Television Changed My Life

I feel as if my childhood was defined by the television I watched. Remember Blue's Clues? I sure do. I cried when Steve left. Remember Rug-Rats? Till this day I fondly recall every episode. Remember Pokemon? I do. I distinctly remember the night in Kindergarten I prayed to God for Pokemon to be real.

Embarrassing. I know.

Nonetheless, my point isn't how Blue's Clues taught us to be top-notch detectives, or demonstrated the immense importance of taking notes. Or how Rug-Rats is the greatest cartoon of all time. Or even how I might've been the weirdest kid in the world. Despite all of these being true, my point is rather how all of us are united by these common bonds television have created. Heck, this past Friday before class I just mentioned an old cartoon and the classroom erupted into discussions of sponges, and who is hotter, Victoria Justice, or Selena Gomez?

And there is a word for the things which unite and bring together distinctly heterogeneous groups of people into single units- it's called culture.

TV is a part of our culture. Just as national identities are composed of the works of great authors, great poets, photographers, or painters, sculptors or architects, American culture is truly comprised of television. Heck, we may not have made the great American novel yet, but we have sure as hell made Two-and-a-Half Men.

And just as a bestselling book can be a piece of paper-back smut (Twilight, anyone?), or a famous picture a piece of pornography, so too can television be absolutely devoid of any value whatsoever. For example, Jersey-Shore.

Now, why must TV carry such a negative stigma, while other pieces of culture, like literature, get off scot-free?

Because television is such a new medium. Yes, its been around for the better part of a century, but compared to its cultural-counterparts, it is truly an infant. For example, when Shakespeare was making plays, theater was a dirty and guilty pleasure. Yet 500 years later, we consider it fine-art, and English-professors make there livings portraying Shakespeare as a genius. Furthermore, around the advent of vernacular literature, like Boccaccio's Decameron, Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, Dante Alighieri's The Divine Comedy, these works were considered junk. Today we consider them master-pieces.

Thus, I bet my bottom dollar that hundreds of years from now, people will hold some of the television programs we have today to the equal esteem to which we now hold Shakespeare. However, today television is just too omnipresent and common for people with hipster tendencies not to hate it and consider it degrading. This is reflected in a lot of people's blog posts today, and it's totally understandable.

Ultimately, television is like any other medium. Some of it is good. Some of it is very bad. Some of it will consume you. Some of it will inspire you. Some of it will instruct you (heck, I've learned more on History, National-Geographic, and Discovery than I have in school). Some of it will debase your intellect (again Jersey-Shore). Thus, I conclude in saying that however you want to spin it, television has changed the world. And most surely, it has changed my life.