Live Television

I’ve seen a lot of memes, jokes and videos lately about smartphones hogging attention, causing accidents and absurdly, preventing people from talking to each other. While I agree that they are one of the most double-edged technological inventions so far and often wish I’d never got one and become a dependent, I’m finding myself far more disturbed by the change that the digital age has made to one of our much older electronic distractions.

There was a time when TV was an extravagant luxury. A person would be fortunate indeed if they knew someone that had one, even if it could only display a crackly, fuzzy, intermittent black and white picture. When they eventually became available to a wider audience, they were used to transmit huge events – moon landings, world championships, royal weddings, whatever might be deemed important or newsworthy in the society of the time. Documentaries eventually gave way to entertainment shows for families to spend their quality time on. The soap operas that initially only aired for half an hour each week built up to several instalments competing for airspace every weeknight, followed by impossibly long omnibus editions to see addicts through the weekend. The variety of programmes, foreign imports, number of channels and broadcasting times continued to increase until TV stealthily became an inescapable and integral part of life.

Now, with the advent of wi-fi laptops, tablets, aforementioned smartphones, digiboxes, media players, streaming and a wealth of speedy downloadable content from across the globe, I genuinely fear that the western world is blindly and obediently entering some Orwellian state of totalitarianism.

When I was growing up (which wasn’t that long ago), anyone sad enough to collect VHS copies of favourite shows to watch consecutively and repeatedly were labelled as geeky, socially deficient saddos, and encouraged to get out more and find a real hobby. Any twenty-something who told their friends they’d spent Saturday night sitting in watching telly would be pitied and/or ridiculed. How times change. In the ‘enlightened’ 21^st century, a couple sitting down to 6 consecutive episodes of the same series on their night off would probably be considered a date.

TV has undergone a magical transformation from something people did when they had nothing better to do, to something people choose to do above all other things. It’s deemed freakish to NOT have one in the house. I know a few people who don’t own a TV, and from the reactions they get from others when they tell people this, they might as well be saying they have serious psychiatric disorders and enjoy depriving their children of vital stimulus and education. Oh, the irony.

I’m not an innocent in all this, I do watch TV myself and I do have favourite programmes which I have been known to get very enthusiastic about, but I try to incorporate this into my life in a healthy way by following them one at a time on a weekly basis, and not allowing any of them to take over my life. During many lengthy periods I’ve lived without a TV, I’ve remained happy, felt liberated in many ways and definitely been more productive. Even with a TV in my bedroom, I still find time to write, read, exercise, go outside a lot and interact with real people.

 I find it off-putting that the occasional well-written, acted and produced shows capable of providing great insight, or provoking genuine emotion and thought are milked dry by greedy distribution networks, endlessly imitated and far outweighed by the mindless drivel and cheap cannon fodder. I won’t have the TV on even ‘in the background’ if that’s all its hundreds of channels can offer me. I’ll just find something else to do. There’s a real world out there.

What saddens me the most is the willing acceptance of this as our new culture. It’s actually become a preferred lifestyle choice. People don’t find common ground any more, they find mutually agreeable viewing material. Small talk and social media posts centre around it. I rarely see some of my friends more animated than when they’re extolling the virtues of Netflix or whatever US series they happen to be in a serious long-term relationship with at the time. I despair at the use of Cbeebies as a primary source in child development and behaviour management, and of grown adults sacrificing so much of their own precious lives in exchange for the contrived experiences of fictional characters.

One of my closest friends recently expressed a strong desire to procure himself a media pod – which seemed to me to be some horrific, Matrix-esque virtual reality device in which a human being can voluntarily incarcerate themselves to stare at screens for hours on end and endure a slow, electronic lobotomy. Another showed me a diary she’s started keeping of the numerous shows she is currently following simultaneously, as it’s becoming too difficult for her evolved, intelligent brain to keep track. I confess that I myself have succumbed to the temptation of downloading a show from another country so I can watch it a whole 24 hours before it’s due to air in my own. It’s looking increasingly like manufacturers will continue developing the sound and image quality of their overpriced equipment until their complexity exceeds anything that basic human senses can hope to process. I don’t want to consider where it will all end.

Maybe soon it will be normal for everyone to live in individual pods with only a carefully catalogued digital menu of noisy, colourful, crystal clear distractions for company; oblivious to the fact that it’s keeping them quiet, quelling their energy and lulling them to sleep on a much grander scale than the Disney channel does to unruly toddlers. Maybe by then it will be too late to wake up and reclaim life.

Call me over dramatic, but if Orwell’s nightmare prophecy taught us anything, it’s that if there is hope for the future, it lies in the masses. Only we can change it, but we probably won’t.

Because the Walking Dead starts again soon, and there’s a Breaking Bad spin-off on the way.

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