TELEOVISION
Robert Bruce Kelsey |
 |
MINE IS PERHAPS THE LAST GENERATION TO HAVE GROWN TO CONSCIOUSNESS
without being constantly bombarded with electronic imagery. I was born in an era when ceilings and walls in public places were adorned with cobwebs, not video monitors showing music videos and CNN. Phones then were single toned, Stonehenge-like affairs with cords to tangle up while listening to Grandma's monologue, not portable digital cameras with web interfaces and instant messaging. For those who could tolerate the miserable reception there was television, but for most of us growing up in my Boston suburb the only images we saw were on billboards, posters, and in the occasional comic book questionably obtained from the corner pharmacy.
As I remember it, a television appeared in the house just about the time I gave up believing in Santa Claus. I'm not sure if there was any direct causal relation between those two events, although it is tempting to believe there was.
After all, Santa Claus is a child's first encounter with Grace. Most of the year there are bullies, scoldings, shoe laces that won't tie themselves, influenza and chicken pox, busy streets to cross, and growing pains. But once a year, someone you don't really know works some kind of magic and comes down through the chimney your house doesn't have and gives you things you wanted. Better yet, Santa gives you things you never knew you wanted! A divine revelation for tiny hands, presents under the tree open to reveal a comforting, entertaining, playful world, in which Someone Cares.
On the other hand, television, for those who weren't exposed to it since birth at least, is a powerful hypnotic, capturing one's attention and forcing it into a narrow focus to the exclusion of all else. It controls your vision, perception, and thought, for it controls the content and the sequence of what appears before you on the screen of your mind. But for all that, TV "dramas" and sitcoms do not provide anything to do, there's nothing to play with there. TV entertains only by constraining, shutting out the rest of the viewer's world so that forgetfulness can for a time do duty for rest and rejuvenation. There is no gift here, no generosity, unless one considers the images of financial, social, or domestic success that the television programming has installed into one's neural pathways to be a gesture of commercial sponsor noblesse oblige.
In any case, whether Santa Claus was the victim of a chance encounter with Christmas wrapping on the top shelf of a closet in mid-July, or whether he was merely replaced by Ed Sullivan, I'll never know. I do remember that for a variety of reasons the TV and I amicably divorced by the time I was in junior high, and in the decades since I don't think I've logged more than a couple hundred hours in front of the tube. I'll be the first to admit that that has made me socially challenged. When you don't watch sports events or the latest cult series, when you miss the HBO showings and the MTV concerts, there's not a heck of a lot left to talk about with people whose heads and wardrobes and trinket boxes are full of such stuff.
In college and grad school, that didn't matter much to me. My social circle was pretty limited - mostly dead or dying poets and philosophers. But in the early '80's I found myself unemployed in my field through a combination of bad timing and no desire to become Freeway Professor of Humanities for a consortia of opportunistic colleges. Technology industries were in the throes of a hiring binge, consuming bodies with the gusto and abandon of children loose in a Penny Candy Shoppe. So I took "Ph.D." off my resume, pushed the tech writing I'd done, and for weekend after weekend I scanned the Sunday Employment Section, marveling like Miranda in The Tempest at the brave new world inviting me from its pages.
When I eventually hired on with a small biotech firm, I discovered that this world was neither brave nor new. I found myself surrounded by updated versions of the prom queens and redwhiteandblue greasers of my youth in the 1950's. Conversing with them was impossible. You couldn't get a word in edgewise in their blather about bonuses, stock, and job titles. You couldn't do anything with them after hours, for they always had to be dressed to be seen, they went only where they could be seen, they associated only with those who were rumored to have been seen with someone important. Sex, the apparent national pastime of the disco 70's, had morphed accordingly, and everything was sexy to these folk - computer chips, software packages, operations training manuals, cars, condo deals, job offers.
We know now that that was just the beginning of the high tech boom. It exacted a high price from those first settlers of Cubicle City. The long hours under bleach white fluorescents, in the minimalist air conditioning of the concrete catacombs that dotted every high tech highway, eventually took their toll. Divorces soared, livers rotted, waistlines sagged. But when these first out of the chute techno baby boomers burned out they simply became recruiters, and with sometimes barely disguised delight stuffed the next generation's Bill Gates wannabes into the ravenous jaws of IT Departments everywhere. It is a measure of the power of the Cinderella myth that high tech still has no trouble finding people willing to sit in the ashes of the dreams that motivated the previous tenant of their desk.
I can't deny that the late-20th century effort to bring technology to Everyman greatly benefited us individually, socially, and economically. (I remember what it was like to write a dissertation with stone and chisel, a.k.a. the typewriter.) But while technology has connected us it has also isolated us, from ourselves as much as from each other. Today we eke out our online deposit to online deposit existences staring at windows that have no view, sharing our thoughts with email text boxes and voicemail memory slots. Between the constant interruptions of phones, faxes, pagers, and PDA timers, there's no time for reflection and deep thought, no solitude amidst this technological isolation where we always have to be somewhere else than where we are and the closest we come to an embrace is often a hyperlink. Busy-ness has robbed us of vision by constraining our sight to what's immediately in front of us. It's a pity that we don't find more time to read.
When we warm the seat cushions with a book rather than a remote or mouse in hand, we're stimulated by intention rather than by images. In contrast to the screen where flat life forms are briefly displayed between commercials, we can find ourselves immersed in someone's mind, their era, their personal history. There's a certain feeling of ownership, too, for the book is but paper and ink until we invest the time to turn it into a novel full of characters and settings and events.
Unlike many of our other activities that are merely tasks, reading is an Act of Creation, a glimpse of the Grand Design, a reflection of ourselves. Worlds are made in the few hours spent with book in hand. Although someday they will be all but discarded in memory, like some past Christmas gift we have grown away from and tossed into the back corner of our closet, these novel worlds are ours still and ever. For we discovered them beneath the tree and within the wrapping, beneath the pages and between the lines, when we mingled our minds and hearts and hands with them, and were, for a time, in this world of our own craftsmanship, that Someone Who Cares.
CC