History Tells Us That We're Probably Wrong

My earliest memories of television were of watching our family's black and white Zenith set. I remember the day dad climbed onto the roof of the house to install the antennae which allowed us to receive two broadcast channels with relative clarity and one, very fuzzy, UHF channel. We didn't have a lot rules around TV viewing, mainly because it wasn't all that attractive to us kids. Most of what was on during the day were news shows and soap operas, boring stuff that filled up all that time between the worthwhile programming like Batman, The Brady Bunch, and The Wonderful World of Disney.

Television was my introduction to the concept of schedules. In a world without video, not to mention on-demand programming, if we were going to catch our shows we needed to understand such things as days of the week and how to read an analog clock. It was a big deal, it changed me. I diligently saved up my pennies to purchase a wristwatch, which I needed if I was going to live in the television age. We neighborhood kids would plan our play around the television schedule, disappearing indoors to watch the latest episode of Batman, then reconvening in our capes (made from our fathers' old dress shirts) to reenact and connect over what we had just seen. Mom called it the "boob tube" and promptly fell asleep whenever she watched it. Adults warned us we were ruining our eyes, our ears, our brains, but television was here to stay and we knew it.

Many of us have now grown up to express those same concerns about the kids of today who are too absorbed in their screens. We've been particularly traumatized by the pandemic, which made even school a screen-based activity. Gallons of virtual ink have been spilled on the tragedy of it all. Those poor kids, we fret, they're having their brains re-wired and their young parents don't know any better. If only they would read books! 

Of course, two hundred years ago our parental counterparts were expressing similar worries about the reading of novels. The common wisdom was that young women in particular were destroying their brains, becoming incapable of distinguishing between reality and fantasy, and dirtying their hands with library books. And long before that, people like Socrates and Chaucer were concerned that literacy itself was robbing our youth of the ability think and feel, making them into lazy oafs and even liars. In other words, it's in the nature of adults to fear that the latest technological advance will destroy us all. So, if we are to be intellectually honest, we must be wary of our knee-jerk reactions. Oh sure, this time, we might be right. Maybe the digital age really will turn our children square-eyed and mushy-brained. 

But, history tells us that we're probably wrong. Or at least, not entirely right.