We just got a TV the day before Thanksgiving, after more than a decade without one. In the two months since then, we have probably watched a total of ten hours on it, about five of them 30 Rock.
But watching the inauguration of Barack Obama on CNNHD, even with my laptop by my side, I can see that TV gives a different and somehow communal experience of news events, quite unlike the hunt-and-peek solipsist patchwork of (for instance) my TV-less website surfing on Election night.
That effect isn’t necessarily benign. When 9/11 unfolded, students who sat glued to TV for hours were more traumatized than those who talked with friends and family. And how about the 2004 “Dean scream”? Played more than 700 times with shocked comments each time, it emerged as the artifact of a crowd-blocking microphone, but not before torpedoing Howard Dean’s run for president.
In Wikipedia, there’s a policy we call WEIGHT — basically, an article should represent fairly all competing viewpoints, but without giving such undue weight to unusual views as to imply that these viewpoints are widely supported. In TV, there seems to be a policy that we might call DRAMA — for example, to give enormous over-weight to any person or event that generates exciting footage.
I can’t say I’m sorry to be watching hour after hour of the inauguration of Barack Obama. But I like it that I can keep working as I do so.
2 responses so far ↓
1 Neon Swan // Jan 25, 2009 at 12:33 am
We have a TV we’ve barely watched for the last 15 years (and we don’t have cable). I don’t expect it to work after February 17. But I’ve noticed exactly the phenomenon you describe. I get most of my news via NPR, or by reading the major papers, and it seems as though I get a completely different version of the news from the one I glimpse on the TV screens in the gym where I work out. There’s no mention of the Missing White Girl of the Month on NPR, or Britney Spears’ custody case, or anything like that–but that seems to be all I see on CNN. I didn’t even really understand the extent to which Rev. Wright was an issue in the presidential campaign until I finally watched Obama’s famous race speech on Youtube. (Not that I didn’t know it was an issue–I just didn’t understand the extent to which the TV news media was hyping it.) No, all I kept hearing about was what was going on in the Congo or the Gaza Strip, or the latest outspoken Russian journalist to be assassinated, or the development of China’s economy, or whatever–none of which I ever saw on CNN, because I guess it simply wasn’t titillating enough. And I had a completely different perspective on the presidential race than my mother, who was glued to the Tube 24/7.
But I did watch the debates and election night coverage on TV, though. Then, the communal experience was pretty cool (though I was also doing the hunt-and-peek thing obsessively at the same time, mostly switching between FiveThirtyEight and Kos the whole night on November 4). As for the inauguration–my workplace is pretty high-tech. We watched the ceremony on a huge screen in one of our labs on which we usually run high-resolution visualizations and wondered snarkily where Cheney’s fat, fuzzy Persian was. Much more fun.
2 Betsy Devine // Jan 25, 2009 at 2:11 pm
Yes, communal TV-watching with a real-life community is the greatest!
The Fisher-Spassky chess matches in particular are a happy memory: http://betsydevine.com/blog/2005/05/12/betsy-devines-roast-of-frank-wilczek-and-david-gross-at-princeton-april-30-2005/