"Men don't care what's on TV.
They only care what else is on TV."
*Jerry Seinfeld*
A world of spectators? Not, we are participants here.
...the huge entertainment industry that arose in the United States
in parallel with the industrial city
It happened terribly fast. In 1880 there was;
no recorded sound,
no moving pictures,
no football,
no basketball,
no vaudeville,
no ragtime, jazz or blues,
no Tin Pan Alley.
By the first decade of the 20th century all were in place and were-or
were about to be-matters of intense national concern.
It does not take much imagination
to grasp the sense of dislocation
...millions of Americans, born in the 1870s and 1880s to a world in
which "fun" meant sledding, word games, picnics, on finding themselves
as young adults simply deluged with professional diversion in mammoth
cities where everything seemed to be run by electricity.
What, finally, was the meaning for Americans-and ultimately for the
world-of the sudden appearance of this huge system of mass
entertainment, with its vast machinery for bringing music, games,
shows of all kinds to the American public?
Today we so take for granted our deep involvement in entertainment
that it is difficult for us to remember that it is actually a great
novelty in human experience.
Up until the last decades of the 19th
century the vast majority of human
beings, stretching back into prehistory,
rarely had the experience of being
professionally entertained.
As hard as it is to believe, the bulk of humanity until recent times
never saw a "show" of any kind.
Instead of being entertained, people
everywhere amused themselves.
...They did so almost always actively, and in groups. They danced,
they sang, they competed in games, they gambled at cards and dice,
they sat in front of fireplaces and around taverns swapping stories,
playing word games, posing each other conundrums. Even as late as the
1950s, and perhaps later, boys shot marbles in the spring, flipped
baseball cards, played jackknife games like mumblety-peg passed down
from genera-ton to generation. And up to this moment girls in big
cities, suburbs, and small towns play traditional sidewalk games like
hopscotch and jump rope.
...there is a significant,
qualitative difference between
playing a game and watching
it being played;
between making music and listening
to it;
between telling a story and watching
one being acted out.
The one is active, the other passive; the one is an occupation for a
group, or at least two people; the other an occupatjon for the self.
It is true, of course, that people go to stadiums and theaters en
masse; but they are, really, members of what David Reisman called;
["the lonely crowd."]
They sit in the audience, private
and alone, interacting with the
people around them only superficially
and intermittently; and in many
cases, as in a half-empty theater,
interacting with nobody at all.
It is precisely this that makes the qualitative difference between
playing the game and watching it: the spectator reacts but he does not
interact.
Being entertained is essentially
a solitary pursuit, an act
of the self.
...It does not often involve us, or affect us, on a deep gut level,
the way competing on a tennis court, playing poker in a basement den,
jamming on the blues in a garage, telling ghost stories around a
campfire do. These things engage us in a much deeper way, because they
connect us to other people whom we can affect and who can affect us in
significant ways-in winning and losing, in the rapid exchange of
ideas, the sharing of an experience. The primary environment in which
human beings live is other people. Playing tennis or jamming on the
blues is life, because these are peopled activities. Watching someone
else do these things is, at best, only an imitation of life. At worst,
it is a way only of passing time in a state of disengagement.
And we are hardly surprised to discover that this basic shift in the
way people amuse themselves came hand in hand with the new industrial
city.
The Rise of Selfisness in America
James L. Collier
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0195052773/