How we all learned to stop doubting and love our TVs
July 28th, 2007 • Business, Television
I lost a Saturday afternoon recently, having lazily turned the TV on to be greeted by the opening credits to Network. The next two hours vanished: I was only 13 when the Sidney Lumet film was released, and had somehow managed to miss it in the intervening 31 years.
It is one of the most powerful uses of a movie camera I have ever witnessed, and will subtly, permanently budge your view of the world. Peter Finch’s quasi-religious monologues to camera will stay with you, whether to want them to or not. And you’ll certainly never view television the same way again.
So I stopped again this afternoon, this time reading Shelly Palmer’s reasoned rant over at the Huffington Post.
If you live in the United States, you have watched approximately 30,000 hours of television by the time you are 18 years old. This factoid is important when you consider that the “conventions of television,” our willingness to suspend disbelief for our own enjoyment of the medium, are learned behaviors. People unfamiliar with television usually walk behind the box to see how the people got in there and wonder why they are so small. Over the course of our childhood, we have come to accept the images on TV as “real” and sometimes we forget what is really “real” and what is fake “real.”
Shelly Palmer: You Mean TV is Fake? - Media on The Huffington Post
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