Friday, December 29, 2006

What's This fuss over TV all about anyways? PT. 3

Here are some highlights of Groothuis's third point concerning how TV contributes to truth decay. I would strongly recommend you read this entire article yourself by purchasing his book, Truth Decay. It is well worth the read.

A Peek-a-Boo World: Discontinuity and Fragmentation
Third, television relentlessly displays a pseudoworld of discontinuity and fragmentation. Its images are not only intrinsically inferior to spoken and written discourse in communicating matters of meaning and substance, but the images appear and disappear and reappear without a rational context. An attempt at a sobering news story about slavery in Sudan is followed by a lively advertisement for Disneyland, followed by an appeal to purchase pantyhose that will make any woman irresistible and so on, ad nauseum. This is what Postman aptly calls the "peek-a-boo world" - a visual environment lacking coherence, consisting of ever-shifting, artificially linked images...

Since postmodernism thrives on fragmentation, incoherence and, ultimately, meaninglessness as modes of being and acting (since there is no God, no objective reality and no universal rationality to provide unity to anything), this facet of television serves postmodernist ends quite well...

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