@joanwestenberg points to Neil Postman’s warnings about the coming of television, and goes on to suggest that as bad as it is, the discourse is worse:
But television, at least, was passive. You sat there and it washed over you. You could zone out, let your mind wander, process what you’d seen during the commercial breaks. The discourse is participatory. It demands engagement. Every controversy comes with an implied social pressure to have a take, to signal your tribal allegiance, to demonstrate that you understand what’s happening and have correctly identified the good guys and the bad guys. Silence is interpreted as complicity, or at least as suspicious. “I haven’t thought about this enough to have an opinion” is not an acceptable response when everyone else is already fighting.
True enough. But I think it’s still worth contemplating the change that television introduced. Was it our first experience with that sort of passive consumption? Not exactly, I suppose. Movies were like that, but at least exposure was limited — going was an occasional thing, the experience lasted a couple of hours. Same with theater and musical performances. Radio? More pervasive, more a fixture of home life, but not as attention-grabbing. The rest — newspapers, magazines, books, conversation, dances — were not at all passive.
What sort of changes resulted from steady bouts of passive TV consumption? Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death explains some of them. Here are two other mentions I’ve run across in my reading.
Janice Holt Giles was a city girl (Louisville, KY) who married a country boy in the late 1940s, moved with him to his rural homeplace, slowly integrated herself into a very different lifestyle, and wrote about the experience in her memoir 40 Acres and No Mule. In the preface, written in 1966, she sketches Appalachian culture as she observed it, work and religion and family and society. The preface ends by describing the changes that modernity has brought:
In the seventeen years I have lived as a Giles in the Giles-ridden north end of Adair County I have witnessed some changes. We have electricity now. We have a road-net of paved roads. The long generations of isolation are ending. Our people can get in and out of the area now and can move around more freely within it. We even have telephones. With good roads the school system is slowly doing away with the little one-room schools. Children today ride to the consolidated schools over the new paved roads in big yellow school buses. Hot lunches are served in the cafeterias. No child takes his “dinner” today in the old-fashioned lard bucket. How much virtue there is in the consolidated schools will take another generation to determine. Something good, intimate and small, has no doubt been lost. It is to be hoped something better has been found.
But the greatest change in the ways and habits of our people has come about through a strange medium — television. Almost every home has a television set nowadays, and its visible, tangible, impact has been greater than a hundred years of preaching and teaching. Not all of its impact is good, but it has helped change diet, habits of dress, it has brought new standards of beautification around and inside the homes, it has brought a different kind of speech and music into the homes, even a different concept of religion. Bought for entertainment, television is a most subtle and powerful educator. In one decade, ten short years, I have seen our people changed more by television than by any other medium.
The other mention comes from Stephen Jenkinson’s book Die Wise. The book is about coming to grip with mortality, but Jenkinson’s attention wanders far and wide in ways I always find entertaining, often edifying. He tells one story that mentions television, which I’ll quote at length because it’s pretty good.
I heard an interview years ago with an Inuit elder. The reporter was looking for some drama for his story, and he asked the old lady through a translator what to her mind was the worst thing to befall her people during her long lifetime. The lady took a while in answering, which the reporter seemed to take for elderly confusion. As most white people might do in a similar situation, out of consideration he began to offer her some choices: Perhaps it was the time the caribou failed to appear back in the early 1960s and there were so many deaths from starvation? The old lady kept her faint smile and nodded a little. “Yes,” she said, “that was a hard time.” Taking this as only partial success, he suggested that maybe it was the time when the government made the people move to government housing, an instant town of prefab houses all close together, off the land, where there was now so much hardship? The old lady smiled a little more, which must have been all the more confusing for the interviewer. “Oh that was a hard time, yes,” she said. The same voice, the same nodding agreement. “Well,” he asked her, “was there anything worse than that?”
The whole interview so far had gone awkwardly. The reporter wanted a sensitive story, something personal, ethnic, exotic, poignant. The old lady was replying as though he was asking after her health, which he unknowingly was. The reporter seemed to have no thought that the request to speak about something like this was an intrusion without limit, or that the request to speak of the dead might be capricious or dangerous or both. Chances are that the old woman by that time had a good amount of experience dealing with people from the south, and her responses came not from confusion or a rickety memory but from an effort to save them both from harm or humiliation. In this small way she may have been defending her people from this latest incarnation of what might be the worst thing to have befallen them.
So, she gathered all of those concerns for etiquette and ancestor into this answer. She said, “Well, when they brought the TV here. That might be the worst.”
“Television?” said the reporter, “Worse than losing your family from starvation or losing your traditional way of life?”
The old lady nodded toward her grandson who was playing on the road outside her government house. “Since TV, we can’t speak together. I can’t speak TV. He can’t speak Inuktituk.”
She didn’t mean that her grandson watched television instead of talking with her. She meant that he watched television because he couldn’t talk with her. She couldn’t speak TV—English—and that was the only language he knew. She knew that her culture could survive starvation, as it had done times aplenty in the past. That was in her culture. And she knew that there could be enough memory and enough hunger for true things among her people to survive forced relocation, which didn’t have to be the end of anything. But she also knew through practice what linguists and anthropologists know through study: The culture lives in the language. When there is a rupture in the teaching and speaking and praying of a language that lasts two generations, when the memory goes the way of the lived experience, it is the real beginning of the end of something. The first generation unable to speak the ancestral tongue, though the language might feel to them like something backward, arcane, or useless and nostalgic, still has the sound of it inside them from their childhood and from the elders that are still alive. The second generation has neither the language nor the experience of hearing it live. That’s when a language withers and fades. That’s how culture dies.
Jenkinson, Stephen. Die Wise: A Manifesto for Sanity and Soul (pp. 319-321, Kindle Edition).