The Death of Television

By Crispin Sartwell

It's time to get nostalgic for television.

Here at our house we have two televisions, two computers, and five children. And I had a little realization about two months ago: the television was being abandoned. Meanwhile I couldn't battle my way through the children to the Dell Inspiron or the iBook. The kids were instant messaging. They were downloading MP3 music files while they listened to Cypress Hill on Real Player. They were messing with their AOL profiles. They were maintaining their webpages on Goplay. They were shopping for skateboards and sneakers. They were playing the Sims and Backyard Baseball.

The computer all at once had reached critical mass as the screen of choice. Compared with everything you can do on a laptop, the television seems downright dull.

I myself am less a television addict than I once was. During the televisual era - that is up until last June - I watched a lot of public affairs programming. But now I find myself reading the newspapers online, complete with video clips. I was on cspan.org and cnn.com during the political conventions, picking my own camera angles, trawling for realtime chat with regular folk and pundits. Two weeks ago I was checking out NBCi's Olympic site, which had video, audio, email diaries of athletes, and viewer polls, though some of the links didn't seem to work right. When I can get to the computer, I check my e-mail about once an hour. My monthly bills from amazon.com and bibliofind.com would leave you aghast, as they do my wife.

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As television became more and more universal in the nineteen fifties, radio ceased to be central to American cultural life. Where once the family gathered for The Shadow or Amos 'n Andy, radio was now used as a background for other activities, like housecleaning and driving. There was a lot less money in radio, so the medium turned to cheaper programming, especially news and recorded music. The medium didn't die but it became vestigial.

Soon people were reviling television and yearning nostalgically for radio.When I was a kid in the sixties, my parents often complained that where radio required imagination to picture the events being described, television viewers were passive: they just sat there soaking it up. Before long, television was being blamed for every social pathology from violence to declining test scores to obesity.

In 1993, a study - published in the journal Pediatrics and widely reported - showed that when children watch television, their metabolic rate slows. The people who performed the study seemed ready to declare a state of emergency, as this slow metabolic rate could be linked to pathological pudginess and a general reduction in alertness and productivity.

However, to say that your metabolic rate has slowed is simply to say that you have relaxed. That's what television as a medium was breathtakingly good for; the fact that you just sat there soaking in it might have disturbed those who demanded continual furious productivity from children, but it sure was good after a long day in the classroom. And television was a great babysitter: kids would sit down and shut up. They might even learn something as they watched Sesame Street or Animal Planet. I'm not sure how people raised children without it.

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Television replaced the radio (which had replaced perhaps the hearth or the dinner table) as the center of family life. Families gathered around it as around a fire. Theorists will soon be pondering the social capital embodied in the TV tray, a late twentieth-century artifact that, like so much else that we're leaving behind in our furious quest for "progress," appears now bathed in the glow of an idealistic vision of the American family. What kept us together as a culture wasn't anything quaint like the Constitution, but rather that we all watched Dallas.

Before the advent of cable, television provided a unifying cultural experience that no other medium has ever matched. We all watched the Kennedy funeral together, the demonstrations at the Democratic convention in Chicago, the moon shot. And we basically watched the same coverage of these events, began our thinking about them by receiving the same interpretation.

But finally there was so much money in television and television was so central to the American psyche that, ironically enough, it began to splinter into a much more anarchic and fragmented environment. As identity politics replaced the universal liberation movements of the sixties, BET and Lifetime arrived on our screens. Soon there were twenty channels, fifty, four hundred.

Under the pressure of this profusion, the networks started to run low on cash. More and more programming has become relatively cheap programming: news magazines, "reality" shows, infomercials, home shopping. And though television is still capable of delivering entertainment that holds the attention of the nation - as in Survivor - overall its cultural centrality is in decline.

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The passivity of television is both its great asset and its great drawback. The interactive environment of the computer is more absorbing and in some ways more useful. For example, my children are writing and reading all the time now as sentence after misspelled and radically abbreviated sentence goes into the cyber-ether and returns. They are engaged in real communication (mediated in a fun way by machines and programs) with other human beings.

As television added the visual dimension to the experience of media, the computer adds interactivity and communication. And every month, the range of activities and the ease with which one can engage in them gets increases a little. Delivery of video on the web is not as good as on television but is continually improving. Connections get faster and more reliable. And programs can be quickly and almost universally disseminated: it would be hell to be a suburban or rural teenager these days without AOL's instant messenger; it's absolutely essential equipment.

So first of all, television (like print) is merging with the computer. Already there is no clear distinction, and the idiot box that just sits there receiving signals is quickly going the way of the dodo. With onscreen program ordering and "personal television" software packages (such as TIVO) that allow you, as it were, to assemble your own television network out of your favorite shows and watch them however and maybe whenever you want, television has already gone interactive. Cable television and the internet are coming in over the same wires.

Many of the most popular web sites are connected to television networks, such MTV, Nick, Disney, and MSNBC. And all of these are merging the two media with streaming video from their shows on their websites and scrolling e-mails or chats on their television screens. In the not-too-distant future, the web sites will be more popular than the networks. And eventually a lot of the current cable networks will fold.

As television becomes absorbed into the internet., it becomes obvious that there's infinitely more to *do* with a computer than there is with an idiot box. So the kids prefer it, and so do I.

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But there are still times when television is exactly the right thing. When my ten-year-old Vincie drags his bleary self downstairs at 7:30, Hey Arnold is just about the perfect transition from sleep to school. When I've had a long day at work and can't focus anymore on the printed page or the inbox, I like to absorb some videos on CMT or MTV2. I jump rope to the beat of CNN's Morning News or C-SPAN's Washington Journal. I've got NFL Sunday ticket and frankly, though I could deal with the games interactively in chat rooms, real-time stats, and online trivia quizzes, I'd rather just sit there with a bowl of chips.

I like sex and violence (oddly, I don't seem to be alone), and television is still a good, fairly inexpensive place to get them, especially now that I can order movies off the DirecTV satellite with my remote. In fact, we owe television a cultural debt of gratitude for permanently associating sex and violence in the public mind: now they go together like bacon and eggs or Simon and Garfunkel.

Television will survive, showing videos and sports, news and wild animal attacks. But the Televisual Era is over; it ended this past summer when my kids abandoned the electronic hearth for the laptop. So now is the time for all good pundits to yearn for wonderful old days of the idiot box and condemn the terrible influence of the internet on our young people.

Or they could take my advice: shut up and enjoy it.

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