What's This fuss over TV all about anyways? PT. 4

This is the fourth concerning the dangers of TV, specifically, its contribution to truth decay in a postmodern world. All that follows is taken from an appendix in Douglas Groothuis book, "Truth Decay." I heartily recommend you purchasing this book and reading it in its entirety. It is well worth the read.

Pathologies of Velocity: No Time for Truth

Fourth, the increasingly rapid pace of television's images make careful evaluation impossible and undesirable for the viewer, thus rendering determinations of truth and falsity difficult if not impossible. With sophisticated video technologies, scenes change at hypervelocities and become the visual equivalent of caffeine or amphetamines. The human mind was not designed by its Creator to accommodate to these visual speeds, and so the sensorium suffers from the pathologies of velocity. This means that one simply absorbs hundreds and thousands of rapidly changing images, with little notion of what they mean or whether they correspond to any reality outside of themselves...

Habituation to such imposed velocities tends to make people intellectually impatient and easily bored with anything that is slow moving and undramatic - such as reading books (particularly thoughtful ones), experiencing nature in the raw and engaging face-to-face conversations with fellow human beings. Hence, the apprehension of difficult and demanding truths suffers and withers. The pace of television's agenda disallows edification, understanding and reflection...the overstuffed and over-stimulated soul becomes out-of-sync with God, nature, others and itself.

On the other hand, the godly art of truthfulness requires a sense of pacing one's senses and thoughts according to the subject matter before one.

Before God, one must shut up, listen and be willing to revolutionize one's life accordingly (see Eccles. 5:1-7). God's word - "be still and know that I am God" (Ps. 46:10) - simply cannot be experienced through television, where stillness and silence are only technical mistakes called "dead air." Television thus becomes a strategic weapon in the arsenal of postmodernist cynicism and apathy.