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Television is 100 years old today

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Re: Television is 100 years old today

#61

Post by zwischenzug »

jedberg wrote: post #2

This is interesting. John Logie Baird did in fact demonstrate something that looked like TV, but the technology was a dead end. Philo Farnsworth demonstrated a competing technology a few years later, but every TV today is based on his technology. So, who actually invented Television?

Whatever we all television now, television then was literally "vision at a distance", which Baird was the first to demonstrate (AFAIK).

The TV I have now in my living room is closer to a computer than a television from when I grew up (born 1975) anyway, so the word could mean all sorts of things. I mean, we still call our pocket computers "phones" even though they are mainly used for viewing cats at a distance.

Re: Television is 100 years old today

#62

Post by burkaman »

Deanallen wrote: post #35

> Television, he notes, has introduced the phrase "now this", which implies a complete absence of connection between the separate topics the phrase ostensibly connects. This idea is why I always take media with a grain of salt. The decontexualization makes it easy for people to be reactive towards something, that isn’t logical Eg “now this is why is good/evil” People call me the devils advocate when I point out these…

Isn't "now this" just a synonym for "moving on" or "next order of business" or "apropos of nothing"? I don't think the concept of jumping to a completely new topic is something TV introduced.

Re: Television is 100 years old today

#63

Post by jedberg »

tadfisher wrote: post #55
shevy-java wrote: post #51

In a way television was kind of cool. I loved it as a child, give or take. Nowadays ..... hmmm. I no longer own a TV since many years. Sadly youtube kind of replaced television. It is not the same, quality-wise I think youtube is actually worse than e. g. the 1980s era. But I also don't really want to go back to television, as it also had low quality - and it simply took longer, too. On youtube I was recently watchin…

I remember when we organized our lives around television. On Saturday mornings it would be cartoons (including the first full-CGI television shows, Reboot and Transformers: Beast Wars), Wednesday evenings would be Star Trek: TNG, Fridays would be the TGIF block of family shows (from early-to-mid-90s USA perspective here). It felt like everyone watched the same thing, everyone had something to talk about from last nig…

This is something I've been lamenting for a long time. The lack of shared culture. Sometimes a mega-hit briefly coalesces us, but for the most part everyone has their own thing.

I miss the days when everyone had seen the same thing I had.

Re: Television is 100 years old today

#64

Post by sosomoxie »

CRTs are peak steam punk technology. Analog, electric, kinda dangerous. Just totally mindblowing that we had these things in our living rooms shooting electric beams everywhere. I doubt it's environmentally friendly at all, but I'd love to see some new CRTs being made.

Re: Television is 100 years old today

#65

Post by marcd35 »

funny story - I had a job recently that installed DirecTV setups for mostly retirement communities. On almost every service call, I'd show up and 95% of the time, without fail, they'd either be watching Fox News, CNN, or CNBC. It was quite depressing to see 24/7 news stations had completely consumed their lives and became the majority of topics of conversation while I was there.

I eventually quit the job. I decided I didn't want to be a part of making our society worse by installing these devices that were causing manufactured outrage, hate, and selective truth telling.

Soon after I left, I found a book while thrifting that came out in 1978 called "Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television" by Jerry Mander. I laughed at the title and couldn't believe someone was already arguing for the detriments of TV before I was born. It's very well written and the points he makes are still relevant today.

From the wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Arguments_for_the_Elimina...

Mander believes that "television and democratic society are incompatible" due to television removing all of society's senses except for seeing and hearing. The author states that television makes it so that people have no common sense which leads to...being "powerless to reject the camera's line of sight, reset the stage, or call on our own sensory apparatus to correct the doctored sights and sounds the machine delivers".

Mander's four arguments in the book to eliminate television are:

1. that telecommunication removes the sense of reality from people,

2. television promotes capitalism,

3. television can be used as a scapegoat, and

4. that all three of these issues negatively work together.

Re: Television is 100 years old today

#66

Post by fecal_henge »

sosomoxie wrote: post #64

CRTs are peak steam punk technology. Analog, electric, kinda dangerous. Just totally mindblowing that we had these things in our living rooms shooting electric beams everywhere. I doubt it's environmentally friendly at all, but I'd love to see some new CRTs being made.

Extra dangerous aspect: On really early CRTs they hadn't quite nailed the glass thicknesses. One failure mode was that the neck that held the electron gun would fail. This would propell the gun through the front of the screen, possibly toward the viewer.

Re: Television is 100 years old today

#67

Post by ghaff »

jedberg wrote: post #63
tadfisher wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember when we organized our lives around television. On Saturday mornings it would be cartoons (including the first full-CGI television shows, Reboot and Transformers: Beast Wars), Wednesday evenings would be Star Trek: TNG, Fridays would be the TGIF block of family shows (from early-to-mid-90s USA perspective here). It felt like everyone watched the same thing, everyone had something to talk about from last nig…

This is something I've been lamenting for a long time. The lack of shared culture. Sometimes a mega-hit briefly coalesces us, but for the most part everyone has their own thing. I miss the days when everyone had seen the same thing I had.

I don't know if it's good or bad but, outside of some megahit films, people mostly don't regularly watch the same TV series. I don't even have live TV myself.

Re: Television is 100 years old today

#68

Post by sodafountan »

jibolash wrote: post #56
josalhor wrote: post #53

On the one hand I look at some tech lifecycles and feel everything moves so slow (cars, energy and train infrastructure etc..). And then I look at other stuff and I cannot phantom that someone who was born 100 years ago saw a TV (or media electronic screen) from conception to modern miracle. As someone in his 20s I can't imagine what I'll see in the next 80 years!

Unfortunately technological progress is not always exponential. An human landed on the moon 56 years ago and people back then thought space travel would be a routine thing today so it'll be interesting to see how things go

It's certainly not routine, but I'd say the privatization of the space industry that's unfolded over the last few decades is significant progress.

When I get depressed and look out at the world, I'm actually amazed at what I'm living through—the internet, space travel, electric and autonomous cars, smartphones. It's really amazing.

Re: Television is 100 years old today

#69

Post by cf100clunk »

sosomoxie wrote: post #64

CRTs are peak steam punk technology. Analog, electric, kinda dangerous. Just totally mindblowing that we had these things in our living rooms shooting electric beams everywhere. I doubt it's environmentally friendly at all, but I'd love to see some new CRTs being made.

The shadow mask system for colour CRTs was a huge improvement that thwarted worries about ''beams everywhere'':

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_mask

Re: Television is 100 years old today

#70

Post by timonoko »

I saw TV first time in 1957. Finland had no TV transmitters, so programs came from Soviet Estonia. I distinctly remember watching romantic Russian film with a catching tune. Perhaps named "Moscow Lights"?

How this is even possible that I remember all this, because I was 4 yrs old?

Gemini knows:

The Film: In the Days of the Spartakiad (1956/1957)

The song "Moscow Nights" was originally written for a documentary film called "In the Days of the Spartakiad" (V dni spartakiady), which chronicled a massive Soviet sports competition.

The Scene: In the film, there is a romantic, quiet scene where athletes are resting in the countryside near Moscow at night.

The Music: The song was sung by Vladimir Troshin. It was intended to be background music, but it was so hauntingly melodic that it became an overnight sensation across the USSR and its neighbors.

The Finnish Connection: In 1957, the song became a massive hit in Finland and Estonia. Since you were watching Estonian TV, you likely saw a version where the dialogue or narration was dubbed into Finnish—a common practice for broadcasts intended for Finnish-speaking audiences across the Gulf of Finland.

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