I was expecting a lot more damning points about TV but this legitimately reads like the man is a luddite rather than someone thinking about maybe the value of deep thinking. His cited evils on TV: "You will see a procession of game shows, formula comedies about totally unbelievable families, blood and thunder, mayhem, violence, sadism, murder, western bad men, western good men, private eyes, gangsters, more violence, and cartoons." Yet in the paragraph above he gives the newspaper as well as the theater a pass, when you can see many of these tropes outlined in this quote from just Shakespeare.
Old Old media also was a "vast wasteland" of sponsored radio programs, poorly written syndicated stories meant to engage readers to see other advertisements in newspapers (literally the social media model), and billboards adorning theaters and most aspects of public life, even more than today. I was hoping he would get into something about devoting ones efforts towards improvements, personal or otherwise, rather than endless consumption that leaves you in the same place as beforehand, but that wasn't really his mark and probably not even in his capitalist head given the opining about 'tyrannical communism'.
The Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television (1978) offers a more succinct critique [1][2]. There is a big anti-TV rabbit hole you can go down from Marshal McLuhan to David Foster Wallace essays. Given that images are so alluring I place the subject in the asceticism category more than the Luddite/curmudgeon space.
Old Old media also was a "vast wasteland" of sponsored radio programs, poorly written syndicated stories meant to engage readers to see other advertisements in newspapers (literally the social media model), and billboards adorning theaters and most aspects of public life, even more than today. I was hoping he would get into something about devoting ones efforts towards improvements, personal or otherwise, rather than endless consumption that leaves you in the same place as beforehand, but that wasn't really his mark and probably not even in his capitalist head given the opining about 'tyrannical communism'.