Electronic Drugs

[RoboCop]

I found this very interesting. Take a look.

Television was the first of a growing group of high-technology drugs that deliver the user into an alternative reality by acting directly on the user's sensorium, without chemials being introduced into the nervous system. No epedimic or addictive craze or religious hysteria has ever moved faster or made as many converts in so short a time. The nearest analogy to the addictive power of television and the transformation of values that is wrought in the life of the heavy user is probably heroin. The illusion of knowing and of control that heroin engenders is analogous to the unconscious assumption of the television consumer that what is seen is "real" somewhere in the world.
Not unlike drugs or alcohol the television experience allows the participant to blot out the real world and into a pleasurable and passive mental state. The worries and anxiieties of reality are as effectively deferred by becoming absorbed in a televion program as by going on a "trip" induced by drugs. Television viewrs similar to people with alcoholism over estimate the control over their television watching. Television is an addictive and all-persuasive drug that delivers an experience whose message is whatever those who deal the drug wish it to be. Could anything provide more fertile ground for fostering fascism and totalitarianism than this? Television is by nature the dominator drug par excellence. Control of content, uniformity of content, repeatability of content make an inevitably a tool of coersion, brainwashing, and manipulation.
Television did its job and created a postwar American culture of the "Ken&Barbie" variety. The children of Ken&Barbie briefly broke out of the television intoxication in the mid-sixties through the use of hallucinogens. "Oops" responded the dominators, they quickly made hallucinogens illegal and halted all research. A double dose of TV therapy plus cocaine was ordered up for the errant hippies and they where quickly cured and turned into consumption-oriented yuppies.