I would not be so impolite as to ask for evidence on such claims. But if
we're dealing with opinions, my opinion is that television is neither
good nor bad but thinking makes it so. And as incomprehensible as that
quote is even to me, I'll explain that I agree that much of TV is a
wasteland, but it also contains much of value. One of my daughters fell
in love with Carl Sagan, for example, while watching his TV programme
"Cosmos" at age five and ended up with a degree in astronomy (insert
standard correlational disclaimer here).
I think my kids would have been disadvantaged growing up without TV, at
least PBS and Canadian stuff like De Grassi, David Suzuki, and Passe
Partout. I wouldn't have minded if they grew up without certain TV--but
when we banned cartoons, they just went over to their friend's house to
watch. I doubt that they were scarred for life by their exposure.
Stephen
I'm not objecting to the television set or its promise, or its manifestation
in one given program or another. I haven't owned a TV since 1975, and my
children don't watch TV, but when I watched DVDs of HBOs The Wire I thought
they surpassed by far any English-language crime film I'd ever seen. So its
not the medium I'm worried about but the message, plain and simple,
delivered in commercial television (which includes some supposedly
non-commercial, but in fact, commercial, television).
I think the term "wasteland", suggesting as it does an arena of wasted time
and meaningless escapism does not accurately convey the malevolent arena
that television actually is in terms of its content. Again, my opinion
only.
Come to think of it, the television as medium also has problems, because it
is always available, always streaming and one show leads to another. It is
built to captivate you and keep you sitting there, regardless of content.
However, this aspect of TV isn't much different from the internet, I
suppose, although the internet is at least interactive.
Paul
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