Slashdot Mirror
1936 Perspective on Television
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."
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!
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.
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.
"...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."
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:
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.
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.
(* 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.