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1936 Perspective on Television

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the talkies dept.

An Anonymous Coward writes "The New Yorker is running an article from their archives from 1936. In it, E.B.White (author of Charlotte's Web) discusses a demonstration he attended of the current state of television, which didn't impress him at all."

13 of 223 comments (clear)

  1. what television is about... by jnana · · Score: 3, Insightful
    What I think people don't realize (enough) is that there is no such thing as television as a (free) service -- there is just networks doing whatever they can to get more advertising dollars. It is incidental to the pursuit of more advertising $ that a good show comes out every now and then. They just want your attention, which is to say that the advertisers want your money.

    Television in the united states is akin to a company providing a free email service so that they can spam you relentlessly and regularly. You think it's about the email service or the television program, but the spam and the commercials are what it's all about!

  2. Old news... by Gandalf04 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    "Mr. Sarnoff next gave a little talk, in which he cheerfully, and with enormous self-effacement, admitted that the real problem of television was not its mechanical vagaries but finding programs for it when it finally gets ironed out."

    It seems to me that this is the very same problem facing us today with HDTV. History has shown us that this hurdle can be overcome (obviously). My only question is, why is it taking so long these days?

    With the increase of the pace of technological change, why is the transition from TV to HDTV taking as long as the transition from radio to TV?

    1. Re:Old news... by Afrosheen · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Don't put the cart before the horse.

      If things keep going the way they are now, you'll only get crap like Dark Angel and Everybody Loves Raymond in higher definition. Who gives a shit? Get good programming first that drives the demand for HDTV.

      While the radio to tv transition was probably much more dramatic, it was also a paradigm shift. You went from only hearing to hearing and seeing. Kinda like the difference between reading the book and watching the movie (and you know which is better right?). The change between TV and HDTV will be so miniscule to the average joe it'll just perpetuate the public and broadcaster's attitude of 'why do we need this?'. Admittedly, watching dvd's on a widescreen hdtv is sweet, and has tons of decent content available, but broadcast tv always has and always will suck ass. It's up to cable or directv to rescue us.

  3. The web didn't impress me by Elbereth · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The web didn't impress me much when I saw a demonstration of it in a computer lab. My friend said, "Hey, Matt, check this out! You can throw a snowball at these scientists when you click on this link!"

    I'm waiting for special internet keyboards that can send a shock to people to say something stupid. Now that would be cool.

  4. A staggering lack of imagination by binaryDigit · · Score: 2, Insightful

    The thing that I came away with was not so much how lame tv must have looked back then (and as others so gleefully point out, looks now), but how unimaginative the author was. True, the technology must have been a bit underwhelming, but my goodness, being one of the first members of the general public to witness the ability to send pictures real time across the ether. I would have thought his mind would be reeling at the possibilities of the technology, vs the un-impressive state that it was currently in.

    1. Re:A staggering lack of imagination by Gavin+Rogers · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Perhaps it wasn't a lack of imagination on the part of the reviewer... The inventors/demonstrators of the technology had something to do with it too (by the sounds of it)

      It happened then and it happens now - some really clever brightspark invents something 'cool'. What he doesn't invent is a purpose for the technology - why someone would actually want to buy one!

      Think to our time and something like the 'Internet Fridge' - wowzers that's great technology! My fridge can detect when I've run out of something and order me some fresh milk across the Internet. Instead of saying, "Wow, this'll change the world!" we all end up thinking that our nice old 'dumb' fridge works very well thankyou-very-much.

      Same attitude in the 1930's I think - the world was perfectly happy reading newspapers, listening to radio (err, I mean the 'wireless') and visiting the cinema.

      TV was cutting-edge technology, but they didn't explain why someone would want one!

      Bringing mass media into the living room back then was a place already taken by radio. As slashdotters probably realise - it's difficult to unseat an existing technology that's wildly popular... (even if it is obsolete)

    2. Re:A staggering lack of imagination by NanoGator · · Score: 4, Insightful

      "...but my goodness, being one of the first members of the general public to witness the ability to send pictures real time across the ether"

      I believe this would have had impact if the Television was a video phone vs. 'radio (entertainment)with pictures'.

      If the people could see what we watch today, oh yeah they`d dog-pile on it. But what did they have to compare it to back then? I can understand the cynical view of it, particularly if you consider what had to be done to make the 'moving pictures' work.

      I often fantasize about taking what I know about making movies today and going back in time to the early years of TV and making a huge name for myself. But if you were to present me with a new challenge (such as 128 kbit video for a Palm Pilot), I'd be hard pressed to think that I could make anything that anybody`d care about. I'd immediately say that it was too 'unsophisticated' for me to do anything with. But you know what'd happen? Somebody out there would make a cute/creative movie in that format and surprise the crap out of everybody.

      --
      "Derp de derp."
  5. Storytelling - a dying art? by Darth+Paul · · Score: 5, Insightful
    This is a little off topic, but the mention of Charlotte's Web, and all the posts here saying "TV is still crap, struck a chord with me ...

    I've recently gotten into anime and I'm really, really loving it. I've never been an avid TV watcher but lately I've been doing several hours of anime a day. I ask myself what it is I love about anime and it's not the visuals or the cuteness or the different-ness, it's the simple fact that they have stories. A series of 26 episodes is about 8 hours of viewing, and in that time you can pack in a seriously good story and excellent character development. Good stories are just not found in (my local) australian tv anymore.

    Here's the state of TV in Australia, I don't think it's majorly different to america apart from the fact that cable has relatively low penetration here. Most of the prime time shows are:

    • Socalled reality shows, big brother, survivor, popstarts. Mush.
    • "Edutainment" shows, like how to build a coffee table, or travel shows, cooking and gardening. If I come home and collapse and turn on the box, I'll watch 'em because they're there, but I won't make a point of coming back next week.
    • And the soaps, often imported from america. Often, there is no story in these - usually it's just a bunch of people living every day lives, cracking a few jokes. No story to speak of (apart from who's going out with who this episode?)... a little character development but not much reason to tune in regularly. I can watch an episode, skip a few weeks, and not miss anything significant.

    There are no regular shows which tell a decent story!Star Trek is probably comes closest. DS9 and Voyager are gone, just a single episode of Enterprise weekly, late on wednesday nights. I haven't been watching much though. DS9 and Voyager particularly suffered overly from the hit-the-reset-button-at-the-end-of-every-episode syndrome. Despite, they have far more continuity and return appeal (for me) than most other shows around.

    So, where have all the decent stories gone? All this hurrah about "Spiderman rocks because everybody relates to it!" is a crock to me. The recent blockbusters (Ep2, Spiderman, LOTR) have been successes because they are uncommon good stories told well. Visuals and action and romance put together do not make a good show. It's the story which captures your imagination and takes you away for a few hours.

    Back to the anime, episodes often finish on a cliffhanger note, and I'm excited in the few seconds it takes to change directories and load up the next divx. Can you imagine what it must be like to see this episode and have to wait a whole week to see it resolved? GUARANTEED VIEWERS.

    This is related to how Harry Potter is lauded as making it "cool for kids to read again". I hope Hogwart's is as real to today's kids as Kirrin Cottage (don't laugh!) was to me as a kid...

    Good storytellers have always been hard to find but unfortunately it seems the TV networks have given up the search in favour of DIY handymen.

    1. Re:Storytelling - a dying art? by KH · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Looks like what you found in animes are in fact common trait in Japanese TV shows. Most comments on the parent seems to miss the point, not surprisingly because most people here are not familiar with how the Japanese TV shows are made.

      Japanese TV shows, especially dramas or animes, which involves a story typically have a life span of three or six months. This is a bit different from the concept of the ``season'' of American TV shows. However a particular TV show may be popular, it is predetermined that the show ends after 13 episodes (typically for 60 minutes shows) or 26 (typically for 30 minutes shows--most animes fall into this category) episodes.

      Given such a restriction, creators of a show concentrate on creating one big continuous story of about nine hours. They don't have to worry about the show being cancelled because they are not going to have another season anyway. Compare this with shows like the X-Files which one of the replies to the parent mentioned. The Japanese creators already know when the mysteries have to be solved, when they have to make the finale, etc., from the beginning. This makes it a lot easier for them because they have a perspective. It would be quite hard for creators when they don't know when they have to reveal the secrets, while they have to keep the interest of viewers.

      There is a peculiar genre in Japanese TV shows, which used to be called ``trendy dramas.'' They typically involve a couple of guys and girls. The interest of the viewers is who is going to be together with whom and how. But the viewers already know when they will know the result. The whole season becomes a process with sometimes twists and detour. Creators spend their effort to make the viewers guessing so that they see each episode. With a limitation of the number of episodes comes a simplicity that allows creators spend efforts in story development. Thus one can see them as if they are a long version of movies.

      Not every story on Japanese TV follow this format, or not every story is a good story, or sometimes they may fail in execution of storytelling, but this format is pretty much predominant, and I think this is a major difference from the American way of storytelling on TV.

      It is quite interesting to see how TV culture developed so differently in Japan. It used to be merely a copy of how things are done in the US. But it seems that the culture developed in a different direction. It is also interesting to see how some ideas are being exported to the American TV culture in recent years (America's Funniest Video, Iron Chef, etc.).

  6. Underwhelming technology by saphena · · Score: 5, Insightful

    At the start of the Afghanistan campaign recently I watched a live broadcast by the BBC correspondent John Simpson perched somewhere up a mountain in Afghanistan who was using a satellite video link.

    The video was a bit jumpy and flaky and I was initially critical of the quality and thought "why can't the BBC do better?".

    A little while later, however, I suddenly realised the significance of what I was seeing:-

    Here we have a man, perched on a mountain in the middle of nowhere, in a country with no electricity and being bombed by an overwhelming force, actually making a live broadcast with sound and colour video! I'm sitting in the comfort of my living room witnessing events as they happen several thousand miles away.

    Isn't that truly amazing? It's easy to criticize the defects of new technology. Sometimes it needs a real leap of imagination to spot the virtues.

  7. Re:Megacycle by Tablizer · · Score: 3, Insightful

    (* The part about them transmitting the signal back on a "megacycle" caught my attention. I took this to mean they sent the television picture back over the airwaves at a frequency of 1mHz (1 Hz = 1 cycle), or a wavelength of 300m. That's a pretty low end of the spectrum to send a complex signal like television, *)

    He probably chopped off the multiplier from his write-up. They probably told them something like, "it goes over a 100 megacycle frequency", and EB only wrote down "megacycle".

    You know how the press is.

    --
    Table-ized A.I.
  8. Similar to my first experience with the Internet by joshv · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I believe it was in 1990. My campus did not have direct access to the Internet, but it had a Vax, and a 9600 bps leased line to Western Michigan University, which had some limited access to the Internet via a bizarre customized terminal server hookup. If I entered the right incantations at the terminal server prompt I could telnet out of the system, to anywhere - well, at least a certain percentage of the time, and it seemed many sites where not reachable.

    I had a friend from high school who had somewhat less resitricted access to the Internet in California. Luckily I was able to telnet into his account and gain access to all sorts of wonderful things. Usenet, chat, and MUDs... I think I lost a year to a wonderful little place at MIT called "The End of the Line".

    A year later we got dialup access and a Unix system and I was able to enjoy all of this, plus line noise at 1200 bps.

    I guess my point (if I have one) is that things are accelerating. I now sit at the end of my own dedicated 1.5 Mbps pipe on a laptop which is probably something like 100 times faster than that Vax I used to access the Internet. This after only 12 years. TV hasn't changed much in 50.

    -josh

  9. Re:Typical revisionism by offlerthecrocgod · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Why has the parent poster been slashed down to 0 (pissing off ammerican audience). I dont want to flame but an american did not invent the tv "Philo Farnsworth"-who?? im sorry but ill bet he was american , he did not invent the tv John Logie Baird as stated above was the inventor he was working in Dublin ( Ireland ) at the time i believe , just like americans didnt invent the Computer , no the English didnt either , a German beat them all to it just before the begining of WW11 ( google for zuze computer not suse !!).The jet fighter was the English , who were gracious enough to lend there jet tech to America , so they could share there knowledge . No Hope , the english were denied all American tech and the Americans built on the English's work.USSR was first in eveything in space EXCEPET to the moon the are building the ISS with American money ( with MIR they have a lot of exeprience ), that the only thing that prevented them from getting there first , money . Nothing againts America I still think its a great country but not everything is invented in america!.ill be moded as offtopic i presume , who cares , what i said is still true.

    --
    Shin: a device for finding furniture in the dark.