What were watching last night Universal Force Part III

 The Four Sorces Part III —“Television”

Well we’ve sort of looked at industrialization/standardization as something that dominates or did dominate the workplace and our schools along with the narrative that if you try harder. And compete you will do better and better etc…. Then we looked at how defining the world in terms of science has  led to advances, however it also encourages us to break all things into little pieces, assume that these pieces always equal the whole and that we can predict and control the world and the people in it.  The implications for seeking peace and joy  related to these two forces alone  are staggering  and yet there  are more things to explore before a “summary” of sorts might be offered and the third of these epic forces is ….”Televison” and the changes. In it that are fundamentally altering the world.   Let’s tune in shall we?

Let’s take a stroll down memory lane shall we Uncle Milty?  Unlike “cultural products like say painting, theatre, music, dance,oh and let’s say books “television is a new deal.  Oh and it got it’s start during the New Deal and just barely.  If you are 75 or older there is a good chance. You remember not having a television in your house.  If you are in your 60’s  you grew up with only two or three channels and you developed some expertise  in going out of doors and spinning your attendance so that the “snow and shadows  could be reduced.  If you grew up  just a few years later you had “cable and three channels went to 20 or 30 and then to 60 then 100 then if you lived in the right place and had the right paycheck around 500 channels.   Well and now “television”  is “streaming digital”  where this thing we call a television offered tens of thousands of shows/movies/sounds when you want to watch it.  Oh and since this includes  YouTube and tick-tock… we are able to watch virtually unlimited content everywhere all the time.  

So what does this all mean for seeking peace and joy?

When TV was young it was a unifying force.  Everybody knew that everybody was watching one of  three nationally shown shows and a few local shows.  We all had something to follow in common and talk about the next day…. A whole country was wondering. Who shot J.R.?  We all watched as the riderless  horse led the mourning masses to the eternal flame and we all knew  the name Archie Bunker Hawkeye Pierce, and who rode trigger.  And then there were reruns… and millions still watched the same shows where people ent to places where everybody knows your name and had questions on their minds like  will Ginger, the skipper and his little buddy and the professor get off that darling island this time?  Sure some of us wondered  how there were six kids when Mike and Carol never touched each other in the bedroom and wasn’t it amazing that Lude and Laura never had to pass gas or tinkle?  anyway the older generation went from radio  where all programming was pretty local to a media that was pretty unified and so our cultural experience  of entertainment  became a common thing we could share.   And then…. 

Technology started giving us more and more choices and more and more decisions and more and more  and more and more and more and is still giving us more until  now the programming  we could access and produce went from a narrow range. To something that offered much but also drives us  into smaller and smaller  bunches and where we fight not to produce  similar things but to produce unique things and hope that  we gain a little fame  or go viral so to speak.   The same thing.holds true for print media or digital print data… In short seeking peace and joy with others has become far for complex as we once  could believe in what we watched however now we can watch anything we might choose to believe.  

In short this thing known as the TV once pulled us together  and now it often leads us to be staring  at a screen by ourselves.   We may alll think of TV as if it is what it was when we grew up… and depending when you grew up that’s an entirely different thing than it is now.  And yet… what we see on these screens is still a dominant. Force in how we look at the world and when we look at it too.   When some of us grew up it was the six o’clock news or the 10 o’clock news and now everything is breaking news. 24 hours a day.  Oh and sports?  Well we used to watch one baseball game a week and maybe a couple of pro football games and one college  game a week.  We had that in common along with that poor guy crashing off the end of that ski jump feeling the agony of defeat.  

We’ll talk more about this force in the summary, however for now. Let’s all take a moment to think about how TV/video has changed in our culture  and in our ways of understanding the things we experience.    This whole discussion  will continue after these brief messages at the same bat time and on the same bat channel.