TV is underrated.
Still serving its primary purposes, the tube has aged quite gracefully. Even alongside YouTube and the World Wide Web at large, it is still considered a major and highly influential (not to mention addictive) medium of information and entertainment, reaching millions of people every day around the world.
It helps us decide what type of laundry detergent to buy, who to elect as our president and what to talk about around the water cooler. Fewer people every day decide to pick up a book for fun or a newspaper to find out what is going on in their world. Scholars and couch potatoes alike can argue all day about whether it is a good thing, but the data cannot be ignored: People still love television.
Like always, it is a shaper of pop culture, perpetuating an endless cycle of art imitating life imitating art. The moral fiber of our country at any point in our history can be directly linked to what America was tuned into at that time. The threads and fibers that make up our clothes could have come from a dream, but we most likely saw someone in TV Land wearing them. Even the amount of fiber in our diets can probably be linked to the kind of lifestyle the Bradys, the Simpsons or the Sopranos are leading, because we follow them.
Many will suggest that television has seen the best minds of many generations destroyed by its broadcast signals and radio waves. Perhaps they are right. But perhaps they have been away too long. For every channel that transmits sleaze, sex or professional wrestling is one that educates, enlightens or even energizes.
One can attend spiritual services, learn to prepare a quick healthy meal, teach a child the alphabet, learn about the Franco-Prussian War, explore new and exotic countries or attend a congressional hearing, all without leaving their living room.
Our diversity shines the brightest when the lights are out in homes across America during prime time. We have grown tired of only three channels and have demanded that stations be created to cater to every person with a remote control in their hand, an amount that grows daily. To fill these stations, we require endless amounts of creativity and ingenuity – forces that are ones to be reckoned with anywhere else.
Historians often say that agriculture is man’s greatest invention because it allowed him to go out into the world and invent, be fruitful and enjoy a life of leisure. Only the television could ever compete. What else is more leisurely than kicking back with a cold one, surfing the channels and finally deciding to tune into American Idol, American Dad or even American Inventor, for that matter.
The television continues to make the world a smaller place and help us find our place in it, and throughout the fall semester this column will track all TV has to offer.
