on to the good.
Avoid every kind of evil.' (1 Thess 5:21-22).
The medium of communication matters
since it always shapes the messages it carries, and these mediated messages
shape us. A novel and a television series based on a novel differ in crucial
ways, for example. Therefore, any medium should be exegeted
to determine its nature, function and structure. Only
in this way can we ascertain what it does well, what it cannot do and what it does poorly. This is what Marshall McLuhan
meant by his hyperbolic slogan, 'the medium is the message.'[4] Taking his
cue from the discussion of idolatry in Psalm 115, McLuhan also remarked that,
'We become what we behold'[5] (see also
Ps 1). When we become habituated to a particular form
of communication, our mentalities and sensibilities bear its mark.
A raft of studies from several
decades indicate that Americans consume vast quantities of television - an
average of about four to five hours per day, with many taking in much more.
Televisions are also becoming nearly omnipresent, imperialistically colonizing
automobiles, airports, restaurants, classrooms, bars, daycare centers and
computers.[6]
They are even being placed on some gasoline pumps.
Once, while attempting to explain a family member's strokelike
symptoms in the triage area of a hospital emergency room, I found myself
competing with a blaring television. After I turned it off (without asking
permission), the attendant behind the check-in desk huffily turned it back on.
Nearly 100 percent of American homes have at least one television, and three
out of four have more than one. Eighty-four percent of households have at least
one VCR. Many have elaborate home-theater systems costing thousands of dollars.
And half of all Americans say they watch too much television![7]
The
Image over the Word: Discourse in Distress
What is there about the nature of
the television medium that shapes its message? First, television emphasizes the
moving image over written and spoken language. It is image-driven, image-saturated and image-controlled. This is precisely what
television does that books, recordings and pictures
cannot do; it brings us visual action. However, when the
image dominates the word, rational discourse ebbs. We are attracted to
the incandescent screen just as medievals were attracted to stained glass windows. As McLuhan noted,
the light comes through them as opposed to light being shown
on them (as with books and photographs and other objects in the physical
world). These technologically animated images move and combine in ways unknown
only a few decades ago, thus increasing their power to mesmerize.
Ellul observes that the 'visionary reality of connected images
cannot tolerate critical discourse, explanation, duplication, or reflection' -
all rational activities required for separating truth from error. Cognitive
pursuits 'presuppose a certain distance and withdrawal from the action, whereas
images require that I continually be involved in the action.' The images must
keep the word in check, keep it humiliated, since 'the word produces
disenchantment with the image; the word strips it of its hypnotic and magical
power.'[8]
Words can expose an image as false or misleading, as when we read in a magazine
that a television program "re-created" an event that never occurred.
Novelist Larry Woiwode further develops the
implications:
The mechanics of the English
language have been tortured to pieces by TV. Visual, moving images - which are the venue of television
- can't be held in the net of careful language. They
want to break out. They really have nothing to do with language. So language, grammar and rhetoric have become fractured.[9]
When the image overwhelms and
subjugates the word, the ability to think, write and
communicate in a linear and logical fashion is undermined. Television's images
have their immediate effect on us, but that effect is seldom to cause us to
pursue their truth or falsity. Television's images are usually shorn of their
overall context and meaning, and are reduced to factoids (at best). Ideas
located within a historical and logical setting are replaced by impressions, emotions and stimulations. While images communicate
narrative stories and quantitative information well (such as graphs and
charts), words are required for more linear and logical communication.
Propositions and beliefs can be true or false; images in themselves do not have
truth value. The persuasiveness of the image on television led media theorist
Tony Schwartz to claim that truth is now an outmoded concept, since it belongs
to a time when print communication was dominant.[10]
Media critic Malcolm Muggeridge understood this well:
The one thing television can't do is express ideas.... There is a danger in
translating life into an image, and that is what television is doing. In doing
it, it is falsifying life. Far from the camera's being an accurate recorder of
what is going on, it is the exact opposite. It cannot convey reality nor does
it even want to.[11]
The images of television may be
arresting, alluring and entrancing, but they are
prefabricated presentations that shrink events into factoids or outright
falsehoods. This is a feature of the very nature of television, as Francis
Schaeffer pointed out:
TV manipulates viewers by its normal
way of operating. Many viewers seem to assume that when they have seen
something on TV, they have seen it with their own eyes....
But this is not so, for one must
never forget that every television minute has been edited. The viewer does not
see the event. He sees ... an edited symbol or an edited image of that event. An
aura and illusion of objectivity and truth is built up, which could not be
totally the case even if the people shooting the film were completely neutral .[12]
The triumph of the televised image
over the word contributes to the depthlessness of
postmodern sensibilities. Reality becomes the image, whether or not that image
corresponds to any objective state of affairs-and we are not
challenged to engage in this analysis. The above-quoted ABC piece of
propaganda advises us to 'celebrate our cerebral-free non activity.'[13] As a
consequence of such nonactivity, truth suffers and truthfulness
is downplayed, if not ignored. Joshua Meyrowitch, a professor of communication, complains that
his students 'tend to have an image-based standard of truth. If I ask, 'What
evidence supports your view or contradicts it?' they look at me as if I came
from another planet.' This is because 'It's very foreign to them to think in
terms of truth, logic, consistency and evidence.'[14] Such
oblivion exists not only in the case with media students but is true of culture
at large, as Kenneth Myers stresses: 'A culture that is rooted more in images
than in words will find it increasingly difficult to sustain any broad
commitment to any truth, since truth is an abstraction requiring language.'[15] In
postmodernism, truth and logic are mere social constructions, which can be deconstructed and reconstructed at whim. Television
gives a powerful object lesson in these notions of truth and so furthers truth
decay in the souls of millions for hours every day.
Muggeridge commented that when the Israelites worshiped the golden
calf instead of waiting for the Word from Moses, they attempted to televise (or
make visible) God.[16]
Biblically speaking, God commands that we not make graven images nor attempt to
televise the invisible. In the beginning was the Word, not the image (Jn 1:1). God gave us a book, not a video. When, in any
culture, written language is marginalized by
television, biblical truth begins to lose its vibrancy. Christians must restore
the primacy and power of the Word as an antidote to truth decay by television.
The
Loss of Self: Truth Removed
Second, along with the displacing of
the word by the flickering television image comes a loss of authentic selfhood,
whereby the self is deemed as a moral agent inexorably
enmeshed in a moral and spiritual universe. Instead the self is
filled with a welter of images and factoids and sound bites lacking
moral and intellectual adhesion. The self becomes ungrounded and fragmented by
its experiences of television. This matches the postmodernist abandonment of a
unified and normative self that is disciplined and directed
by transcendent truths.
By contrast, a love of serious
reading orients the self toward grand narratives and abstract truths - such as
the holiness and mysteries of God, moral truth, the pursuit of virtue, the
dangers of vice, immortality - and these truths place the self in a position of
rectitude before them. People whose sensibilities and worldviews are adjusted through serious reading tend to live by what
they have read. They live in conversation with great minds, even when they are
not reading.[17]
As William Ellery Channing noted, 'It is chiefly through books that we enjoy
intercourse with superior minds.' Watchers of television, on the contrary,
simply engage in the imitation of proliferating images and multiple personae.
Barry Sanders sounds this grim theme: 'With the
disappearance of the book goes that most precious instrument for holding modem
society together, the internalized text on which is inscribed conscience and
remorse, and, most significant of all, the self.'[18]
Postmodern illiterates live their lives through a series of television
characters (better: shadows of characters), and changing channels becomes a
model for the self's manner of experience and its mode of being. Moral and
spiritual anchorage is lost. The self is left to try
on a pastiche of designer personae in no particular order and for no particular
reason.
The reading of great literature
immerses us in realities beyond ourselves, although not
unrelated to our selves. But this life of
reading requires an existential participation not permitted by television,
which simply sweeps us along at its own pace. One cannot muse over a television
program the way one ponders a character in Shakespeare or in C. S. Lewis, or a
Pascal parable, or a line from a T. S. Eliot poem such as 'But our lot crawls
between dry ribs/to keep its metaphysics warm.'[19] No one on
television could utter such a line seriously. It would be 'bad television'- too
abstract, too poetic, too deep, just not entertaining. As such, a serious selflhood - in which the self knows itself as a unique
actor in a great cosmic drama that is larger than one's self - is rendered impossible. Inwardness and self-reflection are replaced by an outward compulsion for increasingly more
mediated experiences that draw one increasingly further away from the essence
of one's soul and its ultimate, eternal fulfillment. As fallen beings, we have
always been mysterious to ourselves, but television can only exacerbate our sad
stupidity. Kierkegaard perceived that the self is quite easy to lose in the
ways of the world:
About such a thing as [the self] not much fuss is made in the world; for a self is the thing the world is least apt to inquire about, and
the thing of all things the most dangerous for man to let people notice that he
has it. The greatest danger, that of losing one's own self, may pass off as
quietly as if it were nothing; every other loss, that of an arm, a leg, five
dollars, a wife, etc., is sure to be noticed.[20]
Through television, oblivion to self
is amplified and broadcast globally and ceaselessly.
As a consequence, the self is destabilized, uprooted and hollowed out; it
becomes ungrounded, weightless, truthless, opaque to
itself - and it likes it that way, because no alternative is available (on
television). Postmodernism prevails; the loss of the self in relation to truth is celebrated, not mourned, for 'TV is good.' But, as Jesus
intoned, what is it worth if we gain the whole world (televised for all to see)
and forfeit our souls (Mt 16:26)?
A
Peek-a-Boo World: Discontinuity and Fragmentation
Third, television relentlessly
displays a pseudoworld of discontinuity and
fragmentation. Its images are not only intrinsically inferior to spoken and
written discourse in communicating matters of meaning and substance, but the
images appear and disappear and reappear without a proper rational context. An
attempt at a sobering news story about slavery in the Sudan is
followed by a lively advertisement for Disneyland, followed by an appeal
to purchase pantyhose that will make any woman irresistible and so on, ad nauseum. This is what Postman aptly calls the 'peek-a-boo
world'- a visual environment lacking coherence, consisting of ever-shifting,
artificially linked images. In order to detect a logical contradiction,
'statements and events [must] be perceived as interrelated aspects of a
continuous and coherent context.' When the context is one of no context, when fragmentation
rules, the very idea of contradiction vanishes.[21] Without
any historical or logical context, the very notion of intellectual or moral
coherence becomes unsustainable on television.[22]
In reflecting on an essay by Walter
Benjamin, social critic Jerry Mander discusses the
implications of the detachment of image from context with respect to artistic
values.
The disconnection from inherent
meaning, which would be visible if image, object and
context were still merged, leads to a similarly disconnected aesthetics in
which all uses for images are equal. All meaning in art and
also human acts becomes only what is invested in to them. There is no
inherent meaning in anything. Everything, even war, is capable of becoming art.[23]
Since postmodernism thrives on
fragmentation, incoherence and, ultimately, meaninglessness as modes of being
and acting (since there is no God, no objective reality
and no universal rationality to provide unity to anything), this facet of
television serves postmodernist ends quite well.
The biblical conception of truth
contradicts this surrender to incoherence, since truth is a noncontradictory,
unified whole, and because God's universal plan proceeds in a linear (if often
mysterious and unpredictable) fashion. The prologue to Luke's Gospel would have
made bad television, since Luke claims that he 'carefully investigated
everything from the beginning,' such that he could 'write an orderly account'
of Jesus' life, so his original reader, Theophilus,
might 'know the certainty of the things [he had] been taught' (Lk 1:3-4).
Pathologies
of Velocity: No Time for Truth
Fourth, the increasingly rapid pace
of television's images makes careful evaluation impossible and undesirable for
the viewer, thus rendering determinations of truth and falsity difficult if not
impossible. With sophisticated video technologies, scenes change at hypervelocities and become the visual equivalent of
caffeine or amphetamines. The human mind was not designed
by its Creator to accommodate to these visual speeds, and so the sensorium
suffers from the pathologies of velocity. This means that one simply absorbs
hundreds and thousands of rapidly changing images, with little notion of what
they mean or whether they correspond to any reality outside of themselves. The
pace of this assault of images is entirely imposed
upon us; it bears little if any resemblance to reality. As Ellul notes, 'The person who puts the images in sequences
chooses for you; he condenses or stretches what becomes reality itself for us.
We are utterly obliged to follow this rhythm.'[24] This, of
course, is the exact opposite of what happens in reading.
Habituation to such imposed
velocities tends to make people intellectually impatient and easily bored with
anything that is slow moving and undramatic - such as
reading books (particularly thoughtful ones), experiencing nature in the raw
and engaging in face-to-face conversations with fellow human beings. Hence, the
apprehension of difficult and demanding truths suffers and withers. The pace of
television's agenda disallows edification, understanding
and reflection. Boredom always threatens and must be defended
against at all costs. The overstuffed and over-stimulated soul becomes
out-of-sync with God, nature, others and itself. It cannot discern truth; it
does not want to. This apathetic attitude makes the apprehension and
application of truth totally irrelevant.
On the other hand, the godly art of
truthfulness requires a sense of pacing one's senses and thoughts according to
the subject matter before one. As Augustine said, 'The peace ... of the
rational soul [is] the harmony of knowledge and action.'[25] The
acquisition of knowledge (warranted belief in what is true), requires
intellectual patience and fortitude. One must linger on perplexing notions,
work them through, compare them to other ideas and
attempt to reach conclusions that imply wise and rational actions. Before God,
one must shut up, listen and be willing to
revolutionize one's life accordingly (see Eccles
5:1-7). God's word - 'Be still and know that I am God' (Ps 46:10) - simply
cannot be experienced through television, where stillness and silence are only
technical mistakes called 'dead air.' Television thus becomes a strategic
weapon in the arsenal of postmodernist cynicism and apathy.[26]
The
Entertainment Imperative: Amusement Triumphant
Television promotes truth decay by
its incessant entertainment imperative. Amusement trumps all other values and
takes captive every topic. Every subject-whether war, religion, business, law or education must be presented in a lively, amusing or
stimulating manner. The best way to receive information interpersonally
-through the 'talking head'- is the worst way according to television values;
it simply fails to entertain (unless a comedy routine is in process). If it
fails to entertain, boredom results, and the yawning watcher switches channels
to something more captivating. The upshot is that any truth that cannot be transposed into entertainment is discarded by
television. Moreover, even off the air, people now think that life (and even
Christian ministry) must be entertaining at all costs. One pastor of a megachurch advises preachers that sermons should be roughly
twenty minutes in length and must be 'light and informal,' with liberal
sprinklings of 'humor and anecdotes.'[27] Just like
television, isn't it?
The truth is that truth, and the
most important truths, is often not entertaining. An entertainment mentality
will insulate us from many hard but necessary truths. The concepts of sin, repentance and hell, for instance, cannot be presented as
entertaining without robbing them of their intrinsic meaning.[28] Jesus,
the prophets and the apostles held the interest of their audience not by being
amusing but by their zeal for God's truth, however unpopular or uncomfortable
it may have been. They refused to entertain but instead edified and convicted.
It was nothing like television.
Becoming
Untelevized: The People of Truth
As Postman, Ellul
and other critics have noted, television is not simply an appliance or a
business: it is a way of life and a mentality for approaching reality. As such,
it amplifies and reinforces postmodernist themes of truth decay. Ellul is right: People are 'being plunged into an
artificial world which will cause them to lose their sense of reality and to
abandon their search for truth'[29] To thwart television's power, one must refuse its
seductions. Television is good at some forms of entertainment but is very bad
at helping us develop the habits of being that lead us deeper into truth for
God's sake and the sake of our own souls. Mander does
not overstate the cause when he claims, 'Television effectively produces a new
form of human being-less creative, less able to make subtle distinctions,
speedier, and more interested in things.'[30] Given
this dire condition, some very practical steps can be taken
to reverse television's truth-decaying effects on the human being.
1. Engage in a TV-free fast for at
least one week and note the changes produced in your thoughts and attitudes.
Discuss these effects with those closest to you and or record them in a
journal. I require students in one of my courses to engage in a media fast of
some sort, and most pick television. They almost uniformly report that the fast
revealed a level of attachment to the tube they did not expect. They did suffer
some withdrawal at first. However, they later experienced a calming effect and
a more contemplative attitude to life; they found more time for friends, family and reading. When they went back to watching
television, many were shocked to realize what they had not seen when they were
habituated and desensitized to this medium: most television programming is
insipid, illicit and idiotic.[31]
2. If either the will or the ability
to go 'cold turkey' is lacking, create instead TV-free zones and times. For
instance, many watch television when they are physically or
emotionally drained. This is the worst time to do so, since television
decreases intellectual vigilance and is not truly relaxing.[32]
Therefore, one might make the two hours after returning from work a TV-free
zone. The same could be done for the two hours before
going to bed. Instead of having the television be the focus of the living room
or family room (with all chairs drawn in its direction), place the television
in another less-frequented room so that one has to go out of the way to watch
it. This breaks the television reflex and leaves the way open to better things,
truer things.
3. Replace television watching with
truth-enhancing activities, particularly reading thoughtful books. The desire
to read and the ability to read well suffer under the ruthless regime of
television, as do writing skills.[33]
Therefore, truth suffers. The very act of reading demands a deep level of
intellectual engagement and bestows tremendous pleasure and benefit for the
faithful. We watch television; we read books. Few have described the
truth-conducive nature of print and reading as well as Postman:
Whenever language is the principle
medium for communication - especially language controlled by the rigors of
print - an idea, a fact, a claim is the inevitable result....
Print is serious because meaning
demands to be understood. A written sentence calls upon its author to say
something, upon its reader to know the import of what is said.
And when an author and reader are struggling with semantic meaning, they are
engaged in the most serious challenge to the intellect. This is especially the
case with the act of reading, for authors are not always trustworthy. They lie,
they become confused, they overgeneralize, they abuse
logic and, sometimes, common sense. The reader must come armed, in a serious
state of intellectual readiness. [34]
The mental act of reading is not
passive, but active. It engages the mind and the imagination in wondrous ways
not possible through television - in ways that are, in fact, discouraged by
television. Through reading, truth becomes possible and knowable. The
discipline of wresting meaning from texts and assessing their truth is
invaluable for people who aspire to '[speak] the truth in love' (Eph 4:15). Truth is restored by attending to the Good Book
- whose authors are trustworthy, but not always easy to understand (2 Pet 3:16)
- and to good books, which require the kind of cognitive criticism Postman
describes (Phil 4:8).
The author of Hebrews chastised his
or her readers because of their slowness and laziness in learning important
biblical truths, which resulted in spiritual ignorance and immaturity. In our
truth-decayed day when television hinders the acquisition, internalization
and application of so much truth, we should transpose this ancient warning to
apply to ourselves.
We have much to say about this
[Jesus' priesthood], but it is hard to explain because you are slow to learn.
In fact, though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to
teach you the elementary truths of God's word all over again. You need milk,
not solid food! Anyone who lives on milk, being an infant, is not acquainted with
the teaching about righteousness. But solid food is for the mature, who by
constant use have trained themselves to distinguish good
from evil. (Heb 5:11-14)
Neutralizing
the acids of truth decay means refusing the enticements of one of its chief
postmodern agents - television.
For more about Truth Decay by
Douglas Groothuis, visit
http://www.gospelcom.net/cgi-ivpress/book.pl/isbn=0-8308-2228-3
Douglas Groothuis
is also the author of The Soul in Cyberspace (Baker) and Unmasking
the New Age (IVP). More information about Dr. Groothuis
is available at http://www.gospelcom.net/ivpress/groothuis
1.'TV Is
Good,' TV Guide, August 9-15,1997. No author is listed.
2. Jacques Ellul, The
Technological Bluff, trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley
(Grand Rapids,Mich.: Eerdmans, 1990), p. 336.
3. Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to
Death (New York: Penguin, 1985), pp. 78-79. The dominance of
television as a medium in American culture also fits into the category of what
Ivan Illich calls a "radical monopoly." See
Ivan Illich, Tools for Conviviality (New York: Harper
& Row, 1973), pp. 54-61.
4. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of
Man (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, reprint 1994), pp. 7-21.
5. Ibid., p. 45.
6. George Guilder believes the days of old fashioned television are numbered, because its basic functions will be
absorbed by computers. See George Guilder, Life After Television (New
York: W W Norton, 1994).
7. For these and more disturbing statistics about television
watching, consult "Television Statistics," on the TV-Free American
Web page <www.tvfa.org.
8. Jacques Ellul, The
Humiliation of the Word, trans. Joyce Main Hanks (Grand Rapids, Mich.:
Eerdmans, 1985), p. 142.
9. Larry Woiwode, 'Television: The
Cyclops That Eats Books,' Imprimus, February
1992, p. 1.
10. Tony Schwartz, The Responsive Chord (Garden City,
N.Y.: Anchor, 1973), pp. 18-22, cited in Kenneth Myers, All God's Children and Blue Suede Shoes: Christians and Popular
Culture (Westchester, Ill.: Crossway, 1989), p. 162.
11. Malcolm Muggeridge, cited in Woiwode, 'Television: The Cyclops That Eats Books,' p. 3.
12. Francis Schaeffer, How Should We Then Live? The Rise
and Decline of Western Thought and Culture (Old Tappan, N.J.: Revell,
1976), p. 240; see also Ellul, Humiliation, p.
140.
13. "TV Is Good."
l4. Quoted in John Leo, 'Spicing Up the (Ho-Hum) Truth,' U.S.
News & World Report, March 8,1993, p. 24.
15. Myers, All God's Children and
Blue Suede Shoes, 164.
16. Muggerridge, Christ and the
Media (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1977), p. 59.
17. On this theme, see Sven Birkerts,
The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age (New
York: Faber & Faber, 1994). This book is highly recommended.
18. Barry Sanders, A Is for Ox: The Collapse of Literacy
and the Rise of Violence in an Electronic Age (New York: Vintage, 1995),
pp. 77-78.
19 T.S. Eliot, 'Whispers of Immortality.'
20. Soren Kierkegaard, Fear and
Trembling and The Sickness unto Death,
trans. Walter Lowrie (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
University Press, 1954), p. 165.
21. Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death, p. 109.
22. Ibid., p. 110.
23. Jerry Mander, Four Arguments
for the Elimination of Television (New York: Morrow Quill Paperbacks,
1977), p. 288. Mander is discussing Walter Benjamin's
essay, 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,' from the
collection Illuminations. See also Birkerts,
Gutenberg Elegies, pp. 224-29.
24. Ellul, Humiliation of the
Word, p. 141. Ellul is right to point out in a
footnote on page 141 that this can be overcome to some
degree if one videotapes a program and stops and starts it when one chooses.
But this is only a small measure of control overall, and most people fail to
use this function critically.
25. Augustine The City of
God 19.13.
26. For more on the problems of speed in postmodern culture,
see Mark Kingwell, 'Fast Forward: Our High-Speed
Chase to Nowhere,' Harper's Magazine (May 1998): 37-48; Stephen Bertman, Hyperculture:
The Human Cost of Speed (Westport, Conn.: Praeger,
1998); and James Gleick, Faster: The Acceleration
of Just About Everything (New York: Pantheon, 1999).
27. Discussed in Douglas Webster, Selling Jesus: What's Wrong with Marketing the Church (Downers Grove,
Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1992), p. 83. This is not Webster's own philosophy of
homiletics!
28. For a satirical treatment of this, see the chapter
'Making Repentance Fun,' in Tom Raabe, The
Ultimate Church: An Irreverent Look at Church Growth, Megachurches,
and Ecclesiastical 'Show Biz' (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 1991), pp.
39-42. This is a neglected classic and a rare piece of thoughtful evangelical
satire.
29. Ellul, The
Technological Bluff, p. 337.
30. Jerry Mander, In the Absence
of the Sacred: The Failure of Technology and the Survival of the Indian Nations
(San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1991), p. 96.
31. Ellul reports the beneficial
effects of television depravation in a French study in Technological Bluff,
pp. 338-39.
32. See Mander, Four Arguments
for the Elimination of Television, pp. 192-215.
33. See Woiwode, "Television:
The Cyclops That Eats Books," p. 1.
34. Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death, p. 50; see also, Birkerts, Gutenberg Elegies, p. 122.