Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television
 Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television argues that the technology of television is not a neutral or benign instrument or tool. The author argues that in varied technologies and institutions such as militaries, automobiles, nuclear power plants, mass production, and advertising, the basic form of the institution and the technology determines its interaction with the world, the way it will be used, the kind of people who use it, and to what ends. The author argues that far from being "neutral," television predetermines who shall use it, how they will use it, what effects it will have on individual lives, and, if it continues to be widely used, what sorts of political forms will inevitably emerge. The four arguments are: # While television may seem useful, interesting, and worthwhile, at the same time it further boxes people into a physical and mental condition appropriate for the emergence of autocratic control. # It is inevitable that the present powers-that-be (or controllers) use and expand using television so that no other controllers are permitted. # Television affects individual human bodies and minds in a manner which fit the purposes of the people who control the medium. # Television has no democratic potential. The technology itself places absolute limits on what may pass through it. The medium, in effect, chooses its own content from a very narrow field of possibilities. The effect is to drastically confine all human understanding within a rigid channel. What binds the four arguments together is that they deal with aspects of television that are not reformable. It is perhaps then paradoxical that attempts to define the arguments of the book inevitably fall into Mander's dilemma: even current forms of technology such as the internet and Wikipedia itself reduce complex information and its perception to slogans and inconsequential 'bits' (in the computer or informatic sense).