- Feb 5, 2002
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Professor John Senior, my godfather and one of the professors of the famed Integrated Humanities Program at the University of Kansas, was a master of hyperbole. He once hinted to us, his students, that we should just go home and smash our television sets. Perhaps he didn’t mean this literally, but he suggested that this was something we should consider. I know of at least one fellow student who took him at his word and dropped his 19-inch Motorola black and white television set out of the window of his fourth-floor dorm room onto the concrete alley below.
Today, the lightweight plastic screen would barely make a sound when it hit the pavement. But in the 1970s, the dozens of sealed tubes (this is why some still call the TV “the tube”) exploded with a thunderous noise. It was so satisfying. So cathartic.
TV was a relatively new technology at the time; it had taken a generation or so to begin to realize what it was doing to us. Instead of being active, seeking, critical engagers with the real world, filled with wonder and joy, we were becoming lazy, slack-jawed, and flat-souled accepters of an often false or incomplete mediated version of reality.
The sound of a TV exploding on the pavement helped mark a new phase of life for us. One in which we made a commitment – a commitment deeply related to our faith (I converted to Catholicism through influence of the IHP) – to refuse to allow this technology to shape us in these negative and distorting ways.
Today, we are faced with a similar problem, but on a wildly greater scale. Artificial Intelligence and related technologies will now be able to use our reliance on screen-delivered mediating technologies and throw us into something close to total confusion about what is real and what isn’t.
Continued below.
www.thecatholicthing.org
Today, the lightweight plastic screen would barely make a sound when it hit the pavement. But in the 1970s, the dozens of sealed tubes (this is why some still call the TV “the tube”) exploded with a thunderous noise. It was so satisfying. So cathartic.
TV was a relatively new technology at the time; it had taken a generation or so to begin to realize what it was doing to us. Instead of being active, seeking, critical engagers with the real world, filled with wonder and joy, we were becoming lazy, slack-jawed, and flat-souled accepters of an often false or incomplete mediated version of reality.
The sound of a TV exploding on the pavement helped mark a new phase of life for us. One in which we made a commitment – a commitment deeply related to our faith (I converted to Catholicism through influence of the IHP) – to refuse to allow this technology to shape us in these negative and distorting ways.
Today, we are faced with a similar problem, but on a wildly greater scale. Artificial Intelligence and related technologies will now be able to use our reliance on screen-delivered mediating technologies and throw us into something close to total confusion about what is real and what isn’t.
Continued below.
Is It Time to “Smash Your TV?” - The Catholic Thing
Instead of being active, seeking, critical engagers with the real world...
www.thecatholicthing.org
