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."

Comments

Times don't change

[jchawk]

Times don't change, 63 years later and still nothing is worth watching on tv.

Re:Times don't change

[Chasing Amy]

> Times don't change, 63 years later and still nothing is worth watching on tv.

Yes, but progress has given us 300 channels of nothing, instead of just one. :-)

Re:Times don't change

[BillTheKatt]

10 stories on the Slashdot homepage and still nothing interesting to read

Elements of Style

[bman08]

E.B. White was also a co author of Elements of Style. A book so many of us in these forums should spend more time with.

Very interesting....

[sixSecondsOfDefeat]

Oddly enough, EB white had been known to do significant work in Alan Turing in the development of a perfect AI model. As noted, EB white brought, "creativity and imagination to mathematics", in light of the little known fact that White WAS a physics major, and an expert in syllogistic systems.

Apparently Turing also shared many of the same political beliefs as him as well.

Just a strange little fact i guess that would indirectly affect us in the internet community.

Re:Very interesting....

[bgfay]

E.B. White was a physics major? And what do you base this on? White went to Cornell to learn to be a writer. He didn't go there to learn physics. And where do you get the Turing connection. I've studied E.B. White for many years and have never come across it.

I doubt that E.B. White had much to do with technology beyone his typewriter. He used to keep the telephone in a closet because it bothered him so much. He missed the days of an operator. He hated having his kitchen modernized, he preferred a sail to an engine.

Probably his one love in the technological world was his Model T. Everyone should read three short books by E.B. White. _Welcome to New York_ was great already, but after September 11 is just gorgeous. _Farewell, My Lovely_ is his love story with the Model T, and _Stuart Little_ is still the funniest and most wonderful of his children's books. That it was largely banned on its release is still funny.

But White and physics...well, that's a bit more than I can get behind.

what television is about...

[jnana]

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!

The web didn't impress me

[Elbereth]

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.

Re:The web didn't impress me

[ChiPHeaD23]

BZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZT.

You knew it was coming.

Re:Old news...

[Afrosheen]

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.

30's lingo is bang up.

[satanami69]

From the article:
"First there had to be a moving picture. Then there had to be the business of iconoscoping it, or whatever the hell it's called. Then it had to be sent by direct wire to the Empire State Building, and back by megacycle to R.C.A., where it appeared in a television set which IN TURN had to be itself iconoscoped, or scooped, and the image sent to the Empire State, and then back again by megacycle to R.C.A., where it hit us squarely between the eyes."

"iconoscoping", "direct wire", "megacycle", when the hell are we gonna get stuff that sounds this cool.

Re:30's lingo is bang up.

[red5]

Lets see.

To post a comment on slashdot.
First you have to telotype it in.
Then press on the virtualcontrol labled "submit". From there you comutational appliance sends an HTTP post request all the way to Holand or where ever the hell they host slashdot.
Finaly it hase to be parsed and committed to the online database.

Yah your right still not as cool. :)

I predict

[red5]

1 million and 1 comments about how "the more thing change the more things stay the same. There are no good shows on yada, yada, yada."

There are good shows on tv you just have to be more selective.

Re:A staggering lack of imagination

[NanoGator]

"...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.

Storytelling - a dying art?

[Darth Paul]

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.

Re:Storytelling - a dying art?

[Bodrius]

Well, let's see what happened to series that tried to tell a continuing story:

- X-Files tried and very successfully told a good story through its mythology episodes. Guess what: what people complain about the X-Files are the mythology episodes. They demanded more independent episodes, "alien or freak of the week" stories. Their words are typically along the lines of "I can't skip it for a week or two because when I come back, I don't know what's going on".
So the X-Files ended up being a mixture of independent episodes, independent mythologies (so you could pay attention for only a season), and weird malabarisms to tie the mythologies of each season together. This was partly done to keep the audience interested as mentioned above, and partly to keep milking the series after each mythology ended.
A problem with good storytelling is that, in order to tell a good story, you need a beginning, development, and an ending. Unless you're remarkably inspired that's hard to build on-the-spot, but if you tell the networks you plan to finish the series in exactly 3 seasons they are not going to be happy. If the show is bad, they'll cancel it before, but if the show is good, they want to keep it running for as long as possible.

- Millenium tried to do the same as the X-files mythology. It had great character development, a good story to tell, great production values... and no one watched it because they didn't understand what was going on.

- Babylon 5 was the most ambitious series in that sense of storytelling. Continuous story, almost no isolated episodes, pre-planned five seasons... and is considered the geekiest show ever because you either have seen all of it from the beginning, or you don't know what the big deal is about.
Mainstream interest degenerated in a direct correlation with the development of the story, in spite of big compromises to try to bring new viewers to the series.

On the other hand, Star Trek has been successful mostly because it does not depend on real storytelling. Almost every episode is completely independent of each other, and each issue is either completely resolved in an episode, in a series of two-three episodes, or will never be resolved. Watch TNG any time, in any order... you'll notice it just has better execution of the "hit the reset button".

I agree with you with the need for decent storytelling, and that this depends mostly on continuity, as it is really hard to pack good stories and character development in a couple of episodes.

Unfortunately, the general public does not.

They don't have the time or the will to pay attention to a story periodically for that long, and the networks know it (they would probably be reading books if they did). Continuity helps to build a cult out of people who cares, which helps to hype something up to the mainstream media, but the networks are careful not to overdo it, as alienating the mainstream in preference is a bad market move.

They will put up with the storytelling in the movies because, in order to go to the movies, they have planned already to dedicate their attention to that story for as long, and only as long, as the movie takes.

Basicly, they are willing to read a book in one sitting, but if they have to stop at a particular chapter, and then remember what they have seen by the time they watch the next chapter, they get annoyed... or worse.

This is a fundamental problem with television which may or may not be solved with Tivo and similar systems, where the rythm to watch the story is not as imposed.

I also enjoy that about Anime: it tends to have a sense of story, as opposed to the recurring sketch that is a modern sitcom. But that is just more common in Anime, not prevalent. Some of the most popular Anime series have no story development whatsoever, and that happens to be their main appeal (Ranma comes to mind, Slayers), have a background story that is completely irrelevant/accesory (late Dragonball Z), or are just plain crap (too much to mention).

So just don't put all your hopes on Anime, if you haven't been exposed to that much of it you might be really disappointed. It's just a new market where you might find a bit more of what you're looking for. You may be lucky, or not, but you probably still have to search a bit.

Series I recommend for storytelling (in case you haven't seen them yet): Lain, Evangelion, Shojo Kakumei Utena, Noir, Escaflowne, Cowboy Bebop...

Underwhelming technology

[saphena]

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.

Well...

[Loki_1929]

Thank God they shit-canned that idea.

Re:Real life is more interesting

[Rhinobird]

How the hell can you promote DUMBER shows? It's like trying to make something colder than absolute zero. We hit rock bottom with Springer. Everything else is trying to cash in on that kind of idiocy. Survivor, Who want's to admit they're a gold-digger, fear factor, ANY dating show, Regis. X-files is GONE, there were rumors of killing of Dateline or somesuch, 'news' shows are blately promoting products (when did a new cola flavor become news?) You want TV DUMBER? Explain to me how it is possible...

The invention of TV

[gargle]

http://newyorker.com/critics/atlarge/?020527crat_a tlarge

Philo T. Farnsworth was born in 1906, and he looked the way an inventor of that era was supposed to look: slight and gaunt, with bright-blue exhausted eyes, and a mane of brown hair swept back from his forehead. He was nervous and tightly wound. He rarely slept. He veered between fits of exuberance and depression. At the age of three, he was making precise drawings of the internal mechanisms of locomotives. At six, he declared his intention to follow in the footsteps of Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell. At fourteen, while tilling a potato field on his family's farm in Idaho, he saw the neat, parallel lines of furrows in front of him, and it occurred to him--in a single, blinding moment--that a picture could be sent electronically through the airwaves in the same way, broken down into easily transmitted lines and then reassembled into a complete picture at the other end.

Megacycle

[eap]

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, given that most television signals are now between 150 and 200mHz. You can send a signal at ~15mHz, albeit at a slow scan rate. Does anyone know what frequency they likely used for this transmission?

Re:Megacycle

[RevRigel]

1mHz = .001 Hz
1MHz = 1e6 Hz

Re:Megacycle

[Tablizer]

(* 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.

Re:Megacycle

[Hollinger]

Try this link. It looks like the low end was around 40-50 MHz.

Radiation nostalgia

[Gray]

The quote mediating on the irony of shooting a signal that represents a picture of a television around New York is pretty amazing to me.

I remember the first time I streamed audio to a shoutcast rebroadcaster half way across the country and then received it back on a second computer. Thousands of miles and an arsenal of human technology just so I create a 3 second delay and lose some audio quality. It's been 70 years, the battle continues.

A more recent demonstration...

[rnturn]

...of the current state of television was presented in my family room this morning. I wasn't impressed either. Not much has changed on the past 70 years.

Luckily I have a stack of books that I haven't gotten around to reading yet.