Brock takes a stand against a critique 
of contemporary culture which favours 
the dulling of people's minds via the media. 
According to him, the expansion of the media 
rather leads to a sensitization of the population, 
the primacy of the word is overcome by media aethetics 
since the latter gives priority to a reflecting in pictures...
The decisive question is above all to what extent 
people learn to handle these new "realities" 
respectively these new cultural technologies.
        Bazon Brock

        PROPOSITIONS ON THE DARK AGE OF TELEVISIONS

        THE CULTURE CRITIC AS BACKALLEY ABORTIONIST

        Certain determinating terms of criticism seem to be recurring in public discussion and in expert circles, their main justification seeming to be the frequency with which they are being used. Among those terms are: the medium is the message; total electronic simulation; television - illiteracy; and recently, culture critics have developed these catchwords into an all-embracing systematic structure termed "we amuse ourselves to death".

        It is a remarkable fact, at least in the Federal Republic of Germany, that culture critique of this kind is being spread by the very social groups that, at the same time, maintain that only a decisive expansion of the media market can safeguard the free and uninhibited development of citizens. Is there any other reply to his ambiguity than the statement that literates do complain about television but spend most of their evenings in front of their sets?

        FIRST PROPOSITION

        Never before has there been a period in history when the sensibilization of wide groups of the population for problems of technological evolution, destruction of the environment, social conflicts, armament race, machine-ruled medicine was greater than today. McLuhan himself, who had developed the formula of "the medium is the message", has illustrated the connection between sensibilization of the population and the expansion of the media in many examples (e. g. opposition against the war in Vietnam). By no means the said illiteracy of tv-consumers has made them commit greater follies than did the praised literacy of classically educated Central Europeans at the beginning of our century. The things educated elites of Western Europe said about God and the world at the beginning and during World War I can easiliy be made out as inexplicable nonsense even by the average tv-consumer of our days. The reproach of tv-illiterarcy obviously disregards the fact that cultural techniques in the electronic age are and have to be different to those of the age of book culture. Those new cultural techniques have been caused by the changed forms of perception and acquisition.

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