“A supermarket of surrogate experience”

One of the perks of living in a house where people have an almost unhealthy inability to throw things away, is that along with the piles of useless things, there are often some interesting things kicking around too. This morning I noticed pile of Life magazines from the 1970s sitting on a bench in the living room. The September 1971 issue promised a special section on “TV: The First 25 Years.” Wild. Maybe one day we’ll get “A quarter-century of Facebook.”

The article was eerily…not prescient, but something similar. The main gist of the piece is the isolation and segregation of TV viewing. I suppose TV hasn’t really changed much in that respect (texting your votes to American Idol does not a community make), but so many of the other technologies we have developed since 1971 have expanded, rather than reeled in, that isolation. Not all of them of course – Skype and cell phones and things connect us with real people we know in real life – but a lot of things keep us apart in ways we didn’t used to be apart. Riding the bus to work every morning for the past two years surrounded by 15 people all with ipods in their ears, who couldn’t hear my “Excuse me, can I get by?” much less any effort at friendly small talk, made me a little sad. I thought these bits were interesting:

“But as always before, to see a performance was to share an experience with a visible audience. At a concert, or a ball game, or a political rally, the audience was half the fun. What and whom you saw in the audience was at least as interesting, and often humanly more important, than what you saw on the stage. While watching TV, the lonely American is thrust back on herself. She can, of course, exclaim or applaud or hiss, but nobody hears except the family in the living room […] And while myriad island audiences gather nightly around their sets […] with more and more two-TV families, a member of the family can actually withdraw and watch in complete privacy […] A new miasma – which no machine before could emit – enshrouds the world of TV. We begin to be so accustomed to this foggy world, so at home and solaced and comforted within and by its blurry edges, the reality itself becomes slightly irritating.”

The article goes on to wonder if “TV-democratized experience” can “carry us to a new society, beyond the traditional democracy of learning and politics.” The answer given is, in part that “We must find ways outside TV to restore the sense of personal presence, the sense of neighborhood, of visible fellowship, or publicly shared enthusiasm and dismay.” Fair enough. The other part of the author’s answer is a bit different: “We must try every institutional and technological device—from more specialized stations to pay TV, to cable TV, and other devices still unimagined.” Pay-per-view as the answer to society’s problems! Oh, those wacky 70s.