1998

Mizrach Steve

Do Electronic Mass Media Have Negative Effects On Indigenous People?

http://www.fiu.edu/~mizrachs/media-effects-indians.html

The author and cultural critic Jerry Mander, in his book, In the Absence of the Sacred: the Failure of Technology and the Survival of the Indian Nations, documents how, from his point of view, indigenous peoples in the U.S. and elsewhere are suffering under "attack" from technology and the world "technoculture." Mander saves his strongest criticism for television, but this is not surprising, as his previous book, Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television, pronounced the "idiot box" to be a scourge on Western civilization. As he sees it, TV has even worse impacts on indigenous people, causing them to lose their traditional cultural practices, making them adopt a Western lifestyle of conspicuous consumption, and severing their connection with nature and the sacred. (Mander, 1991.)