J. Mander, Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television, pp. No person who did not wish to dominate others would choose to use advertising, or choosing it, succeed in it. Television has no democratic potential. The technology of television itself places absolute limits on what may pass through it. The medium, in effect, chooses its own content from a very narrow field of possibilities.
Television isolates people from the environment, from each other, and from their own senses.
Americans have not grasped the fact that many technologies determine their own use, their own effects, and even the kind of people who control them. We have not yet learned to think of technology as having ideology built into its very form. When the Allies occupied post war Japan and Germany, they were careful to prohibit media consolidation, noting that too concentrated media markets were antidemocratic and promoted fascism. Bruce Morton, CBS Correspondent, 1988. But it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use it to those ends.