Cinema, radio, television, magazines are a school of inattention: people look without seeing, listen in without hearing.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
For all the sophistication of a world in which most of our waking hours are spent consuming or interacting with media, we have scarcely advanced in our understanding of what attention means.
Seeing yourself in print is such an amazing concept: you can get so much attention without having to actually show up somewhere... You don't have to dress up, for instance, and you can't hear them boo you right away.
Especially in the day and age now with social media and cameraphones and things like that, you always have to act like you're being watched.
TV viewing is normally a passive, mindless occupation.
I hate this idea in the Cinematheque that you must watch silent movies with no music, like it's a piece of art. It's not true.
There are many, many nouns for the act of looking - a glance, a glimpse, a peep - but there's no noun for the act of listening. In general, we don't think primarily about sound. So I have a different perspective on the world; I can construct soundscapes that have an effect on people, but they don't know why. It's a sort of subterfuge.
I watch movies, and if I get the chance to watch television, I'm usually prone to watching something completely mindless and mundane that I don't have to follow so closely.
I did television for a very long time, but if you're on television, words don't count. What the eye sees beats the words. If you switch sides, from radio to television, you learn that the wordiness that you learn on the radio is useless or not nearly as powerful, and you have to learn to trust that the eye will just beat the ear.
I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.
If you are interested in ideas, radio is way more pure than television. You're not distracted by somebody's nose or hair or posture. You can really see how someone thinks and penetrate to the essence of who that person is.