Radio was something that could be enjoyed almost anywhere in the house. Sometimes it was so gripping and vivid that I stopped what I was doing and just listened.
“Before we had television, we had radios like this one. It used to tell us stories, and we made the pictures in our heads, like with books.” I have been trying to explain the concept of radio to my daughter. I wanted to show her how I grew up, what the difference was.
I retrieved my old radio from my mother’s home after her death and held it in my hands. It still works. It can pick up the FM spectrum and all the stations but I don't use it. Now I have a box with gaudy lights, a bass booster and huge speakers to do that job. Even so, both the radios have the same fault: they don’t tell stories anymore.
Like the stations that my old radio tuned into, like ‘Squad Cars’, ‘Tracy Dark’, ‘Jet Jungle’, ‘The Kowalskis’ and ‘Men from the Ministry’, my old radio will stay silent. I won’t bother with batteries. I’ll find a way to get the rest of the dust off it, and put it in a place where I can look at it and remember.
There is a lot of talk about television, and all that it has supposedly given to us. I cannot get enthusiastic about it. Every evening, the tube goes on, at a certain time, and I turn my back to it, invariably.
The shows on television are pretty much on par with the radio shows of my childhood: cheap thrills, two-dimensional stories that rely more on pace and plot devices than on depth or thought-provoking ideas. The difference is in the pictures that leave no room for imagination.
Radio was something that could be enjoyed almost anywhere in the house. Sometimes it was so gripping and vivid that I stopped what I was doing and just listened. Television routinely collects the family into one place and switches conversation and imagination off, in state that is best described as ‘entropy made real’.
For a long time, I tried to fathom why my mother avoided television. Now I can explain it to myself with absolute conviction.
“We didn’t watch DVDs every day or even have television,” my explanation to my daughter continues. “We went to see a film at the cinema once every week or once every two weeks.”
The bigger difference between ‘then’ and ‘now’ is the saturation that we have attained with technology, and particularly entertainment technology. It seems that the need for entertainment has become so pervasive that our only means of survival is to buy more technology, even to put displays in cars, as if the passing of the scenery and the people and life along the roadside were unworthy of our attention.
Sets have to become bigger and clearer, or more portable. New outlets and devices are emerging. Thanks to the latest advances, we can now watch our favourite shows and video clips on three-and-a-half inch screens during lunch breaks, in coffee breaks and over weekends when we are out of our homes.
Years ago, in my pub, there was conversation and games of dice. The introduction of television put a major crimp in that. The gambling machines followed and conversation died down to sporadic whispers. Not surprisingly, after a while the crowd diminished as well. I can only think that the regulars began to stay home and watch TV there.
Will it be worth going out to the dam, to a dinner or a braai if all that we do is spend the time we should be together, watching portable devices?
For my part, I have the comfort and security of books. Story time was how my daughter learned the vital skill of ‘making pictures in her head’. Call it ‘mommy and daddy radio’. But there is a generation that is growing up with little more than a desire to do nothing but watch pictures on a monitor.
The inability to visualise leads to a passive approach to thought, a dependency on others to ‘draw the pictures’. It becomes a major barrier to dreams which become visions and lead onwards to world-changing ideas, plans and interaction, another example of creeping entropy.
In the many schemes of ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’, I would side with those who don’t use the television to fill their heads with the thoughts of other people. They are the people who will rise.
A note to contextualise this. The first TV broadcasts in Namibia began in 1981 or 1982. People used to go on holiday to watch TV. I'm not that old.
No comments:
Post a Comment