A television (1926- ), also known as a TV or telly, is a box with a window in it called a screen and in it you can see and hear something that is happening far away or (if it has been recorded) long ago. The word comes from tele, which is Greek for “far away” and vision, which is Latin for “vision”.
Although the first working television was built in 1926, it was not till the 1950s that they became common. People no longer have to go out to see a show or a game. They can watch it at home on their television.
Over time the screens have been getting larger and the box part lighter. Perhaps by the 2010s they will be little more than large screens that you hang on the wall, like a painting.
We take it for granted, but television is a wonder: No one before 1800 would have predicted such a thing. And even in the late 1800s Jules Verne thought it was at least a thousand years away. It does sound next to impossible: How would you even begin to build such a thing?
The physics that it is built on was unknown till the 1800s. It was then that we began to understand the inner nature of light and lightning. With that knowledge it was possible to build the first televisions a hundred years later. There are still people alive who remember a time before television. No, I am not one of them.
Although it was an invention that no one could predict, it has not had as great an effect as you would suppose. It has not freed us from the chains of ignorance the way the printed book has. But sometimes television is hard to beat: When man first walked on the moon it was seen on television round the world. The same with the shock and awe of 9/11 and the Fall of Baghdad to the Americans. But for the most part all you see on television are games and shows and game shows.
This is why Newton Minow and Mark Goodman and my father called it the Vast Wasteland. (McLuhan, on the other hand, says that this all misses the point and that the change will be great. More on him later.)
Minow may have been one of President Kennedy’s great and good, but he did not understand television. That is why a lost ship on television was named after him (on “Gilligan’s Island”). The great and good will never understand television.
Nor did I till I was down to the last of my money and had to take whatever work I could find. I was a fact checker for a magazine in New York and by the end of the day when I got home my mind was incapable of anything more serious than – than what was on television! Then I understood.
See also:
Abagond 
Leave a Reply