Eric points to a JSoda post about the Zen Experiment that I read a while back by Dutch sortablogger Adam Curry, saying:

I am very interested in the personal and social affects of TV: as with many of the things I bitch about here, I am concerned with TV as a substitute for real life. That said, like most things, TV in moderation can be diverting, entertaining, educational, even edifying. The key is moderation and selectivity.

It's very difficult to disagree with what he's saying here, and indeed I don't I do want to expound on it, though. What caught my interest with this post is his comments on the "social affects" of television. The general assumption (Zen Experiment was hardly proposing a novel concept) is that television generally has an isolating effect. Eric even (probably unintentionally) reinforces this point by using "diversion" as his first example. I would contend that rather than isolating people, it has done an astounding job of uniting them.

More on that later, but right now let's talk about me!! I've been in the new apartment for two months. When the roommate that watched cable moved out, the two of us that remained chose to cancel our cable service due to the increase in rent that two people pay compared to three. Even more interestingly, I did not even set up the television until two days ago, when someone was coming over and we wanted to watch some movies in the bedroom. The new TV we bought and put downstairs is still not even plugged in. From the way people speak, you would think that I would be less isolated than ever from the world around me. In fact, the opposite is true.

I'm not even talking about the news. I get that from the Internet. I'm talking about the TV shows. The fictional ones that we watch to take us to another time and place where a Democrat is in the White House, chefs can afford spacey apartments in New York City, and the most interesting town in the country is a stateless burg named Springfield. How has my (self-imposed) inability to watch these shows isolated me? Simple. Everyone else has seen them. My former roommate and I used to talk about President Bartlett, Mayor Winston, and those coffee-sipping friends in New York City. An ex-girlfriend and I had our first conversation about Frasier Crane and his family in Seattle.

The idea that television isolates us is a holdover from early technophobes who liked things fine the way they were when they were young, thanks. Many people used to say the same about the Internet a couple years back. Some still do. When I was young and very introverted, the television wasn't my escape from the world, it was my window into it. It allowed me to see things and conversations in a way that I never could before. Was it accurate? Was it real? No, but it was a start. Then the Internet (it was a BBS actually, but functionally the same in this regard) came along and suddenly I could start talking to people who couldn't make snap judgments about my appearence or demeanor. Suddenly, I could talk to a lot more people and become friends. I even started making friends with this wierd species called "girls." I can honestly say that television and the Internet helped me make the transition from an introvert to regular member of society within a year. It gave me a crash course in how other people live. Even if they don't really live like they do on TV or talk like they do on the Internet, it's still instructive.

I must admit, though, that for me personally it can be isolating at times. It had an effect on me. I was a late reader and books never really caught my attention. Television and movies, though, always did. They were also my gates into the world of creativity. I started creating episodes to my favorite serials and sequals to my favorite movies. Eventually I created my own plots with my own characters. Television and movies were my training wheels for what eventually became an hot-rod imagination that has, to date, produced one novel in its polishing stages, half of another novel still in its writing stages, two dozen short stories, three creative editing video productions, and enough ideas to keep me writing for three lifetimes if I completely developed every one of them. Creativity and imagination can become isolating when you spend time in your imaginary worlds instead of the real one. In that sense television has lead to my isolation, but I wouldn't give that back for all the money in the world.

Of course, maybe it would have all happened anyway. Maybe the ex-girlfriend and I would have had a very interesting conversation on the weather that would have compelled me to get her phone number. Is there any denying, though, that television has at least had some affect on bringing this country together? With the advent of television (and, to be fair, radio before it), suddenly citizens from coast to coast are watching the same television shows. People from New York City and Bismarck both know the Ricardos and later the Bunkers and later still the Cosbys. Many believe the electoral college is undemocratic these days. Why? They're looking at the national vote. Why? Presidential are now campaigning on national issues. Why? They are now running national campaigns with issues that transcend the issues of individual states. Why? Television is a big reason. Television isn't distracting us, it's engaging us. It's allowing the illiterate and literate alike a narrative on the world around them.

That is, of course, not to say that television is perfect or entirely beneficial. People watch too much television. Many people don't use it as a launching pad for the imagination or to learn anything new but just as a way of avoidance. We are becoming fat. We are becoming lazy. Our attention spans are getting smaller. These are concerns and they should be taken seriously. As in all things, the television is being abused by both its content suppliers and consumers. However, the idea that the casual watcher is just a more mild sinner than the outright addict is fallacy. Some television is not only not a bad thing, it is a great thing! The idea that we're all addicts unless we can completely turn off the TV misses the point: we have no reason to.