Deconstructing Television

“During the long millennia of material scarcity, the customer’s time was what economists call an externality, like air or water. It was an economic asset so readily available that it escaped economic accounting. In the old economy and a holdover in the new, a key rule of commerce was: Waste the customer’s time. This was not an accident or a mistake. It was so close to the heart of marketing strategy that people long took it for granted, like slavery in the precapitalist era. They hardly even noticed how prodigally businesses wasted their time . . . . The supreme time waster, though, is television. Many people still have trouble understanding how egregious a time consumer, how obsolete a business model, how atavistic a technology, and how debauched a cultural force it is. You sit down on a couch in front of a screen, to watch degrading and titillating lowest-common-denominator trivia, scheduled for you in some netherworld between Madison Avenue, the FCC, and Hollywood, offering a sordid stream of sleazy banalities, gun grunge, bedroom mayhem, and offal innuendoes, some preening as ‘news’ and some leering as entertainment, for as much as seven hours a day, on average, consuming perhaps two thirds of your disposable time, year after year, all in order to grab your eyeballs for a few minutes of artfully crafted advertising images that you don’t want to see, of products that you will never buy. Is it a breast? Is it a thigh? No, it is a fender! A frosted Beemer? No, a beer bottle. TV ads that are as irrelevant to you, 90 percent of the time, as the worst telemarketing spiel. Justifying this scheme is the ‘free public service’ that television supposedly offers, namely the ‘serious’ portions of the ‘news’ (chiefly government propaganda) and Saturday morning children’s programming (more propaganda)” (George Gilder, Telecosm, pp. 245, 247).