| Introduction | |
I | The Belly of the Beast | 13 |
| Adman Manque | |
| Engulfed by the Sixties | |
| The Replacement of Experience | |
| The Unification of Experience | |
II | War to Control the Unity Machine | 29 |
| Advancing from the Sixties to the Fifties | |
| Style Supersedes Content | |
| Television at Black Mesa | |
| The Illusion of Neutral Technology | |
| Before the Arguments: A Comment on Style | |
Argument 1 | The Mediation of Experience | |
III | The Walling of Awareness | 53 |
| Mediated Environments | |
| Sensory-Deprivation Environments | |
| Rooms inside Rooms | |
IV | Expropriation of Knowledge | 69 |
| Direction Education | |
| Motel Education | |
V | Adrift in Mental Space | 86 |
| Science Fiction and Arbitrary Reality | |
| Eight Ideal Conditions for the Flowering of Autocracy | |
| Popular Philosophy and Arbitrary Reality | |
| Schizophrenia and the Influencing Machine | |
Argument 2 | The Colonization of Experience | |
VI | Advertising: The Standard-Gauge Railway | 115 |
| The Creation of "Value" | |
| Redeveloping the Human Being | |
| Commodity People | |
| Breaking the Skin Barrier | |
| The Inherent Need to Create Need | |
| Buying Ourselves Back | |
| The Delivery System's Delivery System | |
VII | The Centralization of Control | 134 |
| Economic Growth and Patriotic Consumption | |
| The Trickle-Down Theory | |
| Beneficiaries of the Advertising Fantasy | |
| The Effect on Individuals | |
| Flaws in the Fantasy | |
| The Depression Never Ended | |
| Domination of the Influencing Machine | |
Argument 3 | Effects of Television on the Human Being | |
VIII | Anecdotal Reports: Sick, Crazy, Mesmerized | 157 |
| Invisible Phenomenon | |
| Dimming Out the Human | |
| Artificial Touch and Hyperactivity | |
| Television Is Sensory Deprivation | |
IX | The Ingestion of Artificial Light | 170 |
| Health and Light | |
| Outdoors to Indoors | |
| Seeking the Light | |
| Serious Research | |
X | How Television Dims the Mind | 192 |
| Hypnosis | |
| Television Bypasses Consciousness | |
| Television Is Sleep Teaching | |
| Television Is Not Relaxing | |
XI | How We Turn into Our Images | 216 |
| Humans Are Image Factories | |
| The Concrete Power of Images | |
| Metaphysics to Physics | |
| Image Emulation: Are We All Taped Replays? | |
| Imitating Media | |
XII | The Replacement of Human Images by Television | 240 |
| Suppression of Imagination | |
| The Inherent Believability of All Images | |
| All Television Is Real | |
| Scientific Evidence | |
| The Irresistibility of Images | |
Argument 4 | The Inherent Biases of Television | |
XIII | Information Loss | 263 |
| Bias against the Excluded | |
| Fuzzy Images: The Bias against Subtlety | |
| The Bias away from the Sensory | |
XIV | Images Disconnected from Source | 283 |
| The Elimination of "Aura" | |
| The Bias toward Death | |
| Separation from Time and Place | |
| Condensation of Time: The Bias against Accuracy | |
XV | Artificial Unusualness | 299 |
| Instinct to the Extraordinary | |
| The Bias toward Technique as Replacement of Content | |
| In Favor of "Alienated" Viewing | |
| The Bias to Highlighted Content: Toward the Peaks, Away from the Troughs | |
XVI | The Pieces That Fall through the Filter | 323 |
| Thirty-three Miscellaneous Inherent Biases | |
| Postscript: Impossible Thoughts | |
XVII | Television Taboo | 347 |
| Acknowledgments | 359 |
| Bibliography | 363 |