CHAPTER 11 Fundamental Assumptions  HUXLEYAN WARNING

FUNDAMENTAL ASSUMPTIONS

1. Television now controls the flow of public discourse in our country.

2. In the Age Of Television our information environment is completely different that in was in colonial America.

3. Television presents information in a form which renders in simplistic, non-substantive, non-historical, and non-contextual.

4. In our culture we are never denied the opportunity to amuse ourselves. The television screen always wants you to remember that it's imagery is always available for your amusement and pleasure.

5. Cultural life is slowing being redefined as a perpetual round of entertainment.

6. Technology has both benefits and costs for a culture.

7. New technology has the capacity to alter a culture's news, politics, social relations, commerce,, and religion

8. Television serves us quite usefully when providing pure entertainment.

9. It is a threat to culture when it turns serious modes of discourse e.g. news, education, and religion into forms of entertainment.

10. To combat the potential negative influence of television we need to educate people about the way in which a technology functions as a medium of communication and influence the nature, role, and function of information in a culture.

11. Only through an awareness of the structure and effects of television, through a demystification of media, will we be able to gain some measure of control over mediums of communication e.g. television, the computer, electronic mail, interactive video and so forth.

14. We need to become more media-conscious.

15. How can we use education to control our technological mediums of communication?

16. American television limits freedom of expression and choice because its only criterion for merit and significance is popularity.