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Originally posted by: ricarleite
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Originally posted by: Darth Chaltab
You've had Cable for fifteen years and are already mindless drones? Everybody pray for Brazil.

This obviously started to happen back in the mid 70s, not since cable TV. I just mentioned it as an example of how TV was not embbeded in our culture, but now that it is, our society seemed to have dumbed down. Not "dumbed down" in the sense of people being ignorant or incompenent, dumbed down in the sense of people drooling in front of the TV, watching our horrible reality TV shows, worshipping celebreties like pseudo-gods, and letting themselves to think as TV tells them to. One day I'll tell you the story of a network called "Globo", not now because I'd take a long time to tell that story.

This is a topic I did some reading on recently. In a book by Harlan Ellison called Strange Wine. If you aren't familiar with Ellison, he's a fairly legendary writer here in the US who's been around a long time. He basically makes it his business to offend people and will usually go out of his way to do so. However, he does EXCELLENT work. Any-hoo...in the intro to the book he talks about how tv is so dangerous now because it requires no work on the part of the viewer. Basically, you sit there, turn off your brain, and the images/sound just pulsate into your head. He was talking about how tv has become reality for so many people now, and gave as an example a Star Trek fan who went nuts on him at a conference when he talked about writing the lines for Spock in a particular episode. The guy called Ellison a liar, saying that he heard and saw Spock saying the lines...the show had become reality for this person and he couldn't deal with someone knocking that reality apart. He gave as another example a reporter who said something like "And now in our quest to bring you stories in gory detail..." and then shot herself in the head on live tv. If she had done it in her bedroom, nobody would have cared, but because she did it on tv it was huge. My wife and I are becoming more concerned about this and are making an effort to drastically reduce the time that the kids spend watching it. Very frightening.