It seems to Dr. Boli that, in our current legal and intellectual climate, there is a way forward for the media-sensitive.
First, we must recognize that there is such a thing as media sensitivity. Some people cannot concentrate on a task if there is a television flashing moving images or a loudspeaker droning drivel; no matter how much they dislike the programming, they find their attention monopolized by the thing that is, after all, specifically designed to attract their attention. Such people may be described as media-sensitive: they have a reaction to media in the same way that people sensitive to urishiol have a reaction to poison ivy. This media sensitivity is a disability: it prevents them from functioning normally in situations where their attention is required to be elsewhere. If, for example, you find it impossible to fill out a form in your doctor’s waiting room because a television is begging you to watch an exciting baking contest, then you suffer from media sensitivity that prevents you from succeeding with tasks that are straightforward for the apparently normal people around you who can ignore the television in the room.
Once we have forced the recognition that media sensitivity is a disability, then our next step is simply to demand the enforcement of the laws that already protect people with disabilities. The media-sensitive must be granted reasonable accommodation. And, as we have found in many other contexts, making the world more accessible to people with disabilities has the unintended side effect of making it more accessible to everyone else as well.
Dr. Boli does not pretend that the struggle will be easy. He predicts that the average office with public-facing television screens would resist pushing the off button much more vigorously than it would resist spending a hundred thousand dollars for a wheelchair ramp. But victories are won by the patient and persistent; and, in the words of an old Danish proverb, “No one ever yet won the day by snoring.” The time to begin the struggle is now.