Creativity Quote by Iris DeMent

DeMent’s line lands like a porch-front scolding with a hymnbook backbone: not anti-technology, anti-passivity. “Turn off the TV” isn’t nostalgia for some purer past; it’s a demand to break a trance. The television stands in for the whole frictionless feed of packaged certainty, where the viewer’s role is to sit still, feel briefly informed, and remain conveniently persuadable. The imperative voice matters. She’s not offering media tips; she’s prescribing a change in posture from consumer to citizen.

The phrase “digging around” is the tell. It’s earthy, manual, unglamorous. Information isn’t a product you receive; it’s something you unearth, sift, cross-check, and sometimes get dirt under your nails for. That verbs-over-nouns choice aligns with DeMent’s broader artistic persona: plainspoken, suspicious of polish, emotionally direct. She frames knowledge as labor, not entertainment.

“Not from a corporation trying to make money” sharpens the target: incentives. She’s pointing at the quiet deal embedded in commercial media - your attention is the commodity, and your worldview is shaped in ways that keep you buying, watching, and not rocking the boat. The subtext isn’t that all corporate reporting is false; it’s that even truth, when filtered through profit, arrives trimmed to what sells.

Contextually, it reads as a populist media critique that predates today’s algorithmic chaos but anticipates it: when distribution is optimized for revenue, “being informed” can become another shopping experience. DeMent’s intent is a kind of cultural self-defense: reclaim agency by making curiosity harder, slower, and more your own.