We turn on the TV and leave it on, allowing someone else to guide us, shape us, and destroy us.

But although I had watched television in the same way many times in my life before, I found I could no longer watch it and not think. “Give yourself to the Screen,” they had taught us. It was as basic as “Don’t ask; relax.” But I could no longer give myself to it. I no longer wanted to keep my mind silent, or use it as a vehicle for disconnected pleasure; I wanted to read, and think, and talk.

In modern society most of us don't want to be in touch with ourselves; we want to be in touch with other things like religion, sports, politics, a book - we want to forget ourselves. Anytime we have leisure, we want to invite something else to enter us, opening ourselves to the television and telling the television to come and colonize us.

Another subtle but worrisome effect television has on its viewers is its tendency to promote passivity and a lack of creativity. Watching television requires little mental activity on the viewer’s part. You simply sit and let the images flow by. Some research suggests that this sort of nonparticipatory viewing fosters a short attention span, making it hard for children to apply themselves in school.

there's a reason regular people don't appear on TV: we're boring.

Busy people tend to forgo the one activity - TV watching _ that is most lethal to community involvement

The world’s now placid, featureless, and culturally dead: nothing really new has been created since the Overlords came. The reason’s obvious. There’s nothing left to struggle for, and there are too many distractions and entertainments. Do you realize that every day something like five hundred hours of radio and TV pour out over the various channels? If you went without sleep and did nothing else, you could follow less than a twentieth of the entertainment that’s available at the turn of a switch! No wonder that people are becoming passive sponges — absorbing but never creating. Did you know that the average viewing time per person is now three hours a day? Soon people won’t be living their own lives any more. It will be a full-time job keeping up with the various family serials on TV!

We think basically you watch television to turn your brain off, and you work on your computer when you want to turn your brain on.

TV accustoms people to not expecting much.

Be very careful of what you allow to infiltrate your consciousness and subconsciousness. When you watch too much television, you'll start to feel inferior from all the commercials hard selling the idea that you're not complete unless you buy their product [...] The ad agencies appeal to your fear of not being wanted or loved. It's the same with the local news. They get you to stay tuned with a constant stream of fear tactics [...] It's as if our culture is addicted to fear and the flat screen is our drug dealer. Don't allow that crap into your head!

We rarely talk about television, only about what’s on television

What bothers me about television is that it takes our minds off our minds.

The average American watches more than four hours of TV each day. In a 65-year life, that person will have spent nine years glued to the tube. Why? Simple. Life sucks. Life needs an escape. Life is no good.
Show me someone who spends hours online playing Mafia Wars or Farmville, and I'll show you someone who probably isn't very successful. When life sucks, escapes are sought. I don't need television because I invested my time into a real life worth living, not a fictitious escape that airs every Tuesday night at 8 p.m.
Again, majority thinking yields mediocrity, and for that majority, time is an asset that is undervalued and mindlessly squandered.

We are currently wealthy, fat, comfortable and complacent. We have currently a built-in allergy to unpleasant or disturbing information. Our mass media reflect this. But unless we get up off our fat surpluses and recognize that television in the main is being used to distract, delude, amuse and insulate us, then television and those who finance it, those who look at it and those who work at it, may see a totally different picture too late.