Above: Gunther Anders accepts the Adorno prize via TV-link (image from Harold Marcuse’s website)

TL;DR Version:
In 1956, having observed television’s initial popularity explosion, Gunther Anders wrote about the massive social and perceptual transformation wrought by this new form of mass media in an essay with the most ridiculous title imaginable.

THE WORLD AS PHANTOM AND AS MATRIX
by Gunther Anders

I

Modern mass consumption is a sum of solo performances; each consumer, an unpaid homeworker employed in the production of the mass man.

In the days before the cultural faucets of radio and television had become standard equipment in each home, the Smiths and Millers used to throng the motion picture theaters where they collectively consumed the stereotyped mass products manufactured for them. One might be tempted to regard it as peculiarly appropriate that the mass product should be thus consumed by a compact mass. Such a view, however, would be mistaken. Nothing contradicts the essential purpose of mass production more completely than a situation in which a single specimen of a commodity is simultaneously enjoyed by several, let alone by numerous, consumers. Whether this consumption is a “genuine communal experience or merely the sum of many individual experiences, is a matter of indifference to the mass producer. What he needs is not the compact mass as such, but a mass broken up or atomized into the largest possible number of customers; he does not want all of his customers to consume one and the same product, he wants all of his customers to buy identical products on the basis of an identical demand which has also to be produced.