Regarding this book, James Woolcott wrote in the New York Review of Books that "the special value of Mander’s call-to-arms is that by dedicating himself to a concrete destructive end he can more effectively marshall his facts. Such utopian ferocity can clarify one’s own misgivings about the medium - or so I thought until I actually cracked the book open."



Yes, certain personal misgivings I, too, have about watching television are represented here: Mander gives voice to what is, in essence, boring

Regarding this book, James Woolcott wrote in the New York Review of Books that "the special value of Mander’s call-to-arms is that by dedicating himself to a concrete destructive end he can more effectively marshall his facts. Such utopian ferocity can clarify one’s own misgivings about the medium - or so I thought until I actually cracked the book open."



Yes, certain personal misgivings I, too, have about watching television are represented here: Mander gives voice to what is, in essence, boring content edited to deceive you into captivation. The stuff between advertisements is present to thread together the advertisements. Or confirmation of the oft-repeated facthood of corporate and political strong-arming of the media (Rupert Murdoch ad nauseam). But Mander fails spectacularly taking his peeves about this new-fangled contraption and catastrophizing its existence in every way possible. I share a contempt for advertising, but it's also steered me from ad-laden print media, Kindles for their "idle" screens, and Top 40 radio. These all get passes from Mander.



Mander's approach is to inflate the urgency of his arguments using a carte-blanche, escalate-it-all strategy. This abject need to expand his view of television kneecaps his point of view, because he expands his reasons past his expertise, or even concrete evidence. I believe the entirety of the third argument is built on supposition after solipsism after inconclusive anecdote. Take, for example, the notion that, because we may now re-read Harry Potter and think of Daniel Radcliffe's face instead of our original images, that this is eroding people's ability to think for themselves, and become passive spectators forever in the receipt of pre-manufactured images. Or take the repeated chapters that simply survey doctors who know that natural light can be a cure for certain conditions and that the reduction from full-spectrum light to, say, fluorescent, does have its consequences. Yet there's nothing documented yet about television's effects, but Mander simply believes the insinuation is sufficient. People are used to pure sunshine in evolutionary history (we call this both the "naturalistic fallacy" and simply a bad ad-hoc hypothesis) and therefore, since television's light is not pure sunshine, it is unnatural and bad. There is some theorizing about how the trickery of light induces hyperactivity in children, but sadly that point is better covered by Louis C.K.'s routine in Hilarious. (A comment I've written in the margins of this book multiple times). Mander is so vicious and yet so unable to deduce strong conclusions that he tries to attack certain logical fallacies themselves: He resents how the bureaucratic scientists need to spend money and do meticulous studies to prove something that the public "surmised" through anecdotal evidence. Folk wisdom suits Mander's needs here, not just because of the absence of much else, but possibly because credible study would quell his panic. This is not to suggest necessarily that the evidence is not there now; the text was written in the late 1970s. But his desperate flailing at trying to accumulate evidence that isn't there - or to preempt inevitable critiques of this absence of substantive evidence - makes him looking reeling and pathetic, and it makes him less sympathetic. What else is pathetic is this: his examples are all speculative hand-wringing drawn from fiction (Solaris and 1984, mostly).



As one could deduce from this awkward sunshine fetish, Mander also has a romantic, unfounded nostalgia in a time when Man had communion with Nature: he thinks that before the twentieth century we were happy because of a routine absorption of natural light as we pranced around the wilderness and lived like a true community. There's nothing more maddening than a nostalgia for an unsubstantiated fantasy, as well as the simple eschewing of an actual scientific claim that prolonged exposure to sunshine can induce, say, heat stroke, sunburn, or skin cancer. Likewise with many poisonous materials that abound in the wilderness, and threats to human life. I wish Mander were perceptive enough to realize that everything is natural, that proclaiming some boundary between synthetic and natural is just reveling in ignorance of basic chemistry. Cities are sort of like human hives, say. It's unfortunate that George Carlin's and Joe Rogan's treatises on this demarcation are keener than Mander's, and I actually heard them through television.



What does make Mander's book redeemable is the moments where the reader and him share mutual opinions about television. He does give precise voice to why reading - or meditation, even - feel more substantive or engaging than television...for me. It made me more mindful of the tricks television uses, as well as making me more mindful of when I'm truly bored or spaced out during a program. Mindfulness in the Kabat-Zinn sense is always good, so I laud Mander for inspiring that. Zealotry over preference is distasteful especially when wielded as fact in this overblown fashion, but at times in the book one may found oneself going, "Oh, that may be part of why reading feels better for me." (Mander mentions nothing about how reading small text is damaging to the eyes, or how reading in dim light is bad for your eyesight). In other words, when Mander is giving voice to one's misgivings, he can be quite good. But when he tries to morph those misgivings into a proposal of total elimination, he is often maddeningly aimless and weak.



To end on a high note, this excerpt made quite an impression:



Do you remember the Howard Johnson’s shoot-out in New Orleans a few years ago? I watched it all on television.



The regular programming was interrupted to take me to New Orleans where a wildly murderous band of black revo­lutionaries had taken over the upper floors of a Howard Johnson’s hotel. They were systematically murdering the white guests. This was a truly frightening story. Images of race war ran through my mind.



The announcer said that a massive police assault was underway, and I saw helicopters, police with drawn guns, and a lot of tense faces.



I didn’t see any murderous black revolutionaries, although I certainly imagined them, and they were described for me by the police on the scene. The death toll was uncertain.



A few hours later, the news reported that the siege was continuing but that the police had reduced their estimate of murderous black revolutionaries to two or three and that the death of only one white guest had been thus far confirmed. However, a number of policemen had been killed by the murderers. The death toll was still uncertain but it could be as high as a dozen.



Back to the regular programming.



By the morning, the siege was over, and the police were able to find only one of the revolutionaries, who apparently had been dead for quite a while, long before the assault was halted. There was still only one dead white guest but there were eight dead police, killed by the band. Police were baffled as to how the other members of the murderous group had eluded them.



A week later, after an investigation, the New Orleans po­lice department reported that they had found that only one white guest had been killed, only one black man had been involved in the killing, that this one man was not a black revolutionary but a crazy person. He had been dead for sev­eral hours while the invasion of the hotel continued, and all of the dead police had been killed by each other’s ricocheting bullets. The story was carried in the back pages of the newspapers; I wasn’t able to find it in any television news reports.



It turned out that virtually all of the facts as reported on television were totally wrong. Ignoring for the moment that television did not correct its own report, newspapers did, I was given the opportunity to straighten it all out in my mind. There were no murderous revolutionaries; there was only a crazy man. The police had all shot each other. But even now, several years later, I can recall the images of the police assault. Brave men acting in my behalf. The images of the murderous band. I can recall them now even though the information was completely false.



If only he could follow that up with more measured evidence of this impact on other people rather than simply letting his own narrative be sold as hard-earned truth. Four Arguments is over-long food-for-thought, not food-for-action. It's a bloated thinkpiece that will do little more than preach to the converted in the moments it works. Otherwise it's an embarrassment logically, teeming with "sacred time where we lived in the wilderness" garbage and ignoring parallels between this medium and others because he's playing favorites.



James Woolcott writes, "Mander sorely needed an editor to slash his work mercilessly, until only a few bloody sentences were left…perhaps enough for a pamphlet." The New York Review of Books gets its right again. It has advertising, too. And it's not killing me.

