Watching Big Brother

The Show-and-Tell Machine: How Television Works and Works You Over By Rose K. Goldsen Dial Press, 427 pp., $10 “Television now holds a virtual monopoly on whatever artistic and symbolic forms have a chance to be widely shared throughout the society.” writes Rose K. Goldsen. “All the images, all the tales and ballads and chants and songs and stories that come through the screen, show-and-tell aspects of social reality that then become familiar to all. . . . It is in this way that television comes to dominate social thought; less because its journalistic efforts provide a data bank of what we take to be factual truths about government and politics and civic life, and more because its total efforts monopolize the socially shared lines of sight for surveying social reality and making things familiar.”

The thesis is McLuhanesque, but, unlike the great guru of the global village, Miss Goldsen deals in empirical rather than abstract evidence in her treatment of the boob-tube culture. Moreover, she sets herself apart from the great mass of television critics by cutting beneath the ideological skin to make her case against the medium’s perverse monopoly of modern society’s “artistic and symbolic forms.”

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Victor Gold

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The Show-and-Tell Machine: How Television Works and Works You Over By Rose K. Goldsen Dial Press, 427 pp., $10 “Television now holds a virtual monopoly on whatever artistic and symbolic forms have a chance to be widely shared throughout the society.” writes Rose K. Goldsen. “All the images, all the tales and ballads and chants and songs and stories that come through the screen, show-and-tell aspects of social reality that then become familiar to all. . . . It is in this way that television comes to dominate social thought; less because its journalistic efforts provide a data bank of what we take to be factual truths about government and politics and civic life, and more because its total efforts monopolize the socially shared lines of sight for surveying social reality and making things familiar.”

The thesis is McLuhanesque, but, unlike the great guru of the global village, Miss Goldsen deals in empirical rather than abstract evidence in her treatment of the boob-tube culture. Moreover, she sets herself apart from the great mass of television critics by cutting beneath the ideological skin to make her case against the medium’s perverse monopoly of modern society’s “artistic and symbolic forms.”