March 12, 2105--Remotes

Neil Postman, a good friend who died a few years ago, in 1984 wrote a prescient book about our current age--Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business.

Long before the proliferation of social media, which enable all of us to put ourselves on the air and potentially become famous (minimally among our "friends"), he spoke about the cultural impact of television. How with its almost universal availability, we could so turn ourselves over to amusements that, though it wasn't contributing to our literal death, it was having such a negative impact on our lives that by submitting ourselves to its lure we were participating in bringing about our own spiritual death. It would render us mindless.

I can only imagine what he would say about Tweets, Instagram, and such.

If you have been following me here, you know that though I share many of Neil's concerns I am attempting to understand this brave new world, looking for the positive things these media and new capabilities are bringing about. Doing this, I remind myself, as Neil once noted, that when the Gutenberg Revolution occurred, once books became widely available, traditionalists at the time decried this new power, feeling, as many again are, that it would destroy all that had been achieved during previous centuries when royal families and the Church held sway. And of course they were right. But as we look back on that powerful paradigm shift, we see things very differently. Most of that change was for the better--individuals became more powerful and as new ideas spread were able to fight to shrug off various forms of oppression.

But this is to be about television. Actually about the remote control, with little emphasis on the remote but with stress on the control.

When remotes first appeared in the mid-1950s, they led to a generation of couch potatoes. One could stretch out on the sofa, a bowl of nuts or pretzels balanced on one's chest, and change channels and adjust volume without having to drag oneself to the TV set.

A corollary benefit was that by switching from channel to channel (and there were at the time only three to ten depending on where you lived) one could get lucky and avoid seeing any ads. While I Love Lucy was taking a commercial break one could switch to Gunsmoke or Leave It to Beaver. All from a prone position.

Faced with this remote problem that empowered viewers to roam from program to program, since TV is more about making money than putting shows on the air, executives figured out a way to cooperate while competing for ratings--they agreed to air content and commercials in identical program blocks. So now when you switch around from Hardball on MSNBC when it is taking a break you find that so is OutFront on CNN and On the Record at Fox. There's nothing to watch except ads for Humira.

And as gender relations continue to evolve, when in the past men dominated the use of the remote, now more woman want equal access to it. One of our ongoing spats is about who get to control the remote control. When we're in bed together, Rona wants to catch the latest episode of Girls while I want to watch Al Jazeera America.

In the city we have just one TV so I am thinking that maybe what we need is two remotes. His and Hers.

When we get back to town I'll check with Time Warner to see what's possible. Maybe there is one designed especially for men (pretty much in the current masculine Freudian shape) while there's another, perhaps rounder, for women.