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Writer's Block: Revolutionary Thought
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Teevee.
Television.
As a sampler and some-times addict of that potent drug I can't help but try and explain.
Commencing academia babble now:
Benedict Anderson wrote about Imagined Communities, the idea that through a non-existent or imagined commonality we establish the community in which we live.
He speaks mainly about the print and literature in order to exemplify this, because News papers are the most reproduced form of literature in the world today - think of those scenes in 1940's and 50's movies in which the frame is filled with men in fedoras and all of them reading the New York Time or the London Times, etc. Are they looking at one another? Do they communicate with each other? Most likely they can barely recognize each others face, but they are reading the same thing and they imagine or consider what they think about they are reading to be social consensus, despite the fact that they most likely would never talk about what they are thinking to another person.
That's an imagined community.
Television takes it one step further in my opinion.
News papers are relevant until the next edition and it takes conscious thought to read and absorb the information and data printed on a page.
Television by its nature, allows you to switch off your cognitive operations and just sponge in what is going on as you watch the screen.
Television has replaced religion when it comes to values as well.
Once in order to know what was right and wrong you listened to pulpits to tell you who was good, who was evil and what one should believe.
Now television tells us who is vilified, what is beautiful, how we ourselves can be like the idols which we worship on the flat screened alter.
Instead of family prayer, a family will congregate around the television and watch the episode of whatever programme we are addicted to at the moment.
And we obsess about it, no less than people used to obsess about god while those who control and create the discourse make some kind of profit off us "sheeple".
Teevee.
Television.
As a sampler and some-times addict of that potent drug I can't help but try and explain.
Commencing academia babble now:
Benedict Anderson wrote about Imagined Communities, the idea that through a non-existent or imagined commonality we establish the community in which we live.
He speaks mainly about the print and literature in order to exemplify this, because News papers are the most reproduced form of literature in the world today - think of those scenes in 1940's and 50's movies in which the frame is filled with men in fedoras and all of them reading the New York Time or the London Times, etc. Are they looking at one another? Do they communicate with each other? Most likely they can barely recognize each others face, but they are reading the same thing and they imagine or consider what they think about they are reading to be social consensus, despite the fact that they most likely would never talk about what they are thinking to another person.
That's an imagined community.
Television takes it one step further in my opinion.
News papers are relevant until the next edition and it takes conscious thought to read and absorb the information and data printed on a page.
Television by its nature, allows you to switch off your cognitive operations and just sponge in what is going on as you watch the screen.
Television has replaced religion when it comes to values as well.
Once in order to know what was right and wrong you listened to pulpits to tell you who was good, who was evil and what one should believe.
Now television tells us who is vilified, what is beautiful, how we ourselves can be like the idols which we worship on the flat screened alter.
Instead of family prayer, a family will congregate around the television and watch the episode of whatever programme we are addicted to at the moment.
And we obsess about it, no less than people used to obsess about god while those who control and create the discourse make some kind of profit off us "sheeple".
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Religion is defined (well, by Otto anyway) as that which provides a numinous experience, that lets us get outside ourselves. As a result, it can function as an opiate - if we can escape beyond ourselves, there's less incentive to fight being oppressed. With the written word, however, people started articulating and recording their individual experiences, and this created a fundamental shift in how they thought about the world (think of the secularization hypothesis), and they started sharing their individual experiences. A big part of what I got out of Anderson's work was that widespread literacy allowed for the formation of communities because people who couldn't communicate orally in the past were now able to do so verbally. Television retains that quality partly because body language and vocal tone communicates a lot even without words, and partly through dubbing and subtitles. At the same time, t.v, particularly reality television, goes back to much of the role played by religion - viewers can identify with the people on screen and thereby both escape themselves and bond with a larger community of viewers. Reading, for all that it can foster "imagined communities" and/or be a form of escapism, is a decidedly individual activity, whereas both religious observance and television watching, even if done alone, are all about feeling something other than your individual emotions.
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#2 I love geekery monologue style, what's a blog without it?!
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Also, I'm not sure what you mean about cult movies...?
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On what grounds do you claim that tv watching is mainly about "connecting to something bigger than yourself" in a way novels aren't? I don't understand.
Cult movies are good examples of motion pictures that were turned into (theatrical, ritualistic) close resemblances of written texts. They are broken apart, taken out of context, paraphrased etc - fans treat them the way one traditionally treated a written text. Also, think of tabloids. No connection to bigger than life celebrity life?
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But... why? They are so interconnected. You connect to someone, you begin to emulate them in some ways, to think like them about some things, no?
Based on my personal experience, I think that books can definitely do the former but don't do the latter, whereas television can.
That's because your experience doesn't include living in pre-tv times :).
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Soviet lit played this role for many people for a long time. For Russian intelligentsia the books on the shelf are to this day a very clear status marker (which already has to do with the iconic and symbolic meanings of the book, not with what it says).
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