Word: tv
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...reason Michael Arlen bothered to produce two years of weekly columns on TV for The New Yorker, and then publish the best of them as The Living Room War, is that one hundred million or more people feed on television daily. It hammers them like malleable gold; it takes and does not give; it bludgeons man, and voraciously relieves him of whatever sensitivity he timorously guards. Television has been described with varying enthusiasm as the great galvanizer, tranquilizer, hypnotizer, pacifier, stupefier, paralyzer, agitator, commentator, activator, adjudicator, erupter, corruptor. It provides a daily vindication of American technological genius, a daily spectacle...
...principal argument of Arlen's book is that: "Television is not merely a box dispensing such commodities as 'information' or 'entertainment,' but something we are doing to ourselves." You can't simply praise or denounce the dissemination of information. But TV viewers extract their satisfactions in the pains of paranoia, and less dramatically, in an inexplicable feeling of frustration. Television may show us things we have never seen, sounds we have never heard, faces only imagined and opinions hardly imagined, but it makes its offering stillborn, draining off the wonder or outrage. We are made poorer by its dilating cosmopolitanism...
Arlen wrote me that he was not at all certain that his pieces were about TV. Perhaps they were about a great, white, ultratechnological superpower picking an out-of-the-way closet of the world in which to have a nervous breakdown- "like sending one's crazy aunt to Pernambuco... but Jesus, now the nervous breakdown seems to be here." His primary concern throughout the book is to present television as a dynamic power capable of fashioning human dreams and fears. He writes...
...much that people don't get "content" from TV, or that the content isn't important. They do. But what people really and mostly receive is a sense of themselves. What it mostly gives us is some other world, the world we dream we live...
Arlen addresses himself to the weary antinomies of TV-relevance and impartiality, balance and accuracy, immediacy and taste, integrity and remorseless expungement of personality, news and entertainment, sobriety and effulgence, public service and self-service-and not surprisingly reaches the conclusion that television flaunts a "slick and greedy and mentally undemanding world...