Customer Reviews

Test Card F: Television, Mythinformation and Social Control

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Test Card F systematically dismantles the myth-machine of Television, and in the process brings down the culture of distraction surrounding Television. But Test Card F isn't some incoherent rant on the evils of modern society - this is in-depth, thought provoking material, well-researched, articulate, and reasonable. This book has more in common with Neil Postman and Marshall McLuhan than the Luddittes.

Test Card F addresses the issue of The Society of the Spectacle - what happens when we all become viewers, spectators in our lives? Today's television viewers are more informed than ever in mankind's history, but are we more active? What is the role of commercials in the television mindscape? Who are these people on the box we see every day? Just who's at the controls here?

Test Card F is a eye-opening, provocative piece of writing, presented with the kind of humorously cynical optimism missing from much of today's social criticism. It's the kind of book that will make you stop watching and start doing.

This book was first published in Ireland, so it naturally focuses on the UK. However, its information on the pathetic state of modern news coverage is very global. This book is very short, slim, and Situationist. Lots of deranged "comix" throughout. It will definitely open your eyes to many things, but I doubt it will make you want to toss your television out the window. After all, if this book makes you do that, then you are just as "impressionable" as the TV slaves the book derides. And that's the funny thing about this book. It claims that TV is bad because it will rot your brain and tell you what you should think; then the book TELLS you to throw away your TV. Basically what I am saying is, this book is just as opinionated and commanding as the industry it is trying to lambaste. Read the book and see what you think. Let it open your eyes, but don't let it change your life. Because the idea that ALL television is bad is just as lameheaded as saying that ALL white people can't dance, or ALL Asians are good at math, or any other such idiotic popular myths. As Hagbard Celine said in the Illuminatus! Trilogy: "Think for yourself." Actually, there was an additional word on that sentence, but if I wrote it, Amazon would surely edit it out...