Louis Mazza's List: Reading Media

• We like it. It's easy, and entertaining. It makes few demands of us as audience. It constantly confirms for us that we are OK, and that if anything is wrong, then it's because of someone else, somewhere else. What's more, it tells us that whatever is wrong, we can solve it by buying something to stop it happening to us, here. TV confirms us to ourselves. It tells us we survived
• but they are far away, and we can soothe any conscience we might have about their plight by sending money to a post office box
• It gives us the excuse to disregard the needy in our own midst, whose quiet requests for spare change we can ignore as if they were on another channel. It tells us we succeeded.
• It shows us the kinds of people we should aspire to become, with lots of detail about how these people are dressed, what kinds of products they use, what cars they drive, how they talk, where they go for entertainment, what values they have, and what things, beliefs or people they currently despise
• It tells us not to worry
• We can watch ten minutes of a show and predict almost exactly how it will end, and yet we continue to devote hundreds of the remaining hours of our short lives to watching these endings
• Pleasure has a lot to do with why we indulge ourselves so much in TV
• We like things that are familiar and predictable, things that stroke rather than challenge our belief systems

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