TV replaces the way we were. Just like desegregation and the eighteenth amendment being repealed TV has given us a sense of freedom that we don’t actually have. Not to knock on civil rights or St. Patrick’s Day, my point is more to give a shove in the side and/or back of television’s representatives and maybe get them to shut up about how wonderful they are.
The Today Show brought Paris and several other attainable locations to the living rooms of Americans where they could sit innocuously watching the giver, the provider. Men, women, and children (capitalization not intended to offend) were all left sitting when they could have been doing something else, like actually doing something they saw on television. Come to think of it, this doesn’t sound all that strange, children coming home to watch television and not doing homework or really interacting with other people directly. This was, in fact, my childhood. Even though the television was making men more like women and children, keep in mind this is apparently all very bad, it was giving back just a little bit.
As this entire blog has been about stabbing in the direction of the abstraction of television with a very sharp, imaginary knife I will not take everything back and say that television is worth all the strange it has brought into a lot of cultural practices, and yet I will say that the things it has brought have never come with the viewers’ best interests in mind. Television was trying to sell to housewives and children what it still attempts to sell to them, in slightly different and more expensive ways. Whether we are being brainwashed or jerked around those who try to sell you things are never there to make friends, and those who are trying to sell things to the people trying to sell things to us are only thinking about the best way to sell, and make my sentences complicated. All in all I think TV has been a very naughty appliance who should be sent to it’s room with no dinner.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment