Revolution or Devolution... That is the Question

Devilish Invention?

 My great- grandfather had once told me a story, a story that I will never forget that idealizes the invention of TV the story is as follows:

Bursa-1913

         It was a cold winter night in a village in Bursa, Turkey on 1913, as the whole family gathered around with a cup of hot steaming tea in their hands they started chatting. The youngest in the family was a little boy and although he was young he loved joining into the conversations of his elders. As the little boy listened to them speak he let his imagination wander as the aunt talked about the future.  His aunt was always anticipating, but mostly fearing what the future had to bring them. As she said, “so I hear them say, one day in the future there will be a box in every room, and within this box we will be able to see what goes on in the other side of the world”. As the other family members were listening closely in what she had to say, they were all very excited and all of their imaginations wandered to what it would be like. The aunt went on “I know you all seem very excited for such a thing, but may God never show me that day, for I am afraid of such an devilish invention”. The little boy was frightened to hear his aunt’s worry of the future and did not know how to feel… Just a second ago, he had imagined of such an invention that brought news from places far away that he couldn’t have managed to see! It was unthinkable! But was there really something to fear?

My great-grandfather had told me that he was the little boy in the story. I always asked him how his aunt knew, he never really acknowledged that part, he always told me “she just seemed to know what the future was going to bring”.

 With this story in mind I want all of us to think about what the future has brought us in terms of television. Lets take a mental flashback to our childhood years and remember the houses we visited. What was in the centerpiece of each living room? Are you thinking what I’m thinking? Yes it definitely was television. We are growing up in such a generation where "TV has become a piece of furniture as commonplace as the dinner table and far more worshipped". Isn't it unnatural for such an invention, which was thought to not have any buyers when it was first invented, has come to have such a sacred place in our homes. But although I am talking about our childhood memories it does not stop there in history. Today, now more than ever, we are devoting our time to TV. When we take a look at how older generations envisioned the high-tech living room of the future, it seems as though we are not far from such a crazy insight of the future... With our walls being filled with screens and our lives being ultimately controlled by technology, we are at a point where it is almost impossible not to engage with the virtual world. It seems as if the only way families communicate when they sit in their living room together is during commercial breaks and also to ask where the remote possibly is...

The Box Just Got Bigger… and Curvier???

  Wouldn’t it be smart to refurbish something that 96.7% of American households have and spend an average of 5 hours on every single day... You would wouldn’t you? Because Samsung did just that by introducing their 105-inch UHD curved TV. As consumers we seem to like the biggest, the brightest, and the newest invention. With this TV we have the option to use it like a flat screen TV or with a click of a button we can arrange the curvature of the television, adjusting the screen to be able to watch it in every angle. With it’s gigantic size, sleek design, custom stand, and “crazy bendiness” it is told to hit the market this year! It is amazing isn’t it? Or is it? I think my great-grandfather’s aunt was right, we do have much to fear!
   Beginning with the first ancestor of television, the Octagon made by General Electric in 1928, displayed images on its three-inch screen. This was a sort of invention only the wealthy could afford to have. Later it was pampered and transfigured, developing into a square box shape with the 1936 Cossor Television. While it was being advertised in a brochure: “Radio—its thrills, its interests, increased one hundred fold by Television . . . Radio is blind no longer. The most exciting running commentary is made immeasurably more thrilling when you can SEE too!" It was revolutionary to be able to not let your own imagination wander but allow a screen to do it for you. The TV was later renovated to being round, it grew legs at one point, and then it hit the 21^st century…hard… it grew almost instantly going from Plasma, to LCD, to LED, and then to OLED, it grew bigger in size, it grew brighter in content, it grew smarter than your average box, now in 2015 its ready to curve too? Being 105-inch in size, as compared to the first 3-inch television, much has changed along the way. With this new technology, people are in doubt as to where to actually put the TV, maybe take out that dinner table then it might actually fit…

So... Now What?

Although first introduced in January of last year, Curved UHD TV, has yet to come out and appear in the market. Depending on the price I believe it will either be a big seller among the array of TV sets that are coming out, or not have that many buyers if it turns out to be very expensive. While it was presented at the Consumer Electronic Show, it's estimated price was, $120,000, which is a price that will take us back to how it was in 1928 all the way up to the end of the second world war: when only the wealthy could afford such a “fancy toy”. While we are in the midst of comparing today's technology to older ones, it is important to point out that 10 years after the end of WWII, nearly two-thirds of Americans owned a television. The number of TV sets that were in use in the U.S. rose from 6,000 in 1946 to more than 12 million by only 1951. It is insanely amazing for such an invention to find its way in so many households in a nearly a decade. In accordance with absurdity, we might find it ridiculous that there are people waiting for such a high-tech expensive curving HD TV. Like a fly that approaches the brightest light it can find, consumers of this era and like that of the older era, will eventually stick to it the television's fascinating beauty. But again like a fly that is attracted by a bright light, but in the end is stuck to it, I believe that those who buy this technology will be just like that fly: stuck to it’s beauty letting life pass them by.

   Through the past century so much has changed in terms of our priorities, while in 1913 something like this would have been unimaginable in the minds of many we are in 2015 and every year we are enhancing the product that we have devoted so much of our lives to. Although the device essentially stayed the same, the way we use it is changing throughout the years. As compared to when it was first invented, with only five major channels being available to the average time- consumer on television, the ideology of TV has evolved. With the advent of such mediums like Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu watching TV shows,  movies, documentaries, and everything of your choice on demand has made it to the point where it has isolated people even more. When there were only five channels everyone only had access to the same TV shows and news stories, the family could come together and watch the same channel and therefore share the same interests. Now with on demand television, every member of the family can access it on their own technological device, be it a cell-phone or television.  Now there is an unofficial global figure of approximately 15,000 channels airing on television and many TV shows that people have access to. Also, there was only one place people could watch the news, with Edward Murrow's See it Now, there are now many news medias with so many different view points that are affective in separating different people based on their mind set. I believe that although television has stayed the same, the people who view it, what they view on it, and how they essentially engage with it has evolved to make us come apart as individual. Apart from our colleagues, our friends, our family. With all this in mind, I presume we will never be able to enjoy a hot cup of tea as closely and as connected as once my great-grandfather had back in 1913, I believe we are essentially loosing ourselves in this new realm of technology.

Here Kid, Don't Talk To Me Talk To The iPad...

        

       A week ago we had some family friends over at our house in Jacksonville, as I was looking after the kids (as they were going berserk around the house) I saw their constant begging for their parent’s cellphones. It was as if they did not know how to act without it when they were not home, they were unaware of the fact that they could somehow play together without the need for a tablet or a cellphone. As they went crazy around the house one of the mom’s told me to open a cartoon so they would not disturb their conversation. As I opened a Disney cartoon they all sat patiently looking blankly at the TV screen and did not budge out of their seat until it was done. It was like a miracle just a minute ago these kids were going wild around the house and the next thing you know they’re glued onto the TV screen unaware of their surroundings and each other, as  Claudia Raleigh, a mother of three,points out in a New York Times article it was almost like a “life-saving device”.

           

          It is rather interesting how parents of this generation are choosing to raise their kids, although the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) recommends that children under two have no screen time, 38 percent of kids in America use smartphones and tablets (according to a study done by Common Sense Media). Jim Steyer, the founder and CEO of Common Sense Media reports, "We're seeing a fundamental change in the way kids consume media," Steyer said. "Kids that can't even talk will walk up to a TV screen and try to swipe it like an iPad or an iPhone." From birth we are letting children get exposed to such mediums that affect their brain development in a way that is devastating their sensory processes. Once they are exposed to such technology they expect reality to be the same way. In seconds as they press different buttons on their tablet screen images pop out of nowhere providing their brains with millions of information that they process, in this sense they expect everything outside of their technological realm to behave in the same manner, and become frustrated when it does not work that way.

            I believe we are disrupting our mental mechanisms in such a way that it is altering how we view the world around us. Nicholas Carr in his novel “The Juggler’s Brain” provides us with such information that explicates the damaging alterations that our brain ultimately goes through as we adapt to this world of technology, as he points out, “As the time we spend scanning Web pages crowds the time we spend reading books… the circuits that support those old intellectual functions and pursuits weaken and begin to break apart.” Therefore as we instantly adapt to this new line of technology and online surfing to get what we want when we want it, our abilities to do things like thinking deeply secedes slowly. It makes our brain lazy put in its simplest sense.

       For my first two years of high school I went to a charter school in Atlanta, Georgia where our school provided us with a laptop that we were allowed to keep for a school year, therefore instead of textbooks we would carry around our laptops and instead of handwriting essays in literature class we would type them and so forth. Now that I think about it and after reading Carr’s article I presume that I hated this experience. It is painful to read from e-textbooks and it is definitely not the same as feeling the pages in your hand and looking at the words physically and not through a screen where there are a billion things disturbing you, as Carr describes it “Try reading a book while doing a crossword puzzle; that’s the intellectual environment of the internet.” The internet and reading online diminishes the traditional sense of reading from an actual text, we are more likely to skim passages on a screen and not read them fully and comprehensibly as we would have if we were provided with the text. It is as if the information flies from your mind as you finish reading what you have to because you are so focused on such getting to the point of the article.

        Therefore as our multitasking skills do strengthen the things around us easily distract us. We get a glimpse of the studies that Carr talks about, such as the study done by Cornell researchers who compared the attention and comprehension of students listened to the lecture while on the web and on their laptops with those students who gave their undivided attention to the lecturer. Through the results we could see that those who were not multitasking scored higher on the lecture quiz than those who were on their laptops. As Carr illuminates, “The Net is, by design, an interruption system, a machine geared for dividing attention.” therefore “when we’re online, we’re often oblivious to everything else going on around us.” As proved correct by this experiment the web has changed our average classroom, the way we receive information and the way we research what we want to know.

     We are trained to interpret the world through a technological window when we are born in this generation, therefore ultimately being robotized to structure our minds in such a way to view reality as a messed up jargon and prefer the images provided to us instantly by the devices we hold in our hands. We come to ignore the needs of our children and just shove our tablets in their hands to be busy and not bother us. We are ultimately blinded and cannot see the negative effects of what this new medium is doing to us, to our lives, and to our family structure. Therefore it is time to wake up and see what we have led ourselves into.

What Do We Have Time For?

         In 1939 after the first demonstration of television a New York Times review of it was as follows, “The problem with television is that people must sit and keep their eyes glued on a screen; the average American family hasn’t time for it.” The effect we see today is the complete opposite. The average American watches 5 hours of T.V. a day, this is 5 hours of life that is waste staring at a box that provides them with nothing but images. And this “box” is usually placed in the most valuable and visible part of the living room. As we complain today saying “we have no time to do anything anymore” we become blind to the fact that we waste a majority of our time staying “glued on a screen”. So much has changed, as TV became almost an object of ‘worship’ in which we have come to spend more time mindlessly with it then we spend with actual people.

        Marshall McLuhan, a canonical media theorist, wrote in his book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, “TV will not work as background. It engages you. You have to be with it… A great many things will not work since the arrival of TV”(pg. 6), as compared to radio which serves as “background-sound” TV is a screen that literally sucks you into it’s contents and does not let you go because it provides a new line of thinking for the individual, it provides a new medium of imagination that the individual would rather not have thought about.

         As Sherry Turkle had pointed out in her Ted Talk, although we seem to be connected we are brutally alone, we are physically there but mentally we are farther away from each other then we have ever been. I imagine we will never be able to enjoy a hot cup of tea as closely and as connected as once a family would have before the invention of all this technology, I presume we are essentially loosing ourselves in this new realm of technology. I believe like McLuhan had pointed out as the development of the medium in which we communicate enhanced we have lost touch with the reality of communication. From telegraphs, to radios, and then to TV right in our houses we have gotten on a path that is not leading us the right way. 

              Mcluhan points out, “The effect of TV…is hard to grasp for various reasons. Since it has affected the totality of our lives, Personal and social and political, it would be quite unrealistic to attempt a ‘systematic’ or visual presentation of such influence.”(pg.11) I agree with McLuhan as it is definitely impossible to elucidate the effects of such a concern within our lives because as we are living in this era of technology the world has never seen before and as we see it as an improvement upon humanity we become blind to its negative aspects. Since it has affected the “totality of our lives” we cannot see the major effects of something if we are within it. Although it has essentially been a positive step in politics because we are able to see the presidential candidates and we are exposed to news that we would have rather not heard of from across the world, it has been a step down in the ladder when it comes to viewing it from a social and personal perspective. As Darine points out in her own blog she explicates the ideology of the media changing and shaping our environment, although it has positive effects in our lives it is still negative in the sense that we are shaping our lives on such medium.

        Towards the end of his piece, McLuhan pinpoints his ideology of explicating the children of this era to being a TV child he says, “The TV child is an underprivileged cripple”(pg. 29). Although he utilizes such harsh language as “underprivileged cripple” he is correct in his identification of the children of this realm of television. The reason for his ideology is his concern for this generation because ultimately they or I should say we grew up in the glorious image of what the TV had to provide us we were deprived of such wandering imagination, and therefore we are unfruitful in our nature to be creative and in that sense we are “underprivileged” and “crippled”. “Pervaded by the mosaic TV image, the TV child encounters the world in a spirit antithetic to literacy.” McLuhan acknowledged that TV had a profound impact on the way children viewed the world around them, not just what was on it but essentially what was in it, it’s lack of detail and it’s “amplification” of everyday senses provides a world that is much exaggerated in its form. Through this medium the images and the content we are exposed to leads us into growing up in an ‘unrealistic’ state of mind.

      It is ultimately upsetting to see what we have brought our selves down to, we are downsizing our own intelligence and human abilities by being hooked to an inanimate object, therefore it is time to stop and think if we are on the right track!