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The Trajectory of Television: A Big History of the Small Screen.
antdude writes "Ars Technica has a three pages article on the trajectory of TV--starting with a big history of the small screen. From the article: 'Though it's a relatively recent invention, television is a pillar of Western—and even global—culture. Even if you're that one guy who makes it a point to mention that you don't watch or even own a television, your life has inevitably been shaped by the small screen to some degree. Popular culture has its moments of being swept up in the comedies and dramas of the airwaves, and television (cable news in particular) indelibly established in the minds of the world that instant access to breaking news on faraway continents is a normal thing.'"
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Watching people watching television, is like watching people stoned out of their minds. The blank expressions, the lack of awareness of their surroundings-- you can pass something quickly in front of a watcher's eyes, and he/she will not even notice. Careful, though, if you block the watcher's eyes for too long, you will receive the drug addicts wrath.
Good article. I suspect the author originally planned to also discuss the trajectory of the content, which was clearly quite different decade over decade, but decided to stick to the techie stuff instead. Wise move.
In addition to NTSC - Never Twice the Same Color (one of the great retronyms in industrial history), there was also PAL - People Are Lavendar, and SECAM - System Essentially Contrary to American Method.
VHS tapes were pretty handy back in the day. They had two problems: 1) like other tapes, they tended to jam and become totally useless, and 2) the fidelity was really poor, something like half of NTSC in each dimension which wasn't very good in the first place. So watching a VHS tape wasn't a great viewing experience.
The stuff on Jack Valenti was overdone. OK, we get it, he was an alarmist on the industry payroll. Let's talk about the technology and how people used it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_television
I'm now one of those in the "don't have a TV" crowd, and I believe that theories of economics have affected the masses by way of the television.
The Good for Viewers: A means of visually confirming events and visually experiencing other people's imaginations via scripted TV.
The Good for Broadcasters: A means of sharing an opinion to audiences in real-time (same goes for the Internet), which inevitably shapes "public opinion."
The Bad for Viewers: Increased exposure to opinions that may not be of interest -- which results in a reduction in lifetime sense of productivity.
The Bad for Broadcasters: Increased exposure and association to opinions which promulgate the decreased sense of productivity.
The Ugly for Viewers: Dumbing down of society thanks to the "rush to the bottom" of the social ladder in the quest for a falsely placed sense of greater social connection and relevance.
The Ugly for Broadcasters: Entirely responsible for the crap on TV and for the dumbing down of society to the point of retardation.
[end rant]
All white people are evil racists fags who beat up black people for sheer spite.
Everyone in the 'south' is a racist homophobe.
The only people actually worth something are those from the East Coast or California. Everyone else in the USA is retarded and useless.
The USA is the bestest country in the whole world. Every other country is backward, kind of like those folks who don't live on the east coast or California.
Lawyers are great people who are always out to help humanity out.
Fun Fact! Farsworth (the inventor of the idiot box) was deeply upset with the affect that it was having on the populous, and regretted inventing it. That was untill the moon landings were televised, and he agreed that TV was good for something.
But thanks to T.V. We won't likely be going back to the moon anytime soon. See T.V. has taught generations of kids that science is for faggots, and that the only thing that matters is popularity and good looks.
There is a inverse coorelation between USian relevance and the popularity of T.V.
Now I am going back to find out what Justin Beiber is doing on T.V. I luv Justin.. He is sooo talented.
(said by an bald middle aged white male)
I'm probably one of the older readers/posters here and I'll tell you why I hate TV.
Back when I was a kid, there was no TV.
People and communities were far different.
Everyone knew their neighbours and interacted with them on a daily basis.
We'd have card or board-game evenings on a Tuesday night, whereupon most everyone in the street would roll up at someone's house and enjoy a very social time together, enjoying each other's company and having fun. We kids would play out in the yard (in summer) or inside (in winter), sharing our comics and also playing games.
When Mrs Brown 5 doors down was ill, someone would go mow her lawns every weekend and the women would take turns making sure she had a nutritious meal three times a day.
Most Saturday nights the guy who lived next to us would get out his 16mm film projector and a movie would be screened on his garage door. The adults would all sit around watching and drinking beer -- while we kids also watched or just went and played ball in the yard out back.
Because of this tight bonding between neighbors, those were days when you could leave your car parked in the driveway (or on the road outside your house) with the keys in it and when folk went on vacation, they never bothered to lock their doors -- otherwise the people next door couldn't get in to water the plants while you were away.
Perhaps my glasses of retrospect are rose-tinted, but they were wonderful, carefree, crime-free days where I lived.
Then TV came along.
Once everyone had their own set, people no longer got together and socialised of an evening. Instead, they stayed in their own houses and after a few years (as some folk sold up and others moved in), it quickly became apparent that we didn't even know some of those who lived in the street.
A little later, after a few car-thefts and burglaries, people started locking their cars and doors.
You see, once the fabric of the community was torn by the isolating effect of television, most folk no longer had the close bond that once existed with the others in their neighborhood -- in fact people became anonymous. Once folk are anonymous their inhibitions tend to drop and they're far more likely to submit to temptation (such as theft or other crimes). Just look at how differently many people behave when they're on vacation in a different part of the country and you'll see the proof of that. If the people around you know who you are you tend to be far more conservative and circumspect in your behavior. Go somewhere where nobody knows you and it's easier to behave badly.
Anyway, TV has now become opiate of the masses. Far too many people spend a huge percentage of their life passively sitting in front of the box, soaking up everything that's thrown at them.
If you'd tried to describe why the Kardashians would be celebrities back when I was a kid, people would simply not understand -- and I have to admit, I still don't get it.
The best thing we could do for any nation is to switch off TV and show people that "reality" is a much better option than "reality TV".
Hell, imagine how much better off we'd all be if we spent an hour less each day watching TV and instead, used that time to improve our education, earn a little extra money -- or just spend quality time with our friends and families.
I doubt very much whether *anyone's* last words will ever be "Darn, I wish I'd spent more time watching TV".
But hey, I'm old enough to know I'm wrong more often than I'm right -- so feel free to ignore this rant :-)
An artilce about the development of television broadcasting that doesn't mention either of these?
We've got the Internet, so why dumb yourself down by passivly staring at a propaganda box? They do call it "TV programs" as in "programming" (mind control). I haven't had a TV for about 12 years and I see a clear colleration between how much people watch TV and how much they know about what is really going on in the world around them. There also seems to be a colleration between the amount of time spent in front of a TV and the ability to think clearly and critically. Seriously, get rid of your TV if you have one, you'll feel more clear-minded just after a few months.
9/11: Never forget it was a false-flag operation
When I was younger I used to watch a lot of televsion and even look forward to the shows. Nowadays I dont even have a television, I get all my information from the Web. Television is no longer informative, watch a documentary and you'll spend an hour watching repeated film clips and commentary interspersed with maybe 20 minutes of adverts. Much more efficient reading articles on the web for what you are interested in. Television is just light entertainment. Also with the news, each countries news agencies have their own narrow agendas so you never really get the full picture of world events. Much better to visit online news sites of different countries and political views. Then you'll understand much better how things came to be the way they are.
NEXT!
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NBC / comcast has killed a lot of good shows at least they try to get sports right but they do press the non Comcast systems.
Watching TV is not so bad, but it should not spent time watching unnecessary programs. since we get many effective information on TV,so it'd also watch TV without unnecessary and avoid harmful programs.
Pretty sure Star Trek: TNG called it:
"Television was a medium that declined by the mid-21st century"
From "the Neutral Zone," season 1 ep. 26
We have not had a TV set for about 4 years now. We do watch some online stuff occasionally. Personally, I simply got tired of the never-ending ads. For me, there is no show worth that ceaseless drone of buy shit. Buy shit so people will like you, buy shit so you can get in some girls pants, buy shit so you can be cool.. on and on and on...and then there is the "news" which is the all propaganda network turning our collective minds into jello. What a joy it is to honestly say.. why no.. I didnt see one damn political ad, havent heard FOX or MSNBC or CNN for 4 years and I am that much better off for not getting my dose of daily indoctrination. Its not entertainment, its a mind-rape.
There's a 1942s book, "Television, Today and Tomorrow", about the Baird and other rotating disk systems. At the end, there's a chapter about "electronic television", but it's dismissed as too complex and expensive. All those tubes!
Yes, I know about Zworklin and Farnsworth and Sarnoff and the progression from the iconoscope and the image dissector to the image orthicon. Then came color, which meant three of everything, including camera tubes.
FTFA:
Brief? LaserDisc was available for almost as long as VHS, having come out in 1978 compared to VHS's 1976. DVD killed them both circa 2000. Coupled with a $10,000 Kloss projection TV, LaserDisc ushered in "home theater" 20 years before DVD made the term popular. (In fact, LaserDisc had been out for so long, the release of DVD caused a collective groan due to the market confusion it created over whether its 480p was "hi-def" and the delay in HDTV standard that had been in the works since the 80's.)
Is it just me, or is there a link created here for just about every story that Ars Technica posts?
Well I probably looked more inside one that at one.
I'll have you know that I don't watch or even own a television.
I suggest reading a book from the 70s by ex-MadMan Jerry Mander called "Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television" if you can find it.
Good stuff.
... TV has taken over social interaction. Inside and outside the family. Time was when we interacted and learnt social mores and life skills from entities who could respond to us. TV cannot. While I am sure Ralph Nader and similar outliers exist, TV has become what human nature and the bandwidth/cable access monopolies always destined it to be... manipulative and shallow programming, beholden to advertising interests engorged by the unnatural hold it has over our life.
Bread and circuses. We got one, one more to go...
After I fire it out of my catapult.
Thanks for the great post. As a disclaimer, I've been working as a contractor for the last 18 months or so supporting a major TV/Cable company's broadcast operations' embedded software for digital video, and years earlier I did work for IBM with digital video and cable set-top boxes, so the below may be biased in that sense.
One thing I might point out is that in Europe, even with TV, the sort of community life you describe is somewhat more intact. So, there is some sort of difference in the USA. TV is no doubt part of the change in our society. But there are other factors. One is the spread of the socially isolating automobile. Another is the movement of women into the paid exchange economy and away from the home-based gift economy (including less in-home child care), away from the subsistence economy of home production, and away from voluntary participating in local community-planned economy. Another is increasing material aspirations, including how larger homes with larger yards physically separate people more; see "Culture of Affluence: Psychological Costs of Material Wealth" by Suniya S. Luthar. The rising professionalization of so many activities has discouraged individuals helping each other (you are more likely now to see a psychologist instead of talk to your neighbor over the fence while putting up laundry, with the solution being prescription drugs instead of social change). Lengthening school days (and years with grad school) means less people are around regular communities. The rise of big box stores displacing locally-owned neighborhood stores is another factor. So is the loss of the family farm and the culture that produces. The reduction of unions in the USA and loss of long vacations and shorter working hours is probably another big factor making for less time to be neighborly. No doubt there are more factors as well due to technological and political changes.
Your post reminds me of a Simpson's episode where for some reason all the TVs stop working and the community immediately renews itself, families interact more, kids play outside, everyone is happier and healthier, and everyone acknowledges that, but as soon as the TVs start working again, people go right back to sitting in front of them. That too has a ring of truth to it. Why would that be? There is a book by Dierdre Barrett called "Supernormal Stimuli: How Primal Urges Overran Their Evolutionary Purpose". It suggests that humans, like all creatures, a wired to respond to certain things. In prehistoric times, these behaviors like responding to quick movements (might be a snake about to strike), or seeking out sweet things (like ripe berries), were adaptive and helped us survive. With modern technology, where quickly changing scenes on a video screen or piles of processed sugar are both easy to conjur up, these tendencies may be maladaptive. Paul Graham wrote an essay on "The Acceleration of Addictiveness", about many addictive things including drugs like cheap alcohol becoming bigger and bigger challenges. The book "The Pleasure Trap" makes a similar point, focusing mostly just on junk food. For food, it used to be that to get sweetness, you had to eat a lot of fruit which had fiber and phytonutrients which were essential to human health. Now you can just get obese on sugar, and get sick too, because you won't be eating the fiber or phytonutrients. The same is true now for interesting experiences. In the past, when TV did not exist, or when it had only a few channels with less programming (like when I was a child), then it was hard to overindulge in it. When you wanted to see people, you generally had to interact with real people in real families and real communities, which generally had other health benefits (maintaining healthy social connections). Or you might read a book. :-) Now you can be part of a TV "family" and get lots of excitement and laughs very easily, but you do not gain the real social connections from that time investment that could help you in other ways. That is an aspect of Neil Postman's book o
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
TL;DR
"television is a pillar of Westernâ"and even global"
...
Television destroyed western culture, that and advertising
Bill Hicks on Advertising
AccountKiller
See a doctor and or therapist, ASAP.
Sex is life. Its really that simple. If you are not having good sex you are missing out on the core experience of life, and there is very likely something wrong with your body and/or mind.
Many conditions not otherwise observed can be diagnosed if you have bad sex. Cardiovascular, Endocrine, Immune, etc. etc. Likewise physical/mental issues such as depression and mental illness in general.
See the film 'The Sessions'. Even extremely ill people can have good, positive, productive sex. Even if there is nothing physically or mentally wrong a sex therapist can be extraordinarily beneficial.
Good Luck. You have no idea what you are missing.