The Box

The other evening Mrs H and I were watching a television programme, something we rarely do now. It was ITV so there were lots of weirdly infantile adverts where actors pretend to be maniacally happy about clean floors or somehow they manage to appear cool and superior while driving a dull, mass produced car.

Apart from the ads, what struck me more forcibly than usual was how crappy television really is. Not a hundred percent crap, but close enough to wonder if we should ever have allowed the goggle box into our homes at all. Perhaps we should have left it in the showroom because it did far more damage than we knew.

What damage would that be? It seems possible that we have drifted away from the spoken and written word towards the moving image. Something which may be an example of that occurred during the recent Facebook outage.

Out of interest during the outage I skimmed through a fair number of comments left at various websites, comments which appeared to have been left by Facebook users impatient to see the issue resolved. Numerous comments may have simply reflected Facebook argot but they also seemed to reflect an unwillingness to string words into sentences.

Even when words were strung together, they usually had to reflect a familiar image. Words are often supposed to do that of course, but the importance of the image seems to have grown. The image directs the words even when it should be the other way round. Television does it all the time.

Of course it is possible that television changed nothing fundamental, it merely plugged itself in to what was already there and made the image into the dominant theme of our lives. In which case the question is answered, we should not have allowed television into our homes and our lives.