Zoneboy
09-27-2007, 09:24 PM
Link (http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,22385207-5000117,00.html)
Television is called a medium because it's seldom well done - Fred Allen
ONLY 7 per cent of homes in Afghanistan have a flush toilet. But 19 per cent have a television.
It's a remarkable statistic considering owning a television was a crime under the Taliban less than a decade ago.
The "liberated" Afghans are now engrossed in much the same TV drivel that seduces the rest of the world -- soap operas, talk shows, imported crime dramas, cooking shows and, of course, Oprah.
There's even Afghan Star, the nation's version of Australian Idol.
There are more than 1.7 billion TV sets in the world, including 400 million in China. Watching TV is probably the most common pastime on the planet.
It certainly is the primary medium through which we see the world.
You might wonder why, because so much television is blindingly awful.
Writer Clive Barnes said television was "the first truly democratic culture" -- the first culture available to everyone and entirely governed by what people wanted.
"The terrifying thing is what people do want," Barnes said.
Television keeps the masses occupied. It is, as American architect Frank Lloyd Wright observed, "chewing gum for the eyes".
It's insidious. Especially the commercials.
US humourist Erma Bombeck said her children, when young, refused to eat "anything that hasn't danced on television".
Bombeck said by the age of six, an average child watching TV could learn skills such as how to prevent wetness all day long and get the laundry twice as white.
TV program maker Rod Serling said it was hard to produce a television documentary that was both incisive and probing when, every 12 minutes, the program was interrupted by 12 dancing rabbits singing about toilet paper.
TV certainly has the potential to produce worthy material. But it mostly doesn't. Instead, it comes up with a crass format and flogs it endlessly.
Imitation, as someone once said, is the sincerest form of television.
TV blurs reality. TV substitutes an artificial world in place of the real thing. It's most often a sanitised illusion created by about 300,000 coloured dots that aim to give us quick gratification. It titillates, manipulates, is addictive and sucks up time like a black hole.
People say they find watching the box relaxing. What's so relaxing about filling our heads with mindless rubbish?
There is some evidence the flickering light of the TV puts people into a sort of trance state where images and ideas pass into the brain without the normal censure of reason.
Imagine TV content in the hands of a tyrant. It would be a perfect tool of coercion, brainwashing and manipulation.
The reality is, of course, that TV content is largely in the hands of people who don't care what they feed you, as long as it sells.
Thus, we are served up the soft-porn shows such as Californication, the talk shows that use racism as humour, the sad madness of Jerry Springer and gross consumerism.
TV makes stars out of the mundane. It's unlikely that Princess Diana, Paris Hilton or her misbehaving Y Gen friends would have become so important without TV exposure.
"Television is not the truth," said pioneering TV writer Paddy Chayefsky.
"Television is a god-damned amusement park. Television is a circus, a carnival, a travelling troupe of acrobats, storytellers, dancers, singers, jugglers, sideshow freaks, lion tamers and football players. We're in the boredom killing business."
Ironically, perhaps. one of Chayefsky's best known scripts was for the satirical film Network, about a TV newsman who avoids being sacked by announcing that he will blow his brains out on air.
Even the man who invented the television technology wasn't a fan of the medium.
"The bloody thing works," said Philo Farnsworth in a telegram after the first successful TV transmission.
Like the inventors of the atom bomb, Farnsworth came to deeply regret what he had wrought.
"There's nothing worthwhile on it," he once told his son.
"We're not going to watch it in this household."
Television is called a medium because it's seldom well done - Fred Allen
ONLY 7 per cent of homes in Afghanistan have a flush toilet. But 19 per cent have a television.
It's a remarkable statistic considering owning a television was a crime under the Taliban less than a decade ago.
The "liberated" Afghans are now engrossed in much the same TV drivel that seduces the rest of the world -- soap operas, talk shows, imported crime dramas, cooking shows and, of course, Oprah.
There's even Afghan Star, the nation's version of Australian Idol.
There are more than 1.7 billion TV sets in the world, including 400 million in China. Watching TV is probably the most common pastime on the planet.
It certainly is the primary medium through which we see the world.
You might wonder why, because so much television is blindingly awful.
Writer Clive Barnes said television was "the first truly democratic culture" -- the first culture available to everyone and entirely governed by what people wanted.
"The terrifying thing is what people do want," Barnes said.
Television keeps the masses occupied. It is, as American architect Frank Lloyd Wright observed, "chewing gum for the eyes".
It's insidious. Especially the commercials.
US humourist Erma Bombeck said her children, when young, refused to eat "anything that hasn't danced on television".
Bombeck said by the age of six, an average child watching TV could learn skills such as how to prevent wetness all day long and get the laundry twice as white.
TV program maker Rod Serling said it was hard to produce a television documentary that was both incisive and probing when, every 12 minutes, the program was interrupted by 12 dancing rabbits singing about toilet paper.
TV certainly has the potential to produce worthy material. But it mostly doesn't. Instead, it comes up with a crass format and flogs it endlessly.
Imitation, as someone once said, is the sincerest form of television.
TV blurs reality. TV substitutes an artificial world in place of the real thing. It's most often a sanitised illusion created by about 300,000 coloured dots that aim to give us quick gratification. It titillates, manipulates, is addictive and sucks up time like a black hole.
People say they find watching the box relaxing. What's so relaxing about filling our heads with mindless rubbish?
There is some evidence the flickering light of the TV puts people into a sort of trance state where images and ideas pass into the brain without the normal censure of reason.
Imagine TV content in the hands of a tyrant. It would be a perfect tool of coercion, brainwashing and manipulation.
The reality is, of course, that TV content is largely in the hands of people who don't care what they feed you, as long as it sells.
Thus, we are served up the soft-porn shows such as Californication, the talk shows that use racism as humour, the sad madness of Jerry Springer and gross consumerism.
TV makes stars out of the mundane. It's unlikely that Princess Diana, Paris Hilton or her misbehaving Y Gen friends would have become so important without TV exposure.
"Television is not the truth," said pioneering TV writer Paddy Chayefsky.
"Television is a god-damned amusement park. Television is a circus, a carnival, a travelling troupe of acrobats, storytellers, dancers, singers, jugglers, sideshow freaks, lion tamers and football players. We're in the boredom killing business."
Ironically, perhaps. one of Chayefsky's best known scripts was for the satirical film Network, about a TV newsman who avoids being sacked by announcing that he will blow his brains out on air.
Even the man who invented the television technology wasn't a fan of the medium.
"The bloody thing works," said Philo Farnsworth in a telegram after the first successful TV transmission.
Like the inventors of the atom bomb, Farnsworth came to deeply regret what he had wrought.
"There's nothing worthwhile on it," he once told his son.
"We're not going to watch it in this household."