Four Arguments for The Elimination of Television

Image Gallery

What's the matter with our modern, technologically based society anyway? Why isn't it more satisfying? Why do so many of us now feel that some vague something hounds us and diminishes us and makes us into something less than we should be? Most specifically of all, do we really use television—and so many other "benefits" and "tools" of our technological age—or does it use us? Jerry Mander (see photo) speaks the unspeakable and asks the unaskable in a remarkable new book that will be completely serialized in this magazine. The first of these installments follows.

From Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television by Jerry Mander, copyright © 1977 6y the author. Reprinted with the permission of William Morrow and Company, Inc. Available in paperback for 14.95 from any good bookstore or for $4.95 plus 95¢ shipping and handling from Mother's Bookshelf, P O. Box 70, Hendersonville, North Carolina 2739.

INTRODUCTION
THE BELLY OF THE BEAST

If this book has any basis in "authority," it lies in the fifteen years I worked as a public relations and advertising executive. During that time, I learned that it is possible to speak through media directly into people's heads and then, like some otherworldly magician, leave images inside that can cause people to do what they might otherwise never have thought to do.

At first I was amused by this power, then dazzled by it and fascinated with the minutiae of how it worked. Later, I tried to use mass media for what seemed worthwhile purposes, only to find it resistant and limited. I came to the conclusion that like other modern technologies which now surround our lives, advertising, television and most mass media predetermine their own ultimate use and effect. In the end, I became horrified by them, as I observed the aberrations which they inevitably create in the world.

Adman Manque.

In retrospect, I can see that an absurd little revolt against my family led me into advertising work. My parents wanted me to choose a profession or to take over my father's business. They felt that while advertising was already a lucrative field by the time I was seeking a way into it in the late 1950s, it was still very chancy for Jewish boys. They were certainly right about that. Directly out of the Wharton School of Business and then Columbia Graduate Business School, I was denied a job in a Park Avenue ad agency because "your hair is a little kinky: you might want to try Seventh Avenue." Seventh Avenue was what I was fleeing.

My parents carried the immigrants' fears. Security was their primary value: all else was secondary. Both of them had escaped pogroms in Eastern Europe. My father's career had followed the path familiar to so many New York immigrants. Lower East Side. Scant schooling. Street hustling. Hard work at anything to keep life together. Early marriage. Struggling out of poverty.

Curiously, success came to him during the Depression. He founded what later became Harry Mander and Company, a small service business to the garment industry, manufacturing pipings, waist bands, pocketing and collar canvas.