We were all born with television in our homes.
We are generations that have been watching television for decades.
Nothing new on the horizon?
Today I bought a new television. The old one was exactly … old.
I have only one and I watch mainly news and movies. A few documentaries.
I took it home after having chosen a reasonable price and that had several functions beyond the classic television.
And this is where I thought about the evolution of television.
We don’t think about it but television has changed so much over the decades, just like us.
Not only in form and function but also in content. After all, every object changes according to the time in which it is used, and television is no less.
I belong to the generation that used radio so much to imagine the world, and television was in black and white.
I remember that in elementary school a friend of mine, richer than all of us, told us that her father had bought a color television, and that if she wanted she could switch from black and white to color and vice versa.
Needless to say, we were all amazed and jealous of so much technology.
My grandmother at that time, while we had black and white television and three TV channels, had only the first and second channel.
So there were those who were worse off than me, but also those who were better off.
The color television came a couple of years later to my house, it was huge, big. We too could switch from color to black and white and vice versa, but my father forbade us to touch it.
He decided when to use it and above all there were no broadcasts in the afternoon and in the evening, in the second evening, they closed all the broadcasts.
Black and white television was like photography: we imagined the world in color and saw in shades of gray and black, it didn’t give us the perception of something depressing.
I thought in color and didn’t see black and white as a limitation.
I was thinking in color and did not see black and white as a limitation.
The television had no tv remote control, someone had to get up to change the channel. Usually it happened to the little ones in the house.
I did it against my will, I didn’t like having to get up.
The transmissions were not always clear. The antenna was shaken by the wind and sometimes horizontal lines and very strange noises blocked the vision. It was called The Antennist who fixed the antenna and you could see the television again.
The broadcasts were full of scripts, singers, cultural characters.
There was no TV for children, it came much later and was not in the children’s channels, but there were only a few broadcasts.
I saw the scripts that turned on my imagination. Taken from important books, they allowed me to learn by dreaming.
Why is there such a vivid memory of the early years of television?
Because there was a lot of theatrical acting, a lot of preparation and many hours of rehearsals behind the scenes. The sets were very well thought out; the costumes were so beautiful that they were copied and adapted by the seamstresses for the ordinary people who wanted to dream.
It was an accurate, studied world that exalted the beauty of culture.
Television had a pedagogical as well as informative purpose.
How many people learned to read and write with television!
And then the scripts taken from Jules Verne’s books, completely different from how we perceive them today. There were no dedicated channels like today. You could see one episode but then you had to wait until the following week to see another one.
There was a wait that tasted like suspense.
From three channels we switched to state television alongside commercial television.
Here things have changed radically and not always for the better. Competition has brought culture down and sometimes reprehensible ways of making television have taken over.
The TV of pain, of crying, of sensationalism.
The cameras inside people’s lives and misfortunes, the use of women as objects on the screen.
The channels have multiplied, the transmissions are multiplied a hundredfold.
The TV is connected to the internet there are channels dedicated to art, documentaries, cooking. The transmissions are h24, you can see channels from all over the world.
The communication has expanded, it has become an important window on the whole world.
Is it better? Is it worse?
Sometimes it is better, when you want to understand how the world goes. Sometimes worse, because the cultural level is sometimes close to the garbage.
However, I firmly believe that TV is only a medium and we have to make the best use of it.
Look for what interests us, change channels, protest when necessary.
The TV of our childhood has all the love for beautiful memories of when we were little. Certainly distorted by memories and you know when we think about our childhood, everything seems better.
We are lucky to be generations that pass through, that have known analogical and then digital. The beauty of paper and the beauty of the Internet.
We can say we are rich because we have sailed more seas and after all there are things that I would never change, like the touch screen and the TV remote control.
Of course it would be wonderful if we used some of the care of the past in today’s broadcasts. Because culturally we haven’t made much progress.
However, TV remains important.
Now I’m going to put the new TV in the bookcase and finish dreaming about the past.
TV is contemporary, and let’s leave dreams to the past.
Let’s try to still love this medium, which is still a showcase for the world, together with the internet.
Good vision to all!
