Raymond Williams, in his article The Technology and the Society, brings up several good points about technology. He uses television to point out that technology can have multiple effects on our lives, even effects that we do not think about. He discusses how television had several different effects, like that it altered the way news was spread and it had direct effects on our family and cultural life. He also brings up the point that not only did the television alter our lives, but it also had a direct effect on history. Williams then goes on to talk about the history of television as a technology and the history of the uses of television.
Williams points out that there are two different views on television. One is that if the television had not been invented, then certain events would never have occurred. The other view is that if television had not been invented, then we would still be doing the same thing, just through different means. While both of these views are valid, I would have to agree with the latter. I think that even if the television had not been invented, we would find another way to keep ourselves entertained. For starters we would still have the radio, which would provide us with almost everything the television provides us with. It also depends on how we define the television. If we define it as the broadcasting that we see when we turn on the television, then the computer would have taken its place as the main means to our entertainment. If we define the television as the screen or the image that is projected to us, then we would probably still rely on books, newspapers, and the radio for entertainment.
Depending on how we defined television, if we choose the screen definition then this would greatly alter other technologies. For instance, we would have no computers, no iPods, etc. Pretty much anything with a screen would not exist. This would create an entirely different society than we know, since we rely on our computers and everything else for so many things these days. The television has definitely altered our lives and will continue to alter the lives of everyone for as long as there is cable being produced or something being made with a screen.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Your focus on screens is an astute one, as some would argue that the shift from television to computer use is hardly drastic given the continuity of the screen as interface. Anne Friedberg writes about something very similar--the window--in her book The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft. For those interested in the cyclical nature of new media change, Lynn Spigel also writes about the mass adoption of television in the late 1940s and early 1950s in her book, Make Room for TV. Between 1948 and 1955, in fact, 2/3 of American families purchased a television!
ReplyDelete