>he wrote about a world where TV is omnipresent and people lack any intellectual cricism and curiosity, and tried to persuade readers that TV was the cause of this intellectual laziness.
If you look closely you can see huge swaths of that today. How many people actually formulate their own political and social opinions without seeds or entire forests planted by television news? They literally tell you what your opinion should be in many cases.
A common cited example is the Nixon/Kennedy debate. People who listened to it on the radio thought Nixon won, while people who watched it on television thought Kennedy won, and that was when TV was in it's infancy. The relevance of that is people started voting based on visual appearance rather than competence of the issues. Unfortunately Nixon didn't do very well once he actually was elected, but that is besides the point. Imagine people like most of us who grew up with it.
As you mentioned, people now don't know any other way, because we grew up with it. That's the long term problem. Perhaps without TV, people would make much better decisions at the polling stations.
It's a constant, one-way deluge that people get exposed to. I think the internet, with all it's faults, helps to alleviate that, because at least with the internet, an individual can discuss alternating opinions.
The Nixon/Kennedy debate anecdote is a common misconception. In reality most radio listeners were older and lived in rural areas, making them more likely to lean towards Nixon anyways. [1]
People have always interpreted things the way they want to, whether it's radio or TV.
> If you look closely you can see huge swaths of that today.
Oh yes, most dystopian fiction still uses it.
And this is also an old rhetorical trick. In political speech it takes the form of putting two words as close as possible together to make people unconsciously do a link between them. "I will strengthen our borders to prevent immigration. Crime is the main focus of our policies." <- No links were formally made in that sentence between crime and immigration, but the words seem linked.
If you make a whole speech about Obama that also talks about the problems of lobbying and corruption of the elite, people will associate Obama with these concepts.
If you look closely you can see huge swaths of that today. How many people actually formulate their own political and social opinions without seeds or entire forests planted by television news? They literally tell you what your opinion should be in many cases.
A common cited example is the Nixon/Kennedy debate. People who listened to it on the radio thought Nixon won, while people who watched it on television thought Kennedy won, and that was when TV was in it's infancy. The relevance of that is people started voting based on visual appearance rather than competence of the issues. Unfortunately Nixon didn't do very well once he actually was elected, but that is besides the point. Imagine people like most of us who grew up with it.
As you mentioned, people now don't know any other way, because we grew up with it. That's the long term problem. Perhaps without TV, people would make much better decisions at the polling stations.
It's a constant, one-way deluge that people get exposed to. I think the internet, with all it's faults, helps to alleviate that, because at least with the internet, an individual can discuss alternating opinions.