The other evening Mrs H and I were watching a television programme, something we rarely do now. It was ITV so there were lots of weirdly infantile adverts where actors pretend to be maniacally happy about clean floors or somehow they manage to appear cool and superior while driving a dull, mass produced car.
Apart from the ads, what struck me more forcibly than usual was how crappy television really is. Not a hundred percent crap, but close enough to wonder if we should ever have allowed the goggle box into our homes at all. Perhaps we should have left it in the showroom because it did far more damage than we knew.
What damage would that be? It seems possible that we have drifted away from the spoken and written word towards the moving image. Something which may be an example of that occurred during the recent Facebook outage.
Out of interest during the outage I skimmed through a fair number of comments left at various websites, comments which appeared to have been left by Facebook users impatient to see the issue resolved. Numerous comments may have simply reflected Facebook argot but they also seemed to reflect an unwillingness to string words into sentences.
Even when words were strung together, they usually had to reflect a familiar image. Words are often supposed to do that of course, but the importance of the image seems to have grown. The image directs the words even when it should be the other way round. Television does it all the time.
Of course it is possible that television changed nothing fundamental, it merely plugged itself in to what was already there and made the image into the dominant theme of our lives. In which case the question is answered, we should not have allowed television into our homes and our lives.
Or the question is not answered because we were bound to adopt television with almost universal enthusiasm. It's how we are made.
5 comments:
"weirdly infantile adverts where actors pretend to appear cool and superior while driving a dull, mass produced car"
That's how you get the measure of their target customer. At one time it was cupholders: now it's a £60k dashboard with Alexa built in . . .
"Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man"
(Francis Bacon)
We have moved to a society of ready men (and women!). Ready to digest trivia and ready to sound off, basically picking up and retailing emotional signals at speed. But there are very few full men, and fewer still that are exact.
There's a parallel with music. Why were 18th and early 19th Century composers so brilliantly prolific? Because the only way of disseminating music was printing and sending it, necessitating reading and playing masses of music. They were saturated with good musical ideas every day. Today, "composers" just grab samples from a computer, and the result is...
Jannie - I remember when it was a heater.
Sam - and the result is folk like Billie Eilish. The other day I came across her name for some reason so I looked up one of her YouTube videos. I won't be doing that again.
That is the reason why I would rather read a text blog post rather than a video which tries to put forward the same story.
The written word shows up flaws and inconsistencies that you might not notice in a video presentation because you are distracted by the speaker's appearance accent, or even the books on the shelf behind.
And it is easy to scan back in text than it is to rewind a video.
Doonhamer - yes, I often think we'd have been better off if computers and the internet had been text only or possibly text with static images.
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