Looking at a television culture

Some of the most important characteristics of a given culture are usually immediately obvious to an outsider and completely invisible to those inside. With that in mind, it's striking how clearly David Mallinak sees when looking at North Americans, television, and what the latter says about the former:

. . . here we are, right smack-dab at the start of the Twenty-first century, where Television has replaced baseball as America’s favorite pastime. To borrow a line from Neal Postman’s delightful little book, we twenty-first century Americans are consumed with amusing ourselves to death.

One might say that this new pastime of ours has had an impact on our culture. That would be irrefutable. And yet, one gets the vague feeling that such a statement somehow gets off the train a few stops short of reality. Television has had more than a mere impact on culture. Television has become our culture. Other cultures were farming cultures, were reading cultures, were fighting cultures. We are a television-watching culture. They planted, they debated, they worked. We watch television. Television defines us. It defines our culture. It defines our nation. To the rest of the world, America is the place where they make TV shows.

Mr. Mallinak challenges his readers to examine the place of television in their own homes and to recognize what it says about our values and priorities. It's a long article but worth a look.