Toobage

[Steven Koteff]

It seems to me that television is being de-emphasized as a central part of
the lives of many people (probably especially in groups that tend young,
college-educated, etc.) It's not that visual entertainment or even
television series are being de-emphasized, but that people are consuming
them in a way that looks increasingly different from what the experience of
cable television looked like for a really long time.

People are spending more time on the internet. Advertisement is tending in
this direction. In terms of TV entertainment, I have no cable service, not
even basic. I have a tube with a streaming device that gets me Netflix,
HBOGo, et al. So my engagement with the world via television consists much
more of substantive narrative (that is, of *art*) than it does of overt
30-second advertisements, of channel surfing, of watching things
accidentally//because nothing else is on. This is new for me in my life but
I think I am probably not alone here.

This means that my access to the pulse is different. TV being more
art-centric (even if a lot of it is slick corporatized entertainment) does
have the potential to render complicated things in a less absolute and more
nuanced way, which is good. It also means that when I consume news, I am
choosing to do so, exercising a bit more agency over what I consume than I
did when my options were maybe a dozen cable channels. And I am attracted
to more nuanced takes on the news, I like to think, but.

Of course the bad part of this is that cable television is becoming ever
less nuanced. And people who don't consume cable TV but instead choose what
kind of news and how much to read have access to more un-nuanced outlets to
get their news from than ever.

It sort of seems to me (as someone who lives in Chicago and interacts
mainly with young people who have college degrees and are not impoverished
or really at much risk in their daily lives) that the general trend of the
country is actually toward liberalism, toward irony (in a good way), toward
tolerance, if not toward nuance, but that, in response to this, the part of
the country that feels itself being left behind is really digging their
heels in. And they are the primary ones paying any attention to the old
model of television/news, so forth, and so they are the ones the news
companies are marketing toward.

Cable TV isn't the dominant portrait of American life anymore, I don't
think, to the extent that there is one. It's just gonna take a while for
the public to catch up to that fact. As long as people still think it is,
it sort of will be, in a de facto way.

Hopefully this all evolves. I think about that old MLK thing about the
moral arc of the universe being long but tending toward the good.

Also I watched *The Case Against 8 *recently and at the end Ted Olson, I
think, offers this Solzhenitsyn quote: 'The line separating good and evil
passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political
parties either, but right through every human heart.'

On Wed, Dec 9, 2015 at 3:30 PM, David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/its-too-late-to-turn-off-trump-20151209?page=2
>
> It's not an accident that Trump's attention span lasts exactly one news
> cycle. He's exactly like the rest of America, except that he's making news,
> not following it – starring on TV instead of watching it. Just like we
> channel-surf, he focuses as long as he can on whatever mess he's in, and
> then he moves on to the next bad idea or incorrect memory that pops into
> his head.
>
> Lots of people have remarked on the irony of this absurd caricature of a
> spoiled rich kid connecting so well with working-class America. But Trump
> does have something very much in common with everybody else. He watches TV.
> That's his primary experience with reality, and just like most of his
> voters, he doesn't realize that it's a distorted picture.
>
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