Will the Dr. Laura show makeover caused by ratings problems cause the show to appeal more or less to our base instincts? So, Dr. Laura, will the programmers ask you throw more prurient interest into your show? How does that square with your morality quest?
I read this quote from Robert Anton Wilson, in the Illuminatus trilogy recently:
\”Thus in preliterate societies taboos on spoken word are more numerous and more Draconic than at any more complex level of social organisation. With the invention of written speech — hieroglyphic, ideographic, or alphabetical — the taboos are shifted to this medium; there is less concern with what people SAY and more concern with what people WRITE. When a more efficient medium arrives, the taboos on television will decrease.\”
Will the Dr. Laura show makeover caused by ratings problems cause the show to appeal more or less to our base instincts? So, Dr. Laura, will the programmers ask you throw more prurient interest into your show? How does that square with your morality quest?
I read this quote from Robert Anton Wilson, in the Illuminatus trilogy recently:
\”Thus in preliterate societies taboos on spoken word are more numerous and more Draconic than at any more complex level of social organisation. With the invention of written speech — hieroglyphic, ideographic, or alphabetical — the taboos are shifted to this medium; there is less concern with what people SAY and more concern with what people WRITE. When a more efficient medium arrives, the taboos on television will decrease.\”
Robert Anton Wilson wrote in the 1970\’s, well before the web. Did he predict the future?
Certainly anyone viewing television programming of late recognizes that the taboos have loosened quite a bit…
Is Wilson right, and is it, as McLuhan might have guessed, the Internet that has made it so? If so, may we be permitted a moment\’s pause, and perchance, a sly smile, now that Dr. Laura\’s TV show has been sent back to the tailor for ratings alterations? (A pause, perhaps a cancellation – to sleep, perchance to daydream… )
Is their not more than a drop or two of irony in the thought that Dr. Laura\’s ALA/Library/Internet attack was NOT SALACIOUS ENOUGH to compete with Ricki Lake, Geraldo Rivera, et al?
To para-plagarize a phrase: Oh what a tangled Web is weaved when the censor\’s wrath is so received!
References are as follows:
http://www.salonmag.com/tech/feature/1999/05/27/dr_laura/>
http://www.rawilson.com/whistlepiss.html
http://news.excite.com/news/ap/000922/14/dr-laura
http://www.mcluhan.utoronto.ca/ground.html>
Thomas J. Hennen Jr.
http://www.haplr-index.com
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