Four Arguments For the Elimination of Television: The Power of Images

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PHOTO: MOTHER EARTH NEWS STAFF
Jerry Mander observes that the power of images includes the ability to create in our minds an artificial reality.

The following is an excerpt from Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television by Jerry Mander, copyright © 1977. Reprinted with the permission of William Morrow and Company, Inc. In a continuing examination of the effects of watching TV, this installment considers the power of images: television implants artificial images that overtake the human mind’s ability to create natural images, creating a schizophrenic mix of imagery partially disconnected from reality.  


How We Turn Into Our Images

More than any other single effect, television places images in our brains. It is a melancholy fact that most of us give little importance to this implantation, perhaps because we have lost touch with our own image-creating abilities, how we use them, and the critical functions they serve in our lives. Not being in touch, we don’t grasp the significance of other people’s images replacing or gaining equality with our own. And yet there are no more terrifying facts about television than that it intervenes between humans and our own image-creating abilities and intervenes between humans and our images of the concrete world outside of our minds.

In this chapter, we will look at how images, any images, directly affect human beings and how we humans slowly turn into whatever images we carry in our minds. Then in the next chapter, we will concentrate on television images.

  • Published on May 1, 1979
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