TV Monsters
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TV Monsters
Dean Williams
Copyright 2013 Dean Williams
Dedication
This story is dedicated to the work and memory of Marshall McLuhan. It appears that you were right all along.
Preface
A literate person, more perceptive than charitable, might call a work like this “a labor of love.” With respect to its undoubted want of polish and a certain corny earnestness, I myself would have to agree: I lay it on rather thickly. And a polemic rarely makes for good fiction. Still, it would be more accurate to call this story “a labor of loathing.” Exactly what it is I loathe—well, you will have to read it to find out! The plot is all mine, but it is chock-full of Marshall McLuhan’s ideas. Any conceptual heft it might possess is due to the work of that Canadian visionary. Not only his ideas are employed but also actual terms he brought into the discourse on media: “the continuous present”; “fetishize”; “search for identity”; “new tribalism”. On a final note, the story is told in rhyme because it began its life as a short and lighthearted children’s tale. But the more I looked into and thought about the subject, the more I realized that my chosen topic is not really suitable for children…yours or mine. But by that point the narrative’s events and ideas had irrevocably taken form as a series of 4-line stanzas, with a bit of prose stubbornly horning its way in at the very end. The task of maintaining a brisk pace while at the same time describing complex societal forces and transformations was one that neither the rigid verse structure nor my own powers as a writer was always up to. In any event, I have told the story that I wanted to tell. The reader will judge whether it was one worth telling.
A Few Quotations from Marshall McLuhan
The new media are not bridges between man and nature; they are nature.
It is the medium that shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action.
All media exist to invest our lives with artificial perception and arbitrary values.
The dichotomy between information and entertainment has ended.
We can always see the Emperor’s old clothes, but not his new ones.
It may even be that the loss of one’s power to recognize the new patterns of power in the environment is in direct ratio to the impact of such new powers. We are most nearly numb where impact is most severe… A.J. Toynbee has few if any instances of societies meeting the challenge of major change successfully.
We now live in a technologically prepared environment that blankets the earth itself. The humanly contrived environment of electric information and power has begun to take precedence over the old environment of “nature.” Nature, as it were, begins to be the content of our technology.
The user is always the content, at least in the traditional Aristotelian view that the “cognitive agent itself becomes and is the thing known.”
We have here today, the electronic equipment (TV) that is translating us into software instantaneously and enables us to be played back as software instantaneously.
If television is going to strip us of our civilized individuality, of our separate selves, then we should close down TV. Because, as far as I know, television is incompatible with the continuance of Western man.
The TV Monsters