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3 ALSA F. 79 (1978)
Four Agruments for the Elimination of Television

handle is hein.journals/lstf3 and id is 153 raw text is: FOUR ARGUMENTS FOR THE ELIMINATION OF TELEVISION * Jerry Mander William Morrow & Co., 1978 Among the one hundred most influential persons in history, according to a recent bookI, are Tsai Lun (inventor of paper in the first century A.D. in China), Johannes Gutenberg, Guglielmo Marconi, Alexander Graham Bell, and Louis Daguerre. Tsai Lun and Gutenberg attained the seventh and eighth places on the list, following Muhammad, Isaac Newton, Jesus Christ, Buddha, Confucious and Saint Paul, and preceding Christopher Columbus, Albert Einstein, Louis Pasteur, Galileo, Aristotle, Lenin, Moses and Charles Darwin. Karl Marx, Marconi, Bell, and Daguerre are a little further down the list in forty-first, forty-fourth and sixty-second positions but, even so, are rated more influential than Julius Caesar, Justinian, William the Conqueror, or Thomas Jefferson. Whether the list is taken seriously or merely treated as a source for friendly argument, it suggests the historical importance of inventors of new media. It is curious that the names of the inventors of television-- de Forrest, Farnsworth and others--are absent from the list. Perhaps the author, a person who, given the rankings of Tsai Lun and Gutenberg, values the printed word very highly, subconsciously wishes that television would disappear (Freud, incidentally, is thirty-second on this list). If so, he would undoubtedly enjoy Jerry Mander's Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television. Mander's wishes are quite overt and are stated in the title of his book. Television is perceived to be the central force in society and the main determinant of the quality of life. Economic, political and legal institutions may interact with the fifty-year old force called television and sometimes modify it; but more often, Mander argues, both institutions and individual citizens are negatively affected 1 Michael H. Hart, The 100 (New York: Hart, 1978). Professor M. Ethan Katsh, Legal Studies Program, University of Massachusetts Amherst, Massachusetts.

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