The Literature Network - Everybody hates television: for critics on the Left and the Right, television is responsible for everything from creating apathetic citizens to assaulting family life. Catharine Lumby looks at how and why we project our anxietites onto the small screen.

Everybody hates television: for critics on the Left and the Right, television is responsible for everything from creating apathetic citizens to assaulting family life. Catharine Lumby looks at how and why we project our anxietites onto the small screen.

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From: Arena Magazine
Date: 20060401
Author:Lumby, Catharine

If Gustave Flaubert were alive today, I'm betting a new entry in his Dictionary of Received Ideas would read: TV: A device invented in the earlier part of the twentieth century that precipitated the end of civilisation. After the advent of TV, couples no longer communicated, teenagers were corrupted by images of sex and violence, and small children lost all interest in natural play.

Flaubert's Dictionary, which was titled in French Le Dictionnaire des Id,es ReOues, satirised the cliches and platitudes that passed for considered opinion among the French middle class of late ...

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Everybody hates television: for critics on the Left and the Right, television is responsible for everything from creating apathetic citizens to assaulting family life. Catharine Lumby looks at how and why we project our anxietites onto the small screen.

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