According to Ellen Tomson from Pioneer Press, “living without a TV is the right program”, or at least that’s what she has concluded while following the story of a family that decided to shutdown the signal, for good. Although the article mentions some of the undeniable influence of mass media on the rise of global brands and a general attitude of consumerism, this post is not a criticism on TV. What I find interesting is the potential shift in one aspect of our global culture.
Without elaborating on the history of television, I believe we can all agree that it is a fairly persistent ocurrence across all latitudes, and has been a powerful factor in shaping our behavior as a society over the last few decades. Marshall McLuhan (see sidebar) pointed out well ahead of most that while the print had forced people into the abstract world of letters and words, accelerating the diffusion of ideas, television was going to reverse the process by leveling access to culture by means of simple images, creating along the way a univeral language of very concrete symbols, enabling what he called the “Global Village”.
If TV has been so engrained in our culture, what does the BitTorrent revolution (around 2004) means? What can we infer when corporations decide to take action by targeting TV Download Sites (mid 2005)? They were obviously nervous about how much attention was being taken from them. It took a gutsy move by Apple (Oct 2005) to admit that there was no going back to the television set and that content producers had to find ways of leveraging the Internet as the new distribution channel. While we can debate that downloading shows to a computer is pretty much the same as watching them on television, I believe these are the early attempts by some enterpreneurs to end the addiction to TV. We should only expect this trend to grow as a new aspect of our global culture as the alternatives and mechanisms become available across all layers of society.
When talking about culture, I’m more concerned in the mundane tasks that fill up our days without us noticing, deeply programmed in our brains. Awareness of how these habits evolve and the impact they have in our society is the first thing to do if we pretend to be able to shape our future.
Update: Wonderland cites some statistics that are supporting the end of television thesis.
[...] the end of television I had ventured into a world where we were no longer forced to sit in front of the television set at [...]
[...] I try to lead this debate from my own experiences as an immigrant, and without falling into the usual anti-globalization traps. But this is not a political blog: In the process of researching Global Culture I’ve come across a very diverse group of topics, ranging from soccer to tourism, from BitTorrent to Lonelygirl15, from hackers to outsourcing, from ethnosphere to the noosphere. [...]
[...] In the end of television I had already stated my position around the dimishing participation of TV in our daily lifes, but mentioned that we still needed the mechanisms to make the few tricks used by the techno-savvy elite available to all layers of society. If you can imagine YouTube with advanced interactive features that allow each user to follow a specific story as in those well-produced DVD’s that contain extra footage at the click of your remote, you’ll realize the mechanisms are becoming simple enough for a larger group of people to consume them. Expect your TV to be very lonely. [...]