Though inescapably a part of the TV generation, I was not raised with a television in the house until junior high school. This was both a parenting choice -- television was viewed as being lowbrow -- and a reflection of the Depression economics which underpinned every decision my mother and father made.
We came to have a twelve-inch black and white television only when my father and I took to going to his colleagues' home to watch football on the weekend. His colleague also had a small vineyard, and, well, it may have been that famous Dolphins-Chiefs triple overtime game, or maybe one of those epic Nebraska-Oklahoma clashes in the early 1970s, but at some point mom reckoned it was more dangerous to let me be in the car coming home than to pay the cable TV bill.
And so I came to watch all the Watergate hearings the summer of my unfortunate encounter with a chainsaw, and to join the balance of my generation in believing television to be a permanent and essential part of our media landscape. To recognize it, as a print guy, as the immediate evil we must defeat to keep our jobs (hah!).
And now I wonder...
I wonder because I have lately had scattered conversations with a variety of friends here in the small town where I now live, and to discover that many of them have already begun to live without broadcast/cable-cast television; and that many more contemplate doing so.
To some extent this is a reflection of the cost-cutting we all contemplate these days. But there is more afoot, I suspect.
They're not getting rid of their TV, they're just using it differently. They buy and rent and NetFlix movies and episodic TV series; and they watch "Grey's Anatomy" online a few days after it has aired. So the point is not that they wish their children not to be raised around television and its pernicious influences, though that's sometimes part of the picture. The point is that they have found different ways to control and ingest this media.
A few years back I observed a group of college kids, all strangers to each other, thrown into a work situation in which they had to cooperate, make alliances, and function as a team. My generation would have established commonalities by talking about music (or beer brand loyalties, say). This generation sorted itself through TV shows and separated out along those cultural lines (the reality fans coalesced in one group, comedy fans in another, and "Six Foot Under" viewers sorted themselves as well). It was a quick shorthand they all knew and unconsciously used.
Another group of thirtysomethings with whom I sometimes socialize (I'm nearly 50), a more homogeneous assortment who know each other well, are able to speak in a weird sort of "Friends" shorthand that is impenetrable to me, since I despised and never watched the show.
Now...when we finally got TV in the early 1970s, there were three networks, a PBS affiliate, and one or two independent stations that broadcast from Tacoma, the next town down I-5. My wife and I went exploring last night, and there are something like 200 channels on our cable system -- none of them premiums, I hasten to add -- and we still could find nothing worth watching. (Public Enemy was right, of course.)
I have written at some length about the demise of print, because that has been my focus for my entire professional life. But now I begin to wonder if we are watching the beginning stages of the demise of television. And, with it, the end of the common culture it has provided us by way of polite discussion fodder and, even, the odd bit of news.
Watching MSNBC (for example), I cannot help but notice the number of adverts which seem like they pay the network based on viewer response, rather than being straight airtime buys. (And, yes, I know it's the first quarter and advertising is always soft now; but I first noticed this during the fourth quarter.) It takes not a wit of sense to know that advertising is down in the present economy, and spread thinly over those several hundred channels vying for our attention.
Were it not for my addiction to sports and politics, my wife would win out and we would cancel our cable service. (That and the fact that our five-year-old is now entertained by "Me Or The Dog," even though we have two cats and speak with nothing like an English accent.)
Still, television, however brief its run may prove to be, has clearly provided us with a kind of national glue. It is hard to imagine the internet replacing that, but I shall be curious to read your thoughts.
The title of this brief flurry of thought comes from John Prine's song "Spanish Pipedream," the first chorus of which sings thusly...
Blow up your TV throw away your paper
Go to the country, build you a house
Plant a little garden, eat a lot of peaches
Try an find Jesus on your own
That comes some distance toward describing my present life. I wonder how broadly the sentiment extends these days. And so a poll...