Musings on Television

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Television has been placed in a role that is front and center in our lives. Most of the most popular leisure time activities in modern America depend somehow on television. From video games to TV shows to movies-all have conspired to make televisions a necessary element in our daily lives.

The days of quiet reading or chatting with neighbors on the front porch have long past. A large number of us wouldn't even know our neighbors well enough to say little more than hello if we met them on the street. We certainly don't socialize with them on a daily basis. Most books are experienced as audio books we listen to while doing something else or are experienced after they are adapted into a film or TV show. Monitors and PCs have replaced libraries as a source of information and very few read the newspaper when they can turn on Fox News or CNN. Most children don't own any board game or one played anywhere but on a screen, typically without any direct interaction with another child. We experience life through a television screen in one form or another.

Television has the power to bring the world into our homes, while isolating us from anything outside our homes and from each other. We can experience other lives and experiences, without ever leaving our own and actually living them. This makes television both a wonderful invention and a scourge.

For a vast majority of Americans, we cannot remember a time without television nor can we imagine life without it. It is a babysitter, pacifier, entertainer, informer, teacher, voyeur, equalizer and escape. Does any other single thing fulfill all those functions in our lives? Because of this, for good or bad, television is here to stay. There isn't much else in human experience that is as affecting as what playwright of Frost/Nixon, Peter Morgan, calls the "the reductive power of the close-up." In this 2006 play one of the characters, James Reston, Jr., says this about television:

"You know the first and greatest sin of the deception of television is that it simplifies; it diminishes great, complex ideas, stretches of time; whole careers become reduced to a single snapshot."

And since they are memorialized forever on the screen, those snapshots can remain in our minds forever, saying far more than words alone--right there in our living room.

Next time, before you tell yourself that television is harmless; that it is a mindless entertainment box; think about that and give it the respect it deserves. Television has irretrievably changed our lives and is anything but harmless or powerless. Consider that when you decide what to watch and how much to watch. Watch with caution.

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