Charles Featherstone meditates about television. I'm not sure I agree with everything he says, but he raises interesting angles to ponder.
For almost all of my adolescence and adult life, I have gotten most of my news from the radio -- specifically international shortwave. (I was a long-time partisan of BBC World Service, but it is nowhere as intellectually rigorous as it used to be...) But generally my view of the world is "unmediated," and I think it helps. Teevee does a poor job of portraying ANYTHING realistically or with any complexity, and it is almost incapable of communicating ideas -- at least well-articulated ideas. Teevee teaches people to be afraid of the world around them and creates a false sense of immediacy and intimacy. Empathy is a hard enough feeling to cultivate in human beings, but teevee's world replaces real empathy with a simulacrum, a self-righteous false sympathy that allows people to be both callous to suffering yet demand "something be done about it" at the same time. In creating its artificial and imaginary connections between real and fake people, it atrophies the ability to foster real and sincere connections between real human beings.
