Inheritance (Beeinflussungsapparates), 2006.
 Inheritance (Beeinflussungsapparates), 2006. “In this century colonization is accomplished through the eye.” -Joyce
Nelson, The Perfect Machine: Television and the Bomb, 1992, page 25. “By using myths which explain, justify, and sometimes even glamorize the prevailing conditions of existence, manipulators secure popular support for a social order that is not in the majority’s long term real interest. When manipulation is successful, alternative social arrangements remain unconsidered. …Myths are used to dominate people. When they are inserted unobtrusively into popular consciousness, as they are by the cultural-informational apparatus, their strength is great because most individuals remain unaware that they have been manipulated. The process of control is made still more effective by the special form in which the myth is transmitted. The technique of transmission can in itself add an extra dimension to the manipulative process. What we find, in fact, is that the form of the communication, as developed in market economies, and in the United States in particular, is an actual embodiment of consciousness control.” -Herbert Schiller,The Mind Managers, 1974, page 24. “It appears that the mode of response to television is more or less constant and very different from the response to print. That is, the basic electrical response of the brain is clearly to the medium and not to content difference…[Television] is a communications medium that effortlessly transmits huge quantities of information not thought about at the time of exposure.” -Herbert
E. Krugman, Electroencephalographic Aspects of Low Involvement, 1970. "Brainwise, being in front of a TV may be more like being asleep than any other activity." -John Robinson, Sociologist, University of Maryland, quoted in 'Thief of Minds: Studies indicate how television produces overstimulated, underactive kids', The Fresno Bee, October 7 1997, page B6. “Media tend to isolate one or another sense from the others. The result is hypnosis.” -Marshall
McLuhan, Understanding Media, 1965, page 41. “What is Television? What kinds of conversations does it permit? What are the intellectual tendencies it encourages? What sort of culture does it produce?…Every technology has an inherent bias. It has within its physical form a predisposition toward being used in certain ways and not others. Only those who know nothing of the history of technology believe that a technology is entirely neutral…Each technology has an agenda of its own.” "One of the more interesting concepts of propaganda -- at least propaganda in Western societies --is that it's a propaganda of integration, that it's not an overt practice, that it is something that has to take place over a long period of time; it has to be fairly common; it has to be integrated into everyday life." -Richard Bolton, Professor of Visual Arts, MIT., quoted in Consuming Images, part one of The Public Mind: Image and Reality in America, Bill Moyers, 1989. “The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it.”
-Mark
Weiser, The Computer for the 21st century, Scientific American, September 1991,
page 94.
“Audiences don’t watch something in the media and then run out and imitate it immediately. Media influences are far more subtle and gradual than any simplistic ‘imitation theory’ could explain. While the media may not cause our behaviors, they are culture mythmakers: they supply us, socially, with ideas and scripts that seep into our consciousness over time, especially when the myths are constantly recirculated in various forms. They accentuate certain aspects of social life and underplay others. They are part of a larger culture in which these myths are already at work, making it possible for the myths to find fertile ground in which to take root and flourish. They can reinforce certain social patterns and trends, and invalidate others. They can gradually and insidiously shape our ways of thinking, our notions of what is normal and what is deviant, and our acceptance of behaviors and ideas that we see normalized on television, in films, and in other forms of popular culture. The myths are sugarcoated: they are aesthetically appealing, emotionally addictive, and framed as cutting-edge and subversive.” -M.
Gigi Durham, Ph.D., The Lolita Effect, 2008, page 148. “If you are not careful the media will have you hating the people who are oppressed and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.” -Malcolm X ‘‘I take a very flat elitist position. Our job is to give people not what they want, but what we decide they ought to have.’’ -Richard Salant, former President of CBS News, quoted in Ron Powers, The Newscasters: The News Business as Show Business, 1977, page "To me entertainment is a poisonous concept. The idea of entertainment is that it has nothing to do with the serious problems of the world but that it fills up an idle hour. Actually, there is an ideology implicit in every kind of fictional story. Fiction may be far more important than non-fiction in forming people's opinions." -Erik Barnouw, Television as a Medium, Feedback #1, The Network Project, Performance no.3, July/August 1972, page 13. "...Celebrity has a political function. It operates to articulate, and legitimate, various forms of subjectivity that enhance the value of individuality and personality. Through these means, order and compliance are reproduced...Celebrity is emphatically a social construction, in which the mass-media play a leading role in governing the population." -Chris Rojek, Celebrity, 2001, page 36. "The tools and techniques used to shape the personalities of celebrities constitute a political and a social 'technology' in the broadest possible sense of the term. In the end, this technolgy shapes us as a culture as well. For in the act of manufacturing those few, revered others who exist to satisfy our deepest needs, we are engaged in the manufacturing and remanufacturing of our selves as well." -Ian Mitroff & Warren Bennis, The Unreality Industry, 1993, page 182. "Generally speaking, only simple conceptions can grip the mind of a nation. An idea that is clear and precise even though false will always have greater power in the world than an idea that is true but complex." -Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol. 1, Part One, Chapter 8, 1835. “Whatever be the ideas suggested to crowds they can only exercise effective influence on condition that they assume a very absolute, uncompromising, and simple shape. They present themselves then in the quise of images, and are only accessible to the masses under this form…This is why it happens that it is always the marvelous and legendary side of events that more specially strike crowds…Appearances have always played a much more important part than reality in history, where the unreal is always of greater moment than the real. Crowds being only capable of thinking in images are only to be impressed by images. It is only images that terrify or attract them and become motives of action…Nothing has a greater effect on the imagination of crowds of every category than theatrical representations. The entire audience experiences at the same time the same emotions, and if these emotions are not at once transformed into acts, it is because the most unconscious spectator cannot ignore that he is the victim of illusions, and that he has laughed or wept over imaginary adventures…The unreal has almost as much influence on them as the real. They have an evident tendency not to distinguish between the two.” “I think the subject which will be of most importance politically is mass psychology…Its importance has been enormously increased by the growth of modern methods of propaganda. Of these the most influential is what is called education. Religion plays a part, though a diminishing one; the press, the cinema, and the radio play an increasing part…It may be hoped that in time anybody will be able to persuade anybody of anything if he can catch the patient young and is provided by the State with money and equipment. …The subject will make great strides when it is taken by scientists under a scientific dictatorship... Although this science will be diligently studied, it will be rigidly confined to the governing class. The populace will not be allowed to know how its convictions were generated.” -Bertrand Russell, The Impact of Science on Society, 1951, page 40. “Technological structures are
‘revolutionizing’ human response by forcing life to conform to the parameters
of the machine…Even the shape of the child’s developing brain is said to be
changing…What can transform to the computer, what can be transmitted by
technology, will remain; what cannot will vanish. That which remains will also
be transformed by its isolation from that which is eliminated, and we will be
changed irrevocably in the process. As language is reshaped, language will
reshape daily life. Certain modes of thinking will simply atrophy and
disappear, like rare, specialized species of
birds. Later generations will not miss what they never had; the domain
of language and meaning will be the domain of the screen. History will be the
history on the screens; any subtlety, any memory which does not fit will be
undecipherable, incoherent.”
"The television screen is the retina of the mind’s eye. Therefore the
television screen is part of the physical structure of the brain.
Therefore whatever appears on the television screen emerges as raw
experience for those who watch it. Therefore television is reality, and
reality is less than television.”-Professor Brian O’Blivion, Videodrome, 1983. “No mighty king, no ambitious emperor, no pope, or prophet ever dreamt of such an awesome pulpit, so potent a magic wand.” -Fred W. Friendly, Presidential Television, A Twentieth Century Fund report, Newton N. Minow, John Bartlow Martin, Lee M. Mitchell, 1973, page vii. Be the first to post a comment. | ||||||||||||
