Posted for Jesse Sawyerr

A Dive into the Television set.

            My television almost seems to pose itself as something essential to my existence. A creeping feeling of dread, doom, and loneness settles in fifteen minutes into the television set being turned off. The television as a device has a astounded the human race with its gravitas, charm, and connective powers. Televisions possess gravitas through television shows that pull you I emotionally with a story. A T.V show can charm you with a delightful sequence of scenarios that comfort the view and lull them into conformance. The connection that a person can have with their television is almost ephemeral in nature, since so many people make television make it a part of their daily routine. All these claims of the television casting a magical spell over humanity is to prove that the television set will terraform into some an uncanny sentient force in the human experience; something more than just technology. It poses a problem for us right now because we already seem to take television sets more seriously than some friends that we have. Some TV’s can talk back to you and hear you, and some can stream your favorite YouTube channel but the goal of television stays the same; to control the masses through pleasure. The kind of pleasure you can only get with a T.V can come in the form of the instant gratification you get when you binge watch something on Netflix. Most televisions now are slim and show HD images; a trend that might have started with Apple’s approach to make “better” phones and laptops. I argue that the television could become sentient based on the amount of data that can be taken in about people’s watching habits through streaming sites. Something as simple as the amount of brightness people prefer on their television screens can be useful information in getting to know people who watch T.V and using that information to control them with a seemingly harmless initiative experience.  The future with a smarter, more personal, television set is a future devoid of diverse creativity. They’re have been documentaries released within the last fifteen years that claim television corporations systematically sucked out the creativity from children through the advent of cartoons with product placements and memorabilia based off your favorite T.V show. Television as we know it wasn’t as culturally relevant as it is today, but now when people talk about television they think off the thousands of production companies and corporations that collectively established a web of entertainment. One could argue that television was the “Internet” of the 50’s and 60’s because it was a new way for people to connect based on the common denominator that is the television show. Imagine what television will mean to people thirty, or even fifty years from now. Western culture is already moving in the direction of tailored experiences with devices like Google Home. Who is to say that the television set couldn’t transform into an experience that knows your preferences and keeps you bound watching for days on end? However farfetched these assumptions may seem there are ways to see how the ways we interact with televisions now could create an unhealthy dependence in the future. It will come to a point where you can walk into your living room and your television set will turn on to your favorite T.V shows that’s airing the moment, and then show you other episodes from other shows that it’s recorded. The television will only need to change in a few ways for it to completely consume our lives. Characters could seem like really people we actually know, and the T.V watcher could find themselves in a virtual maze of a story they chose to dive into.