Televisions Grip on the Mind of America Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

Televisions Grip on the Mind of America - Essay mannequinNeil Postman rightly identifies the iron grip that the television has on mental capacitys throughout American society.Perhaps the fundamental cerebrate for televisions power is the way in which it has disposed an exquisite and dangerous perfection to the epistemological biases of the telegraph and instancy. The telegraph brought bits of information directly to the consumer, without giving that information any sort of context, any sort of reason why that information was significant. The significance was in the novelty, or in the entertainment value. The instancy of the photograph relieves the mind of having to imagine, or even having to pay a group of attention. An idea can be summarized, remembered, ingrained in the form of a picture. Combining the two, making a slogan with a picture, simultaneously places an idea an plan in the mind. This increases the power of the idea, and gives a visual source of memory associated wit h that idea for the mind to clutch tightly.Another characteristic of television concomitant to this simultaneity of horizon and vision is the power of speed. The telegraph took the line-by-line, sequential, continuous form of the printed page and reduced it to a world of fragments and discontinuities. The photograph takes a reality that can present ideas to the mind and reduces them down to particular examples.