Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television - Jerry Mander

I found this book right on the ball when it comes to television and how it is not good for us to consume regularly. I found that although written many decades ago, almost everything still holds true today in the age of social media and YouTube. He goes into grave detail about "technical events" or cuts in TV and Ads to capture the users attention since TV is inherently boring unless these tricks are done to retain your attention. This reminds of me modern day YouTube where every video is a close up of someone's face, then a cut to a new scene what feels like every 0.5 - 1.5 seconds to maintain viewership. It has given me a new perspective on consuming video content in general, how history can't fit or be portrayed properly in the medium, and that it's mainly just good for sports and violence. Makes me want to read more books and consume less video content having read it.

I'm curious if there's any book similar to this that pickup on where Jerry left off but in the modern age? I've already read 10 Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts by Jaron Lanier, but I am open to books in the similar genre as this book and curious to know people's takeaways!

Touchstone: Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television

Well, obviously Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death is on a related topic. If you look at the book page of the book (see the touchstone in #2), there are lots of recommended similar books.

>1 wolfgang.smith: You make a good point about Mander's arguments still being relevant today because they're applicable in the context of social media and the 24-hour news cycle. Where they're still relevant to television as such is, I think, a different question . . . television, especially, television drama, is a very different thing than it was when Mander (or, for that matter, Postman) was writing.

If you want a (more) recent application of Mander's arguments to the era of social media, you might start with Nicholas Carr's The Shallows, Howard Rosenberg's No Time to Think, or Richard Seymour's The Twittering Machine.

However I'd also suggest Stephen Johnson's Everything Bad Is Good For You as a counter-argument and an exploration of why treating today's television landscape and that of Postman or Mander's era is, perhaps, being overly reductive.