Joe Six - pack and Sally Soaper would probably rather watch TSN or a major commercial network's movie of the week. For a number of my colleagues, as the previous reviews demonstrate, its flaws are endless. What follows are some respectful challenges that TVTV prompted when I thought about it in the context of my own interest in media history, especially radio. Early in the documentary Znaimer emphatically notes that television is the single most important development in communication since the written word. He gives the impression that instantaneous electronic information and entertainment were born shortly after he was, when, on an expanding early 1950s cityscape, Homo consumerus first saw the light of thetube.
Innocence is lost a second time and the world is again changed in unprecedented ways.
If we push the historical rewind button, we can easily conjure up a parallel scenario a generation earlier. Around the glow of the radio dial in the dark of the night families huddled for information and entertainment, as they once did around primeval campfires. More homes had radio during the Depression and World War II than had television in the 1950s. Those who lived as adults in both eras often remark that the transformation in information access and entertainment wrought by radio was as great, if not greater, than the one television instigated. Television and its culture, then, did not spring full - blown from the eye of Zeus, as TVTV suggests.