Test Card F: Television, Mythinformation and Social Control

By Anonymous

Test Card F is a graphic demolition derby through the culture of a factory farmed and show-shocked society, a society whose sell-by date has long since expired. Using savage image/text cut and paste, this controversial book explodes all previous media theories and riots through the Global Village, looting the ideological supermarkets of all its products: anti-fascism, Malcolm X, James Bulger, the Gulf War, Satanic Abuse, Somalia, and Eastern Europe.
Test Card F joyrides in front of the surveillance cameras, amidst the rubble of a junkyard nation, and heaves television's burnt-out carcass through the plate glass shop window of "independent" video and "community access" broadcasting. It transcends postmodern and Situationist analysis in its positive refusal of the concept of Truth.
Test Card F has no named authors; it originates in the pirate transmissions of the unruly squatters of cyberspace when scheduled programming closes down for the night.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1873176910
• ISBN13: 9781873176917
• Release Date: July 2001
• Publisher: AK Press
• Length: 80 Pages
• Weight: 0.30 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 5.8" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

Smashes the Idiot Box

Test Card F systematically dismantles the myth-machine of Television, and in the process brings down the culture of distraction surrounding Television. But Test Card F isn't some incoherent rant on the evils of modern society - this is in-depth, thought provoking material, well-researched, articulate, and reasonable. This book has more in common with Neil Postman and Marshall McLuhan than the Luddittes. Test Card F addresses the issue of The Society of the Spectacle - what happens when we all become viewers, spectators in our lives? Today's television viewers are more informed than ever in mankind's history, but are we more active? What is the role of commercials in the television mindscape? Who are these people on the box we see every day? Just who's at the controls here?Test Card F is a eye-opening, provocative piece of writing, presented with the kind of humorously cynical optimism missing from much of today's social criticism. It's the kind of book that will make you stop watching and start doing.