Comments on: Television IS the anti-Christ

By: wretch

wretch — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 00:32:00 +0000

The problem with screens in urinals, as I see it, is that the installers tend to mount them higher than I can arc a stream. So maybe it’s time to start carrying permanent Sharpies…
Brian

By: Jeff in Oakland

Jeff in Oakland — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 22:41:00 +0000

I feel your pain. When my wife was pregnant we spent a lot of time in the waiting room at a doctor's office. They had a 5-minute infomercial repeating endlessly on a big-screen set, at high volume. No controls accessible to the audience. I finally had to pull the plug.

Here's my solution:

Gas stations, airports, and (apparently) rest rooms have too many video screens.

Schoolyards, street corners, and many other places have video cameras -- but nobody watching.

How about if, while you're stuck for a few minutes in front of one of those screens, you keep an eye on the neighborhood? See something suspicious? Press here and the video feed gets priority attention from the school principal, the neighborhood beat cop, or whatever.

By: Kerri

Kerri — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 04:18:00 +0000

I can’t tell if you’re blaming ‘television’ or ‘televisions’. Is it screen time that bothers you, or the content that you see on the screens?

I would probably be annoyed if I lived in the kind of place that had screens everywhere. But we don’t even have a single billboard within the town limits, much less video screens in our loos. Sometimes, I look forward to the familiar blue flicker in places, because it’s exciting and new for those of us who aren’t bombarded all the time.

If it’s the content of television, well, that’s a completely different tirade for me.

By: Loring Wirbel

Loring Wirbel — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 02:01:00 +0000

Or what about when pamphlets first came around, about the time of the American Revolution? “You kids these days have such short attention spans, those screeds aren’t any more than a couple thousand words, all that emotional ranting and fast channel-changing is going to leave you with no linear thinking left to enjoy a good novel. And don’t even get me started about that damned Laurence Stern…”

By: Lou Covey

Lou Covey — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 22:50:00 +0000

Maybe.

Then again, William Shakespeare wrote his plays to entertain the masses, twisted history to portray English leaders as heroic (Henry V) and was considered the Aaron Spelling of his day.

But he wasn't the only playwright producing mass-media entertainment. He's just one of the few that survived the test of history.

There has never been a moment in the history of media that dreck was less than quality. I can see in my mind a time when a elderly bard was complaining to his young son as the latter was immersed in a scroll.

"We've got 300 scrolls in this house and not a decent thing to read! If the oral tradition was good enough for my father, it should be good enough for you!"

By: Loring Wirbel

Loring Wirbel — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 20:39:00 +0000

Only one thing to say:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6CgotCUtMo

Well, maybe two:

http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/debord/1.htm

Excellent post