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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."
Times don't change, 63 years later and still nothing is worth watching on tv.
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.
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.
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.
I really hate Dan Patrick.
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.
Thank God they shit-canned that idea.
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
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...
If Mr. Edison had thought smarter he wouldn't sweat as much. --Nikola Tesla
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.
Yeah, I'm as old as my UID would suggest.