Quotes about television

In the age of pseudo‑events it is less the artificial sim­plification than the artificial complication of experience that confuses us. Whenever in the public mind a pseudo‑event competes for attention with a spontaneous event in the same field, the pseudo‑event will tend to dominate. What happens on television will overshadow what happens off television.

“I've invented a new definition for TV,” he muttered gloomily. “I've decided it’s a device for hindering communication between artist and audience.”

If you can watch much television, then being dead will be a cinch. Actually, watching television and surfing the Internet are really excellent practice for being dead.

Leather shoes and fried chicken and dead soldiers are only a tragedy if you waste their gift sitting in front of the television. Or stuck in traffic. Or stranded at some airport.

No one wants to admit we're addicted to music. That's just not possible. No one's addicted to music and television and radio. We just need more of it, more channels, a larger screen, more volume. We can't bear to be without it, but no, nobody's addicted. We could turn it off anytime we wanted. I fit a window frame into a brick wall. With a little brush, the size for fingernail polish, I glue it. The window is the size of a fingernail. The glue smells like hair spray. The smell tastes like oranges and gasoline

Down through the ceiling comes a fire siren and people screaming that we're supposed to ignore. The gunshots and tires squeeling, sounds wee have to pretend are okay. They don't mean anything. It's just television. An explosion vibrates down from the upstairs. A woman begs someone not to rape her. It's not real. It's just a movie. We're the culture that cried wolf.

We come from a generation of people who need their TV or stereo playing all the time. These people so scared of silence. These soundaholics, these quietophobics.

The muffled thunder of dialogue comes through the walls, then a chorus of laughter. Then more thunder. Most of the laugh tracks on television were recorded in the early 1950s. These days, most of the people you hear laughing are dead.

Only one thing I'll say for the people watching television, the millions and millions of the One Eye: they're not hurting anyone

I was born in 1948. I can't recall a world before television...Initially there was nothing on it but “snow,” and then the nightly advent of a targetlike device called “the test pattern,” which people actually gathered to watch.

I imagine that the World Wide Web and its modest wonders are no more than the test pattern for whatever the twenty-first century will regard as its equivalent medium.

If the use of leisure time is confined to looking at TV for a few extra hours every day, we will deteriorate as a people. (5 November 1958)

Humans are very good at dreaming, although you'd never know it from your television.