Television commercials are fundamentally more coercive than radio commercials, so should we all transition back to radio just to avoid those small additional coercive factors? No, of course not, there are benefits to television that are more important than those factors.
You should in fact practice television avoidance. It's an awful format in just about every sense.
You should not begin listening to more radio to compensate. Reading more newspapers and books would be more appropriate. Something movie trailers, television, and radio all have in common is the coercive use of music to manipulate how you feel, particularly when trying to persuade you to buy something or vote for somebody.
Try this simple exercise: instead of watching CNN on television, go to CNN.com and read the stories they have there in text. I assure you, anything important they have to say on television will be written down. And in text form, it will have less flashy graphics to daze you, the emotion in the television personality's voice will be neutralized, there will be far less repetition and typically more details organized in a more coherent manner. And perhaps best of all, the advertisements will be much easier to filter out.
Ok, maybe television wasn't the best example of my point. Let me give a different example. Advertisements on the web are fundamentally more coercive than advertisements in the newspaper, so should we regress back to newspapers? You mentioned adblockers but obviously that's not feasible for television, so for the purposes of the hypothetical, assume that adblocking on the web isn't feasible either. Would you stop using the web if that was the case?
> "Advertisements on the web are fundamentally more coercive than advertisements in the newspaper, so should we regress back to newspapers"
Emphatic yes, should adblocking on the web become infeasible. As I said, "Reading more newspapers and books would be more appropriate."
As it stands currently, it's possible to see fewer advertisements on the web of any sort than advertisements in newspapers. Web adblockers are currently very effective. Should that change, then I will change my reading habits and so should you.
(Of course websites that do not contain advertisements would still be perfectly fine.)
I don't get it. Basically you are saying that advertising has a greater negative utility than the positive utility of any technological advancement which could be used for advertising. How could this possibly be true? Would you prefer a world where reading and writing were never invented if that meant advertising could never be invented?
I don't quite agree, but they're very nearly bad if not worse because audio specifically is exceptionally power and very easy to manipulate people with. Arguably people in the radio industry might be more skilled at using audio for manipulation since they're forced to rely on it, but I think that's discounting the hypnotic effect of television, which controls your gaze as well.
Either way, avoiding television only to listen to the radio more is absurd. Like an alcoholic who's trying to quite booze so he starts chain smoking to cope.
