Jerry Mander Quotes

#1. The worst thing one can do for a hyperactive child is to put him or her in front of a television set. Television activates the child at the same time that it cuts the child (or adult) off from real sensory stimulation and the opportunity for resolution.

Jerry Mander

#2. [T]he problem was too much information. The population was being inundated with conflicting versions of increasingly complex events. People were giving up on understanding anything. The glut of information was dulling awareness, not aiding it. Overload. It encouraged passivity, not involvement.

Jerry Mander

#3. Technological evolution is leading to something new: a worldwide, interlocked, monolithic, technical-political web of unprecedented negative proportions

Jerry Mander

#4. The moment people move off land which has directly supported them, the necessities of life are removed from individual control. The things people could formerly produce for their survival must now be paid for.

Jerry Mander

#5. To speak of television as 'neutral' and therefore subject to change is as absurd as speaking of the reform of a technology such as guns.

Jerry Mander

#6. Living within artificial, reconstructed, arbitrary environments that are strictly the products of human conception, we have no way to be sure that we know what is true and what is not. We have lost context and perspective. What we know is what other humans tell us.

Jerry Mander

#7. The glut of information was dulling awareness, not aiding it.

Jerry Mander

#8. Mankind's self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order.

Jerry Mander

#9. Advertising expresses a power relationship . . . One person, the advertiser, invades; millions absorb. And to what end? So that people will buy something! A deep, profound and disturbing act by the few against the many for a trivial purpose.

Jerry Mander