Rating: - One of the most poorly reasoned, anti-intellectual books that I've ever read
I read this book from cover to cover with something akin to complete horror. I was appalled that many people regard this as a good book, while in fact it is one of the most poorly argued, weakly reasoned books I've ever encountered. I am sorely tempted to write a book-length response entitled TWENTY ARGUMENTS IN REFUTATION OF JERRY MANDER.

I could go ten times over the maximum length allotted to me here and not do more than scratch the surface of what is wrong with this book. Let me start off with one of the most important facts: Mander self-refutes himself. What do I mean? Let me start off by granting that at the time when Mander wrote this book, primetime American television was almost universally awful. In fact, at this time in the history of television, Mander for some strange reason was watching a LOT more television than I was. I knew most TV at the time was a waste of time and therefore watched nearly none of it. In 1978 about all that I deemed worth watching was THE TWILIGHT ZONE from the late fifties and early sixties, the great BBC series THE PRISONER, a few other superb BBC teleplays like the great Dennis Potter's PENNIES FROM HEAVEN (he would later top himself with THE SINGING DETECTIVE) and the comedies MONTY PYTHON, and FAWLTY TOWERS. I also watched sports and the occasional news show (I've always gotten most of my news either from print or NPR.) Now, Mander's argument (though he is wildly inconsistent throughout the book, he does on multiple occasions insist that there cannot be good TV) is that TV is beyond redemption, that it does by the very nature of its medium very bad things to the brain, and that it cannot be redeemed as an art form. By the letter of Mander's argument there can never, ever be such a thing as a good TV show. Yet, Mander himself sites what he regards to be as a great TV show: Ingmar Bergman's SCENES FROM A MARRIAGE. At this precise point Mander refutes the entire contents of the rest of his book. Mander doesn't want to argue -- something that I agree completely with -- that most TV is bad. No, Mander wants to argue that TV is inherently, irremediably bad. But Mander knows his central contention to be a lie the second he acknowledges that there has been at least one great television series. If there is one then there exists the possibility of more.

But Mander rarely bothers with consistency in logic. He engages in constant leaps in reasoning. For instance, he'll assert "A" and "B" along with "C" therefore "F" without showing any logical connections between any of the components. Another thing you constantly see Mander do is engage in false analogy. He loves analogies. For instance, he argues that TV flattens the national experience by saying that it resembles a three ring circus (p. 26), with one person imagining that she or he was doing one thing by watching a show about an actual war, another imagining they were doing something different by watching sports, and another something yet different by watching a police drama. But, Mander asserts, this is like a three-ring circus. By paying attention to one ring rather than another, a person can be self-deceived about being at the circus. This is just absurd reasoning, yet it is the bastion of the entire book. For Mander people are constantly baffled and mystified by television, constantly being deceived to believe it is reality. It is a rhetorical stunt (actually, the kind of stunt used in advertising, Mander's actual field of expertise) that sloughs over all real differences and strips entities of their actual qualities. It would take a complete dunderhead not to realize that there is not a huge difference between watching a light weight infotainment show like TWENTY-TWENTY, a reality show like BIG BROTHER, and a serious character-driven serial drama like FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS (the latter bearing a very sharp resemblance to a series like SCENES FROM A MARRIAGE, that Mander was so very good).

I don't have time to catalog all the fallacious logical ploys Mander resorts to in his book. I'll name a few. But the main point is that Mander hates firm, solid, careful reasoning. He, in fact, hates reason. Instead, he is more of a "touchy-feely" kind of thinker. His emotive, irrational form of argumentation is far more typical of the New Age kind of thinking that would emerge in the next decade or so after this book. And it is no surprise that Mander became a part of the New Age crowd.

Let me catalog a few of the errors he constantly engages in. He is a nostalgist. That is, he constantly refers to previous historical conditions, idealizing those periods, without any actual reference to the historical record. He constantly creates Never-Never Lands of the past and then fantasizes about how happy we would be if we would revert to that. Many of his historical references are pain-invoking if you are familiar with history. For instance, he refers to Hermes as if he were a real person (and he confuses one Hermes with another -- one Hermes is the equivalent of Mercury, the messenger of the gods, but Mander confuses him with Hermes Trismegistus, Hermes the Thricegreat, who was until the late Renaissance considered an actual historical figure, the contemporary of Moses and the main inspiration for Plato, even though he was a creation of the 2nd century BC - the word Hermetic refers to that Hermes and the school of thought he inspired Hermeticism).

Mander is a master cherry picker. He'll take some aspect of TV, select this, take that, but ignore fifteen other things to prove his point. He also engages in a lot of false either/or thinking. He constantly sets up false situations in which the "truth" (and Mander feels he has a pretty firm grasp of the truth) is EITHER this OR that. In other words, he sets up false dichotomies. He distorts other people's positions on nearly every page.

The most comical part of the book is when he writes of contacting researchers about trying to get them to confirm some conclusions he wants to draw from their research that they do not. If you read between the lines, they clearly think that Mander is a nut.

All of these things would have made this book a bad book regardless of when it was written. Bad reasoning is bad reasoning regardless of anything else. His cherry picking, his arguments from false analogies, his distortion of the positions of others, the counter-factual nature of his discussion of anything historical, all of these would have doomed his book as bad at any time at which it had been written.

The worst thing about Mander's book is that he means to make an absolutist point: technology is inherently evil. Now, he focuses on TV, but if you pay attention his real beef is the entire world of modern technology. Now, I am not a technophile. For instance, I very much admire the work of Jacques Ellul (who, of course, Mander both refers to and abuses), whose book THE TECHNOLOGICAL SOCIETY was the first great book to point out some of the problems of a society in which technology has taken on a life of its own. But Ellul's book is carefully reasoned, intelligent, and still very relevant. Ellul is often wrongly accused of being a Luddite by technophiles. Mander very definitely is a Luddite. Mander basically hates the modern world and yearns nostalgically for a world of the past that exists within the confines of his own imagination, a world that never existed. Ellul lived very much in "this" world, but was alarmed about some dominant trends. (Another very good critic of the technological society is Langdon Winner. Please don't waste time reading Mander when there are people like Langdon Winner, Jacques Ellul, and Bill McKibben you could be reading instead.) Basically, wailing against ALL technology is spitting in the wind. It is here. It isn't going away. Wally in MY DINNER WITH ANDRE is not going to dispense with his electric blanket. Nor should he.

Ironically, had Mander's book been a screed against how bad TV was in 1978, I would have been in complete agreement. But in fact, despite his attempt to engage in absolute arguments, his main points were historically contingent. I want to end my review (I wish I had more room! I've had to miniaturize my critique too much already!) with three main points. 1) Mander's book is now irrelevant because his assumptions have been undercut by technological developments, 2) his book is critically irrelevant because of the astonishing growth in quality television, and 3) his book is even less relevant now than it was when written because of his misunderstanding of how people watch and use television.

1. Huge hunks of Mander's book depend upon the technological form that television took at the time. For instance, he tries to make a lot of hay out of the rather poor resolution of television at the time. Today HD TV provides a degree of resolution that is simply shocking. For instance, over Thanksgiving I was at the house of a friend of my brother. We briefly watched a high def station on his 50-inch SONY LCD on early 20th century Mexican painting. The picture was so detailed that you could actually see not merely the individual brush strokes, but the texture of the canvas, board, or wood on which the artist had painted. This, of course, eliminates as relevant the sections of Mander's book that depends on the lack of resolution. Also, Mander makes much of the relatively small size of the TV screen. In fact, setting in front of a Sony 50 inch LCD (or any comparable brand), the picture from the TV, depending on where you are sitting, can take up a comparable percentage of your field of vision as being in a movie theater or, for that matter, an art museum (if you are watching a show on early 20th Century Mexican painting). And because LCD television dispenses with the tubes that Mander sees as being so villainous, more large hunks of his book fall away as irrelevant.

2. As mentioned above, Mander self-refutes his own book by identifying one television show that he regards as very good. Mander's book was published in 1978. I'm going to attempt a very brief history of television since then. In 1981 Stephen Bocho created HILL STREET BLUES. Now, if you try to watch this today, it does not come across as a very good show. But it was revolutionary at the time because it broke television out of the episodic formula that dominated all shows except for the soaps and what was called at the time "short form" television (counterintuitively, this meant miniseries, like what would appear on PBS's MASTERPIECE THEATER). During the eighties more and more shows -- CHINA BEACH, ST. ELSEWHERE, L.A. LAW, and thirtysomething -- embraced the serial format. For my money, television was still not all that good, but there is no question that it was better than what was on in the seventies. But the nineties saw TWIN PEAKS bring an art house aesthetic to television, and while few shows tried to emulate completely the unique style of TWIN PEAK, there is no question that a host of new shows in the nineties both strove to adopt the serial format developed in the eighties and combine it with a more aesthetically sophisticated approach, coupled with a far greater emphasis on intelligent writing. As a result we've gotten a plethora of truly great television shows, beginning with TWIN PEAKS but continuing with NORTHERN EXPOSURE, THE X-FILES, BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER, SIX FEET UNDER, THE SOPRANOS, THE WIRE, FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS, ANGEL, PUSHING DAISIES, THE GILMORE GIRLS, BATTLESTAR GALACTICA, BAND OF BROTHERS, VERONICA MARS, ALIAS, THE SHIELD, SLINGS AND ARROWS and any of a number of other shows recently or currently running on TV.

3. Mander presents an almost comical picture of how people watch TV. He envisions an almost impossibly passive mind helplessly, hopelessly taking into the central regions of the brain all the messages from television and succumbing to them. Even though the scientists whose work he wants to use to prove this tell him (even in Mander's own records of his conversations with them) that he has it wrong, any half-aware individual would know Mander is mistaken. For one thing, no one watches TV like Mander imagines. Even in the seventies if I was watching TV, I would be doing other things at the same time: reading a book or newspaper, playing backgammon with my wife at the time, playing cards, working crosswords, grading papers for a school I worked at, playing tug of war with my dog, petting my cat, etc. And when the commercial came on, I was off to the bathroom, or into the kitchen to fix a snack. And that was 1978! How different today! Thanks to DVRs for a growing number of television viewers commercials are a thing of the past. Furthermore, 100% of my TV viewing is by "appointment only." Example: this past fall (before the strike) I would on Wednesday nights turn on ABC at 7:00 CT and watch PUSHING DAISIES. Then at 8:00 CT I would switch over to NBC and watch THE BIONIC WOMAN (which never became the show I hoped it would, though I even now believe in its potential). Last month on Mondays I would watch KYLE XY at 7:00 CT on the ABC Family Network and then switch over to FOX at 8:00 for TERMINATOR: THE SARAH CONNOR CHRONICLES. During the commercials I was as in the past off to the restroom or kitchen, but also to my computer where I would post on boards with other fans of TV shows. Such activity is even more common with shows like BATTLESTAR GALACTICA and LOST. In fact, in four years of watching LOST, I'm not sure I've ever seen a commercial. I only rush back to the TV set when hear the show come back on. My point is that the passive viewing that Mander imagines does not exist for me. No doubt some individuals can be found who watch TV the way that Mander envisions, but at most that proves that some people watch TV badly, not that TV can only be watched badly

In fact, television has today surpassed the movies as the thinking person's visual medium of choice (and I state that as someone who ran film societies in grad school).

Not all television is gold. I remain appalled at the mania attending AMERICAN IDLE. I lament that a brilliant serial drama like FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS pulls in only a tiny percentage of the audience of formulaic police procedurals like LAW AND ORDER and the various CSI shows. Most television is bad. Moreover, people tend to prefer weaker shows to better shows. TWO AND A HALF MEN is the most widely watched comedy on TV right now, despite enjoying absolutely no critical acclaim. Both 30 ROCK and THE OFFICE are vastly better shows, but get only a fraction of TWO AND A HALF MEN's audience. But this isn't Mander's point. He isn't arguing that people watch bad TV instead of good TV. He was arguing that all TV was bad (even while inconsistently acknowledging that at least one show was not).

Avoid this book at all costs. It is anti-intellectualism at its worse. There are both better books on TV and better books on the dangers of technology. Please read Langdon Winner or Jacques Ellul instead on technology. Winner has two great books on struggling with modern technology, THE WHALE AND THE REACTOR and AUTONOMOUS TECHNOLOGY. Or read Bill McKibben's ENOUGH. Or Erik Davis's TECHGNOSIS: MYTH, MAGIC AND MYSTICISM IN THE AGE OF INFORMATION. Or David F. Noble's fabulous THE RELIGION OF TECHNOLOGY. Or any of Mark Dery's books, like THE PYROTECHNIC INSANITARIUM. These books will educate and inform. Jerry Mander's book will actively misinform. Avoid it.