Day 38 - "History all at once and not at all"

I conveniently forgot to mention this earlier: last weekend I binged on a DVD & a trip to the cinema. TV is such a distant object in my day to day life that I'm getting lax about how I deal with its cousins. Fortunately, unlike the last time I watched a DVD, urges to watch more haven't popped up in the aftermath.

If you go to this site and search for a definition of TV, this is what you get:

TV is a multifarious instrument which is best described as `history all at once and not at all'. It is by and large alienating, yet we still see it as the locus of the global village. It is empowering if only because all the messages are accessible, and we decide when to watch and what to watch...

Today, cable TV stations broadcast sitcoms and commercials from earlier decades that play as ironic relics from a crude and naïve culture. The medium continually allows for a re-broadcasting, re-visiting, and re-contextualizing of our cultural moments.

Some critics argue that television birthed the Postmodern condition, creating a realm in which we are alienated from each other personally, but recognize each other in the fears and stereotypes writ large across the small screen. The massive reach of televison broadcasting gives rise to a monitoring of our collective consciousness that has been matched by no other art form. As we watch, we all share the same pair of eyes. We see Rodney King on a L.A. highway; aerial shots of SWAT teams escorting students from a mid-western school; fictional dramas played out between beloved characters; game shows won by people eerily similar to ourselves...

We see footage of actual events, but it is a record of life as witnessed by no one: film editors construct the sequence of events and our understandings of their consequences, and voiceovers are our storytellers. Indeed, television is a telling representative of the patchworked psyche of our modern state.