Watching television is a hoax from the moment you look at it as you're not watching something but rather you're looking at someone else watching something. The photographer thinks it's important you see a burning building or some such. This isn't something you observed but rather something someone else did and it's an important distinction.
If there are any young kids around, you will know the distinction already in how they will be fascinated by watching ants. They will squat right down and watch them to try to figure out just what all these creatures are doing and why don't they all crash into each other.
That fascination is one of the most delicious sensibilities humans possess, that things can enthrall us that much with no artificial interference of any kind. We shouldn't have to pay to watch television but rather they should pay us to give up our time for it.
Then the astronomer guy jumps up to say, oh, but they learn from these science shows. It's true people learn from them but not all that much and it's highly likely the retention of the knowledge will not be the same as if the student had pursued this knowledge for himself / herself. That last part is just a guess but it seems reasonable.
Even with the science show, you're still watching someone watching something else as the astronomer guy has something really intriguing to tell you about dark matter. However, your engagement is tempered with how long until the next break so you can use the toilet, when the hell will that phone call come, what's for dinner, etc, etc. This is fundamentally different from when you're sitting with some other resource trying to discover this thing for yourself.
(Ed: the gadget has not arrived yet?)
You guessed.
The observation is pointless as television will not disappear but some consideration of the destructiveness of it is still worthwhile. The destructiveness is not generic as NASCAR, naturally, has value. The reason is the level of engagement if you watch it because you can't get this without being at the track, there will be no other chance to see it, and you're highly interested in the details which create the outcome. In this general context, any sporting event has value in a televised medium.
On the other end of the continuum is an educational show which does not have some high-priced astronomer to bring some charismatic goodness to it. Achieving any level of engagement with an audience which is not highly-motivated to be participating becomes something of a marketing endeavor. There is more and more of this type of material but all of it has the same problem, a flat-screen video monitor just isn't that interesting.
There's really not that much destructiveness in time-wasting content such as reality shows as your specific purpose is to waste time with your fake friends. No-one is fooled that it's fake and it's an easy way to pass some time, probably while you're screwing around with something else. The flaw isn't in some moronic reality show as you chose it because it's moronic. The problem is why you don't get off your dead butt to be somebody but you chose that too. Right now I'm going to watch those idiot Kardashians do something absolutely pointless and then I'll get back to my own life in which things actually (gasp) mean something. It's really not destructive that these products are not all that engaging as the audience doesn't want them to be engaging anyway.
The biggest problem I see is with the educational shows and their unwilling audience. Trying to force engagement is a problem as the regimentation of the absorption of knowledge is an abhorrent thing to me. That looks like a taste of sci-fi movies in which the People of the Future plant someone in front of a machine with some electrodes attached to the head and they learn Everything in Physics in forty-seven minutes.
This goes beyond my reading in considering education in these ways as there's almost nothing which came to me which was taught overtly other than the most elementary and mechanical things. Everything else came from reading either from content which led to other content or suggestions from other people but always the engagement was the same. The question to the educator is whether there's a better way to do it, up to and including using some kind of hipster pharmaceutical to improve focus, retention, etc.
There's a class of people who call ourselves 'learnaholics' or some variation on that as we're always watching ants. You know who you are. If you're a young learnaholic, do understand you will never grow out of it. Even when you're old, you still get curious when you see an ant hill.
So the general premise to this rambling is that television does not foster curiosity and my concern is this extends to a lack of curiosity at the sociological level thus resolving why such immense hoaxes can be perpetrated easily on the public. It's not even necessary to identify a hoax as every reader out there likely has a view of the opinions of some other set of people and you think, man, how the hell can those yokels believe such rubbish.
(Ed: Hitler didn't have television to stifle curiosity)
Fair enough. Goebbels was adept at manipulating print media, radio, and movies. Of those three general classes, all except print media suffer from the same problem of engagement. Reading requires motivation is you have to think to do it whereas the others are passive.
This goes beyond my original thinking is my conclusion with NAZI era factored into it comes to the same thing about lack of engagement with educational tools.
Consider the success of print media with the Bible as that to a very large extent is what took that content to the world and affected unknown millions of people for life. It's arguably the most successful media presentation of all time and yet it's the most primitive in terms of the presentation medium. This argues in support of the level of engagement of people reading the Bible. Various television and radio programs exist but those are relatively trivial and are more for people looking for company than religion.
This stream is startling to me as it's pure heresy insofar as there is a large commitment in what I do musically toward combining that with lasers, etc for a visual component of this 'artistic entity' but it suffers from precisely the same problem as went previously. Watching it on a monitor cannot possibly be as engaging as it is for me to create it because of the nature of monitors. The music is not affected by that constraint as it's not on the monitor and has almost nothing to do with it except as a general sense of source.
(Ed: see, this is why you shouldn't smoke reefer while you wait for a delivery)
Yah, I shot my (cough) artistic vision all to hell in a few (i.e. a lot) short paragraphs.
If there are any young kids around, you will know the distinction already in how they will be fascinated by watching ants. They will squat right down and watch them to try to figure out just what all these creatures are doing and why don't they all crash into each other.
That fascination is one of the most delicious sensibilities humans possess, that things can enthrall us that much with no artificial interference of any kind. We shouldn't have to pay to watch television but rather they should pay us to give up our time for it.
Then the astronomer guy jumps up to say, oh, but they learn from these science shows. It's true people learn from them but not all that much and it's highly likely the retention of the knowledge will not be the same as if the student had pursued this knowledge for himself / herself. That last part is just a guess but it seems reasonable.
Even with the science show, you're still watching someone watching something else as the astronomer guy has something really intriguing to tell you about dark matter. However, your engagement is tempered with how long until the next break so you can use the toilet, when the hell will that phone call come, what's for dinner, etc, etc. This is fundamentally different from when you're sitting with some other resource trying to discover this thing for yourself.
(Ed: the gadget has not arrived yet?)
You guessed.
The observation is pointless as television will not disappear but some consideration of the destructiveness of it is still worthwhile. The destructiveness is not generic as NASCAR, naturally, has value. The reason is the level of engagement if you watch it because you can't get this without being at the track, there will be no other chance to see it, and you're highly interested in the details which create the outcome. In this general context, any sporting event has value in a televised medium.
On the other end of the continuum is an educational show which does not have some high-priced astronomer to bring some charismatic goodness to it. Achieving any level of engagement with an audience which is not highly-motivated to be participating becomes something of a marketing endeavor. There is more and more of this type of material but all of it has the same problem, a flat-screen video monitor just isn't that interesting.
There's really not that much destructiveness in time-wasting content such as reality shows as your specific purpose is to waste time with your fake friends. No-one is fooled that it's fake and it's an easy way to pass some time, probably while you're screwing around with something else. The flaw isn't in some moronic reality show as you chose it because it's moronic. The problem is why you don't get off your dead butt to be somebody but you chose that too. Right now I'm going to watch those idiot Kardashians do something absolutely pointless and then I'll get back to my own life in which things actually (gasp) mean something. It's really not destructive that these products are not all that engaging as the audience doesn't want them to be engaging anyway.
The biggest problem I see is with the educational shows and their unwilling audience. Trying to force engagement is a problem as the regimentation of the absorption of knowledge is an abhorrent thing to me. That looks like a taste of sci-fi movies in which the People of the Future plant someone in front of a machine with some electrodes attached to the head and they learn Everything in Physics in forty-seven minutes.
This goes beyond my reading in considering education in these ways as there's almost nothing which came to me which was taught overtly other than the most elementary and mechanical things. Everything else came from reading either from content which led to other content or suggestions from other people but always the engagement was the same. The question to the educator is whether there's a better way to do it, up to and including using some kind of hipster pharmaceutical to improve focus, retention, etc.
There's a class of people who call ourselves 'learnaholics' or some variation on that as we're always watching ants. You know who you are. If you're a young learnaholic, do understand you will never grow out of it. Even when you're old, you still get curious when you see an ant hill.
So the general premise to this rambling is that television does not foster curiosity and my concern is this extends to a lack of curiosity at the sociological level thus resolving why such immense hoaxes can be perpetrated easily on the public. It's not even necessary to identify a hoax as every reader out there likely has a view of the opinions of some other set of people and you think, man, how the hell can those yokels believe such rubbish.
(Ed: Hitler didn't have television to stifle curiosity)
Fair enough. Goebbels was adept at manipulating print media, radio, and movies. Of those three general classes, all except print media suffer from the same problem of engagement. Reading requires motivation is you have to think to do it whereas the others are passive.
This goes beyond my original thinking is my conclusion with NAZI era factored into it comes to the same thing about lack of engagement with educational tools.
Consider the success of print media with the Bible as that to a very large extent is what took that content to the world and affected unknown millions of people for life. It's arguably the most successful media presentation of all time and yet it's the most primitive in terms of the presentation medium. This argues in support of the level of engagement of people reading the Bible. Various television and radio programs exist but those are relatively trivial and are more for people looking for company than religion.
This stream is startling to me as it's pure heresy insofar as there is a large commitment in what I do musically toward combining that with lasers, etc for a visual component of this 'artistic entity' but it suffers from precisely the same problem as went previously. Watching it on a monitor cannot possibly be as engaging as it is for me to create it because of the nature of monitors. The music is not affected by that constraint as it's not on the monitor and has almost nothing to do with it except as a general sense of source.
(Ed: see, this is why you shouldn't smoke reefer while you wait for a delivery)
Yah, I shot my (cough) artistic vision all to hell in a few (i.e. a lot) short paragraphs.
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