A Home With Five Windows

There was, of course, one in the living room, with all the furniture arranged around it.  There was one in my bedroom.  Mom and Dad had one in their bedroom, on a shelf near the ceiling so they could see it easily in bed.  There was one in the kitchen.  And, for awhile at least, there was one in the bathroom.

I grew up in a home with five television sets.

   

Television was supposed to strengthen the American family.  Hell, visionaries like Marshall McLuhan even believed it would organize the worldwide human family into one big, harmonious “global village.”  Television advertisements projected an image of social bonding—Father, Mother, two happy children (all white and middle class, of course) happily sharing high-quality drama, or cocktail parties with all the friends and neighbors (Mother in an evening dress serving drinks). 

Cecilia Tichi, in her 1992 book The Electronic Hearth, showed how television manufacturers consciously co-opted the imagery of the colonial fireplace hearth and transferred the warmth and fellow-feeling associated with it to this new technology.  Television was to keep the children home; it would even keep (or get) the husband home to be attended to by his loving wife.  And at the same time, it would be, in a phrase popular at the time, a “window on the world”, bringing news and sports from far away straight into the family room for all to experience.  We’d even eat our TV dinners together off aluminum and plastic TV trays!

Much of that did indeed happen.  I was “nourished” by my share of TV dinners and turkey pot pies.  But increasingly, I ate them in my own room, on my own TV tray, watching my own programs on my own television set.  And so did many others.  The great unifier proved, in fact, to be one of the great dividers.

One of the most important trends in current media is fragmentation and the dissolution of the mass audience.  Marketers have learned to target narrow demographic audiences with ever-increasing precision so that they don’t waste any effort trying to reach people who aren’t already inclined to buy, and this has driven most media, but especially television, to tailor offerings to niche viewers.  Cable and satellite viewers can spend 24 hours watching golf or cooking or home improvement or news and entertainment in a variety of other languages.  Five hundred channels and plenty on, for every conceivable (at least legal) taste and inclination.  And one result is that, as a society, we are fractured and polarized as never before during the Age of Media.  We simply have less and less to talk to each other about—and when we do talk, we have increasingly polarized points of view.

Despite the sexist, racist and classist images used to promote it, the electronic hearth wasn’t such a bad idea.  But as soon as it became possible to buy cheap sets, it became an impossible dream.  We could all gaze out of our own windows on our own worlds.

The TV I had in my bedroom.