Jerry Mander: I don't think that the '60's generation has disappeared. You know, they're still visible. They look a little different. I mean there are a lot of examples of those who've gone on to become stock brokers and so on. But I think, for the most part, people who were active then still remain involved now. That's my impression. I don't go with the idea that they all disappeared into their corporate offices. I don't see that among the people that I knew then. They're still active in some way. I am.

JM: Well, I wasn't a rebel when I got into advertising. I became a rebel through advertising. It was by being in advertising and realizing what advertising does in the system. I mean I can't explain why I, unblike other advertising men, saw that as a big problem. But I became involved using those techniques to help, you know, environmental groups and anti-war groups and civil rights groups, using advertising as a technique to help them. Advertising and also public relations work. So using that medium is what awoke me in many ways to the power of the medium and the power to use it in the reverse, against the system as well. Although the main problem is that those who are in power have so much more power and more money than those who are trying to resist it. And so we're always up against a heavy ratio, and the fact the opposite side has more power than we do.

JM: The Public Media Center is a non-profit advertising agency in San Fransico. It has 16 employees, almost all of whom are former advertising people who have left the commercial world to engage in service to organizations working in the public interest in our view. We're the only one of its kind in the world as far as we know. We work only for other non-profits such as Friends of the Earth, Planned Parenthood, the Sierra Club, Rainforest Action, anti-Contra funding, anti-U.S. investment in South Africa, Greenpeace - a lot of environmental organizations. Well, that's a summary.

JM: I'm what's called a Senior Fellow. I was the founder of it and I am given a special relationship in the place in that I make my own tasks. Just because I'm the only one over 50, I get to do what I want pretty much. The Executive Director is a young Chinese man who was born in China actually, and still has quite a lot of Chinese tradition in him, and he says he's honoring his elders when he has me around. [laughs]

JM: Well, one of the points of the book is that you really can't summarize complex information. And that television is a medium of summary or reductionism - it reduces everything to slogans. And that's one criticism of it, that it requires everything to be packaged and reduced and announced in a slogan-type form.

But let me say this: the book is not really four arguments, it's really hundreds of arguments broken down into four categories. And the categories have to do with a variety of effects that are not normally discussed. Most criticisms of television have to do with the program content. People say if there is less violence on television or less sexism on television, or less this or less that, television would be better. If there were more programs about this or more programs about that, then we'd have "good television".

My own feeling is that that is true - that it's very important to improve the program content - but that television has effects, very important effects, aside from the content, and they may be more important. They organize society in a certain way. They give power to a very small number of people to speak into the brains of everyone else in the system night after night after night with images that make people turn out in a certain kind of way. It affects the psychology of people who watch. It increases the passivity of people who watch. It changes family relationships. It changes understandings of nature. It flattens perception so that information, which you need a fair amount of complexity to understand it as you would get from reading, this information is flattened down to a very reduced form on television. And the medium has inherent qualities which cause it to be that way.

And the book is really about television considered from a holistic point of view, from a biological point of view - perceptual, environmental, political, social, experiential, as well as the concrete problems of whether a program is silly or not. But other people deal with that very well. My job was to talk about television from many of these other dimensions which are not usually discussed.

JM: No, nothing has changed. I think, if anything I see television as more negative now than I did before. It's gained power in that time. It's done that not so much here in Japan or in the United States. The power that it has gained is that it applies itself all over the world in the same way. Satellite communications, for example, which came along and were celebrated as something which was going to democratize information elsewhere in the world, has turned out to homogenize knowledge and experience and culture.

Television is being used as an instrument to destroy indigenous culture all over the world. Places in Indonesia and South America and the Arctic Circle and the jungles of South America where there aren't even any roads, there are people sitting around in front of their grass houses or next to their dog teams in the ice and they're watching Dallas! And they're turning into Americans. They're being hit with a thousand commercials. Their culture is not surviving that.

Television is really an instrument of cloning in the world. It's taking variety, diverse mentalities and diverse cultures and homogenizing them into the American, or at least the Western industrialized nations' format. So it's very dangerous. It's Orwellian in its implications when used in underdeveloped areas of the world. And its power has been magnified as a result. Almost 70% of the world now has television and, they are being made over into consumers...Their indigenous cultures are being sacrificed. They're being made into workers that will fit into the system and, hopefully, someday consumers. The World Bank is in there giving them the money to make it all work. The idea is to make people compatible with the dominant economic system. And that's what's taking place.

JM: Well, there are certain contexts where television has had a progressive result. Sometimes you take a tradition which is a negative tradition and you show another way of being and people learn the other way of being and they make some changes. Or you show a problem to another group of people and changes result from that. The civil rights movement in the United States was definitely helped by television. I could think of some other things - the anti-war movement was helped. Although it's got to be remembered that television basically caused the Vietnam War in many ways. It enabled President Johnson and the Pentagon to inform the public that something was going on which was not going on and they used it with great effect at the beginning. But then when television got tired of that war they turned against it and it got us back out of the war. So, television has had certain progressive results. I think there are certain situations among oprressed people where television's entry with images of another part of the world can be helpful.

Curiously even though my case is for the elimination of television, I don't make a completely negative case for television. There are plenty of things positive about television. The reason I speak for the elimination of it is that on balance when you consider all its effects, it's so much more negative than positive and it doesn't contribute anything that other media could not contribute.

Simultaneity is provided by radio. It's also a less expensive, easier medium for people to use, easier for people to receive. If something is happening in Borneo that you must know right now, radio is much more likely to get it than television. Print media is much better for complexity and detail and depth and historical context. And movies are better for a visual medium and have far more impact. So, other media do what television does except better. The only thing that television does that other media do not do is that it goes into the homes of an entire nation night after night after night . It puts images into everyone's heads at the same time and it's controlled by a very small number of people. So it's an improvement for the controllers of the medium. It's not an improvement in information flow. So, it can do good things but it's unlikely to do good things and on balance it's going to do more harm than good.

JM: Only in my case is it ideological. Among all the other people it's practical because most of the clients we deal with don't have the resources. And it's not a rule. In other words, we do do some television. I don't do it, but other people in the organization do it. And for the most part the reason we don't do it is very, very practical. We are usually dealing with very small budget advertisers who have collected a bunch of money and have one shot to make their story. And we speak of always going for the 'hole in one', you know, the golf expression. And if you're going to be on television you need an enormous amount of money for production as well as the constant repetition television requires.

And also the kind of messages you can use in advertising on television are very, very reduced. You know, thirty seconds. What can you say, for example, about the history of the United States' involvement in South Africa in that time. I mean, how can you really explain that? All you could say is, "U.S. out of South Africa!" That is basically all you could say. Or you could show them images of violence. But you do something in such a reduced form that you don't gain real understanding. And what most of our clients want is commitment and real engagement in the issue. And therefore it takes a lot more detail and explanation. Most of them have not been in the news. On some of these environmental battles, for example, often they're about things the public knows nothing about at all. So you have to explain the whole issue. And you have to create arguments that counter the arguments of the people that want to "develop" some forest or something. You have to explain why that's bad economically, environmentally, socially, and so on. You can't do it in that reduced format. And anyway you don't have the money to repeat your message a thousand times which you'd have to to reach the public.