Television, The Failed Storyteller: YouTube, the Storyteller of our Times
Sep 16th, 2007 | 5 responses
Wasn’t television supposed to be The Universal Storyteller? Back in the 50s when televisions were the sizes of refrigerators and Univacs were the size of three room houses… television…. It was so promising wasn’t it?… education for everyone, the egalitarian programming of television would become ‘the electric storyteller’… a set of endless wisdom books inside the box.
Like a book, the many leaves of Television would magically flutter open, coming to life across the screen by simply plugging the cord of the mysterious box into an electrical outlet.
We would be engaged by Television.
We would be educated.
We would be lifted
and we would learn useful
and important things.
…but the reality was, we would become television’s roadkill, and yet, as though television were an electronic drug, we would become zombie-ized by television at the same time, increasingly being led around by its timing, not our own, its demand that we be present before its one glass eye at the appointed time, night after night.
Regarding ‘brainwashing,’ it is advised that to disturb the captive’s sense of time, to disorient them accordingly, is the direct way to control them.
As TV programming deteriorated into ‘son of clone of the already cloned’ many of us began looking like Death driving a sofa through the living room whilst eating saltines and peanut butter… and watching a pale blue glass screen flicker in time with our heartbeats. We found less and less jing in the deal.
Why did those in charge of content think we could never get enough of the TV spilling out insulting women who surely seem to have stingers growing out of their rear ends … and their poor husbands who are ever harangued about being too slobby, inept, stupid and disorganized… and their children who appear to be pretenders to the throne of ‘tiresome scathe.’
Did we ask for that, really?
Really? If your mother keeps making you cheese sandwiches for lunch even though you say you don’t like them, can it really be said you are colluding in your own aversive reactions?
Yes, many argue, there are still some ‘good’ ‘things’ on television. True. But why do so many people ‘browse without buying.’ Click click click. Like the ‘full-but-empty-refrigerator’ syndrome: Open the door, look, lots of food, but nothing to eat. Close the door. Open/close, open/close. Nada, nothing.
Whatever there is left on TV that is ‘good and nourishing’ seems like the thinnest tiniest sliver of delicious food in the midst of shelf after shelf of tin pans packed with white lard.
How can that be, when humans are the most inventive creatures on the planet? Who’s methodically annihilating artful imagination? And at what age, and in which places? And who are the volunteer stranglers? Who are the real marauders, by name?
Yet, I hope we can be encouraged about the return of a storyteller for our times… for I remember this one crisp and clear event one night about a year ago that told me the new Storyteller of our Times is near. I was watching the evening news on one of the alphabet networks. The camera panned in on the well known news commentator who was sincerely acting as though he’d just discovered primal fire.
His discovery? YouTube. He’d never heard of it before, and he was marveling over this tiny film clip, creative and fresh, made and uploaded by ‘a citizen.’
I remember his colleague’s remark on air in response, and especially the panic at the edge of his voice as he said completely outside of his usual helmet-haired persona, “There go our jobs.”
It was one of those moments where you could read the newscasters’ thoughts as though they were written on their foreheads… they had just realized they were witnessing the slow motion implosion of an era… their era that had grown so cloistered. They realized in that instant that they were not standing at the cutting edge, but at the long-dead and brackish center.
But this so-evident turn in the road, is not a time of celebration but one of caution. For as promising as television began, YouTube now too proceeds in such promise. But the same temptations, bypasses, detours, shortcuts, twisted ambitions in some, and mal-appetites will also show up and try to calcify, appropriate and hobble what is now so very free and alive.
So maybe, just maybe as YouTube incubates inside the various corporate uterii at Google– despite Viacom trying to force a miscarriage by kinking the blood flow…a blood flow that has in the past, before lawsuits by Viacom, depended on only the slimmest portions of Viacom’s TV content, such as a minute or two of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report… that surely such ‘flow’ could be arranged by simple agreement—
…and if all governmental and cablecast types are not allowed to carve up the Internet ingress and egress into fiefdoms as they’ve carved up television media… and if we remain vigilant about those who are plotting at this very moment to claim the entire moon as their very own just because they deem it so…
then we will have kept a refuge for one of the major story-givers of our times. Think of it, a storyteller that is one of the most huge proportions and the most inclusive EVER known to humankind… a carrier of stories that flows outward from a flickering blue glass screen too, but this time carrying real passion from its many creators to find and fill their many one-of-a-kind patrons…
just like the bards of old … traveling overland with just a staff, a wineskin, a bindle bag, unimpeded by boundaries, telling to whomsoever without qualifying them or ourselves first, engaging whomever has need or want, whomever is hungry for any one of the 6 billion stories in this world that carry real jump, real meaning, real moisture… after decades of eating dust.
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5 Responses to “Television, The Failed Storyteller: YouTube, the Storyteller of our Times”
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You provide interesting and salient obsevations, De. E, but I see it somewhat differently.
It wasn’t TV (or the governemment) that degraded its content, It was us – that old consumer demand.
I think the same thing is happening with the Internet, the YouTube and all the latest gadgets.
Gadgets and inventions are just things. It’s how we use them that shapes their nature. The same people. us, that contribuited to the ratings (and cloning) of TV shows browse the Internet and read blogs, bringing some things to prominence and dooming others to live on the margins.
When we sat staring at the TV screen, at lwast we sat as families and groups, someimes talking to one another. Now a lot of the talking is done anonymously with strangers while we sit with out gadgets alone.
Things don’t shape our world. We shape our own world by how we use things.
One way we are shaping our new world is to substitue the illusion of community for actual community. Neighbors sitting and talking on a stoop while drinking beer might disagree about politics, but there ia real person to person connection, including the touch of a slap on the shoulder, say.
Now we ignore those around us to talk on the cellphone with an absent someone.
It’s a new world, but whether it liberates us will depend on whther we liberate ourselves and our minds and not on the inventions themselves.
very thoughtful domajot. And you are right; they are just things. I remember when people were excited about atomic energy, and then nuclear energy, high hopes about how these could be put to good and wondrous uses….. those’ things’ didn’t work out the way many had imagined…
back then, it could have been bec. the populace was so naive/amazed by such things, that they had no idea how to direct or influence development or uses.
your point about loss of sensory relationship with one another (cant hear tone or timbre or temperament on the internet… although sometimes it seems inferred at least… that is quite so. In the summers I hold ‘front porch storytelling’ nights (on my porch, lol) and old people (like me)… and families and teens and college students and babies and dogs come. Just to laugh out loud with others seems like such good medicine for us all. The dogs laugh too. They do!
I wouldn’t include thoughtful people, inc you, in the ‘couch potato set’ who just swill in whatever production pp at stations pour with pollution into our homes. Just a teeny reference: Since the call 10 years ago from community public radio people, I’ve witnessed the absurd struggle as just ordinary people like you and me, have tried to get low-power radio licenses.
We’re up against people who have money to burn, and well paid lobbyists, and ‘special interests’ who want to keep a leg up on top of everyone else… the utter stonewalling ‘those in charge’ at government agencies do, who they really serve, the complicity of the ‘big stations’…
I think the couch potatoes have their share of the flattening of TV’s potential, but also truly significant numbers of people and groups have protested the programming as well as the processes involved… and met utter resistance.
It appears, and this is just my two cents worth, that if we OWNED a network, then we’d have a chance at bringing change.
It might be little chicken-eggie, I am not sure, but it could be a lot of people passively accept crummy TV programming because they have tried to let their desires be known, but have been rebuffed, and think it’s no use trying to get programming to change. Or else they complain at the water cooler or in the truck on the way to the site, and don’t know where else to go or who to join up with in order to press for change.
in psychology, there is a well-documented malaise that comes from feeling one has little or no power.
Community radio, however, is very alive across the country (different than npr) though they struggle for dollars and have nearly all volunteer staff…one of my favorite stations is on the Navajo reservation.
One of the reasons, I think the internet and blogs and YouTube etc, are amazing is not only because they allow any of us to say our piece; but also, I think first of all about Comandante Marcos. The story of his village in Chiapas and even the current horrible state of things in Oaxaca would never have come to us; we’d never have been able to help, if it was all left up to the TV and radio stations in Mex and the US.
I agree, there’s a bunch of trivia and flat boring stuff as on TV/radio. However, I can go to you tube and learn (I just watched a wonderful film of Chinese paper cutting, and another one about blood evidence… ) but there’s little to learn from TV/radio. There, one often has to wait a day or two at least for something scintillating to come along. Those well-crafted programs stand way way out.
Yet, you are on exactly the right track, I think. Community that has that tactile quality is so valuable too. I think we should all have front porch storytelling.
and, ah, I realize this is awfully long, sorry… I’ll stop here, for both our sakes. lol
dr.e
Once upon a time, a long time ago, when I was a little girl, there was a universal plea from little children to their parents. Four little words that would sometime be answered, towards the end of the day, as night approached and the world grew still and attentive. Skin fresh from bathing, in soft clean bedclothes with still damp but newly combed hair, an excitement full of possibilities,
“Tell me a story”
Do today’s children find that magic that we were given?
How many children today use those four little words and associate them with something exciting, a gift, a treat, a special belonging something?
“Pass me the remote”
Doesn’t have quite the same ‘ring’ to it.
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