Let me tell you a story. The day after Columbine, I was interviewed for the Tom Brokaw news program. The reporter had been assigned a theory and was seeking sound bites to support it. Wouldn't you say, she asked, that killings like this are influenced by violent movies? No, I said, I wouldn't say that. But what about 'Basketball Diaries'? She asked. Doesn't that have a scene of a boy walking into a school with a machine gun? The obscure 1995 Leonardo Di Caprio movie did indeed have a brief fantasy scene of that nature, I said, but the movie failed at the box office, and it's unlikely the Columbine killers saw it. The reporter looked disappointed, so I offered her my theory. Events like this, I said, if they are influenced by anything, are influenced by news programs like your own. When an unbalanced kid walks into a school and starts shooting, it becomes a major media event. Cable news drops ordinary programming and goes around the clock with it. The story is assigned a logo and a theme song; These two kids were packaged as the Trench Coat Mafia. The message is clear to other disturbed kids around the country: If I shoot up my school, I can be famous. The TV will talk about nothing else but me. Experts will try to figure out what I was thinking. The kids and teachers at school will see they shouldn't have messed with me. I'll go out in a blaze of glory.
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The paradox of our time in history is that we have taller buildings but shorter tempers, wider freeways, but narrower viewpoints. We spend more, but have less; we buy more, but enjoy less. We have bigger houses and smaller families, more conveniences, but less time. We have more degrees but less sense, more knowledge, but less judgment, more experts, yet more problems, more medicine, but less wellness. We drink too much, smoke too much, spend too recklessly, laugh too little, drive too fast, get too angry, stay up too late, get up too tired, read too little, watch TV too much, and pray too seldom. We have multiplied our possessions, but reduced our values. We talk too much, love too seldom, and hate too often. We've learned how to make a living, but not a life. We've added years to life not life to years. We've been all the way to the moon and back, but have trouble crossing the street to meet a new neighbor. We conquered outer space but not inner space. We've done larger things, but not better things. We've cleaned up the air, but polluted the soul. We've conquered the atom, but not our prejudice. We write more, but learn less. We plan more, but accomplish less. We've learned to rush, but not to wait. We build more computers to hold more information, to produce more copies than ever, but we communicate less and less. These are the times of fast foods and slow digestion, big men and small character, steep profits and shallow relationships. These are the days of two incomes but more divorce, fancier houses, but broken homes. These are days of quick trips, disposable diapers, throwaway morality, one night stands, overweight bodies, and pills that do everything from cheer, to quiet, to kill. It is a time when there is much in the showroom window and nothing in the stockroom. A time when technology can bring this letter to you, and a time when you can choose either to share this insight, or to just hit delete.
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When I Grow Up When I grow up, I wonder if people will be more afraid to cry than they are to die. Will I be able to see a rainbow in a small-filled sky. Will there be any trees left, if not how will the planet survive. Will there be a website at www.lifeairsupply.com. When I grow up, if I got bored and had nothing to do and me and my son built a canoe and water that was once blue would be so poluted it would give us the flu. Will a thousand dollars be enough for a shoe. Will I have to be like you, letting money make the decision for everything that I do. When I grow up, will the existance of dolphins and whales just be a story I tell, starting with Once upon a time and ending with where did we fail. Will adults be the hammer and nail. Will schools be next door to jails. Will the truth be illegal for sale. When I grow up, will people be on the news for anything besides killing. Will those drug dealers still be outside of my building. Will they ever learn how to love or are they still afraid of the feeling. Will tv and music videos still raise America's children. Will students go home from school in a bullet proof bus. What if children had no one to trust, that would hurt me so much and i just want to be happy, when i grow up.
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Before I was shot, I always thought that I was more half-there than all-there -- I always suspected that I was watching TV instead of living life. Right when I was being shot and ever since, I knew that I was watching television.
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Having a thirteen-year-old in the family is like having a general-admission ticket to the movies, radio and TV. You get to understand that the glittering new arts of our civilization are directed to the teen-agers, and by their suffrage they stand or fall.
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I don't know what the new Ford will be called. Probably something like the 'Ford Untamed Wilderness Adventure.' In the TV commercials, it will be shown splashing through rivers, charging up rocky mountainsides, swinging on vines, diving off cliffs, racing
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The present era grabs everything that was ever written in order to transform it into films, TV programs; or cartoons. What is essential in a novel is precisely what can only be expressed in a novel, and so every adaptation contains nothing but the non-essential. If a person is still crazy enough to write novels nowadays and wants to protect them, he has to write them in such a way that they cannot be adapted, in other words, in such a way that they cannot be retold.
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On TV people look at your hair and then they look at your skin, and then they look at your clothes, and by the time they're listening to what you're saying, you're off the screen.
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Someday, this beach might wash away... the oceans may dry, the sun could dim, but on that day I'll still be loving you.
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If I were not an atheist, I would believe in a God who would choose to save people on the basis of the totality of their lives and not the pattern of their words. I think he would prefer an honest and righteous atheist to a TV preacher whose every word is God, God, God, and whose every deed is foul, foul, foul.
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Eclecticism is the degree zero of contemporary general culture: one listens to reggae, watches a western, eats McDonald's food for lunch and local cuisine for dinner, wears Paris perfume in Tokyo and retro clothes in Hong Kong; knowledge is a matter for TV games. It is easy to find a public for eclectic works.
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What does good in bed mean to me? When I'm sick and I stay home from school propped up with lots of pillows watching TV and my mom brings me soup -- that's good in bed.
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I believe that organic sex, body against body, skin area against skin area, is becoming no longer possible, simply because if anything is to have any meaning for us it must take place in terms of the values and experiences of the media landscape. What we're getting is a whole new order of sexual fantasies, involving a different order of experiences, like car crashes, like travelling in jet aircraft, the whole overlay of new technologies, architecture, interior design, communications, transport, merchandising. These things are beginning to reach into our lives and change the interior design of our sexual fantasies. We've got to recognize that what one sees through the window of the TV screen is as important as what one sees through a window on the street.
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Jag avskyr TV och föraktar alla som visar sig i den. Politiker, icke-politiker, hemmafruar, läkare som pratar om sjukdommar och mediciner, reklamen. De som styr är rent kriminella. De ser människor som idioter och förser dem med spel och lekar. Alla villa vara med i TV. Det generar mig.
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If you sincerely desire a _truly_ well-rounded education, you must study the extremists, the obscure and 'nutty'. You need the balance! Your poor brain is already being impregnated with middle-of-the-road crap, twenty-four hours a day, _no matter what_. Network TV, newspapers, radio, magazines at the supermarket... even if you never watch, read, listen, or leave your house, even if you are deaf and blind, the _telepathic pressure alone_ of the uncountable normals surrounding you will insure that you are automatically well- grounded in consensus reality.
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So this is the only TV show in America where I am quite confident that you, the audience, will share my excitement when I tell you that coming up in our next segment, we have the best graph ever. Best graph ever.
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Oh Doris Lessing, my dear -- your Anna is wrong about orgasms. They are no proof of love -- any more than that other Anna's fall under the wheels of that Russian train was a proof of love. It's all female shenanigans, cultural mishegoss, conditioning, brainwashing, male mythologizing. What does a woman want? She wants what she has been told she ought to want. Anna Wulf wants orgasm, Anna Karenina, death. Orgasm is no proof of anything. Orgasm is proof of orgasm. Someday every woman will have orgasms -- like every family has color TV -- and we can all get on with the real business of life.
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The preamble to the Constitution states We, the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquillity, provide for the common defence, promote the general welfare... It doesn't say guarantee the general welfare. And it certainly doesn't say give welfare benefits to all the people in the country who aren't doing so well even if the reason they aren't doing so well is because they're sitting on their butts in front of the TV.
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What? They're like any holiday photographs. A bunch of people stood around squinting, and didn't realise they were that fat.
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And it's true we are immune When fact is fiction and TV reality And the today the millions cry We eat and drink when tomorrow they die
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Good wine needs no bush, and perhaps products that people really want need no hard-sell or soft-sell TV push. Why not? Look at pot.
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We went to Central Park in a horse-drawn carriage. We had this huge suite of rooms at The Plaza Hotel, with a TV in each room, and we had radios with earpieces. This was too far out.
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Det är löjligt att påstå att tv-spel påverkar barn. Om tex Pac-Man hade påverkat barn födda 80-talet skulle vi idag ha en massa ungdomar som springer runt i ett mörkt rum och äter piller medan de lyssnar på monoton och enformig musik.
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You know, evil comes in many forms, be it a man-eating cow or Joseph Stalin. But you can't let the package hide the pudding. Evil is just plain bad! You don't cotton to it! You gotta smack it on the nose with the rolled up newspaper of goodness! Bad dog! Bad dog!
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I don't care what Aeryn says. You certainly look dead to me. I don't know your customs for these situations, not that I care. So I'll give you the Hynerian Ceremony of Passage. John Crichton, valued friend. Now wait a minute. Valued friend's a bit of a stretch. John Crichton, unwelcome shipmate. May you have safe transport to the hallowed realm. Actually, not our hallowed realm. That's for Hynerians. Go find your own hallowed realm. With the Ceremony of Passage completed, I declare you officially dead, and claim all your possessions for myself.
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You know, I think that if parents would spend less time worrying about what their kids watch on TV and more time worrying about what's going on in their kids' lives, this world would be a much better place.
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15 years later, it's all the TV stars with the film deals, whether it's the cast of Friends or That '70s Show now with Ashton and other people doing stuff.
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The most puzzling thing about TV is the steady advance of the sponsor across the line that has always separated news from promotion, entertainment from merchandising. The advertiser has assumed the role of originator, and the performer has gradually been eased into the role of peddler.
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There's a good deal in common between the mind's eye and the TV screen, and though the TV set has all too often been the boobtube, it could be, it can be, the box of dreams.
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Earlier people used to switch on TV's after getting bored with their routine work. Now they switch on to routine work after getting bored with TV.
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