The history of Television has always been of interest to me. Being an older student I have a different perspective on tv than the average student. I was among the first generation that grew up with tv being a part of everyday life and it was definitely a part of my every day life. I think I was one of the first kids who was addicted to tv. I was barely more than a toddler when I tuned in every day to watch Lassie save Timmy from another hazardous situation, then spent my afternoon playing out my own stories using living room furniture as mountains, train cars, horses, or whatever other props I needed for my scenes. I grew up on Lost in Space, My Favorite Martian, Hogan's Heroes, Combat, Dragnet, The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits, and original Star Trek. I remember the introduction of color tv, but of course we didn't have one until much later. My grandparents got one and the first show I watched on it was How the Grinch Stole Christmas. Later, when I saw more of my favorite shows in color I realized that I had always been imagining the black and white picture in color anyway so seeing it in color just took away the need to assign colors in my imagination. Maybe kids who have grown up watching tv in color don't see color when they watch an old show or film that's in b&w. I don't know, but I suspect that if you never had to develop that as an automatic compensation maybe it doesn't happen.
MZTV is a great place to go if you want to get details about television history, see what events led to other events, and understand how radio influenced the development of tv programming. I really like the different quotes that come up on the main page, like this one:
"Television is bubble gum for the mind." Frank Lloyd Wright
For me, tv used to be a place I could go to escape into someone else's stories. I always ended up getting ideas to write my own stories from shows I watched or often I'd rewrite the stories to change things that happened, or write my own stories using the characters from a show I liked. Later, when the internet connected me with the rest of the world I discovered that there were probably thousands of other people out there who also wrote stories based on tv shows. They called it fanfic. I joined in and started posting my own stories and through that medium I ended up meeting people and making new friends across the US and in a few other countries. Television led me to writing and writing led me to the internet and the internet led me to connecting with people all over the world.
I'm pretty sure tv is heading into a more interactive direction and it won't be long before just watching a show will be considered odd. There will be more and more tv options that will have some kind of user interactivity component, but there will always be people who just want to zone out in front of the tv or who let the tv play as background noise while they do other things so I don't think it will ever end up requiring user interactivity for all programming. The future is gradually turning all of our information and entertainment sources into one entity. We already watch tv on our computers and access the internet on tv's. Why have different devices? We'll end up having big flat screens mounted on our walls where we can watch broadcasts that are stored on massive servers for on demand viewing, interactive broadcasts in real time where viewers all over the world will be interacting with each other and with the broadcast program, and where we can access the internet for anything we use it for, do video chats with friends or groups of friends on social networking sites, or make phone calls, etc. For traveling outside of home we'll all end up with portable personal devices that function as phone, computer, tv, much like out current iPhones and their competitors, but with greater functionality.
When I was a kid I told my mom that in the future we'd have little handheld portable tv's that would run on batteries and could be carried around anywhere we went. She laughed and said that was ridiculous. Later I told her that we'd soon have tape recorders that could tape tv shows and that they'd be common in every house and she laughed at me again and said nobody would buy them if they made them. Of course, a few years later I came home one day and there was a new vcr in its box waiting to be connected to the tv. I guess my father saw the benefit of having one. Pretty amazing really that he's 80 years old now, grew up without tv, retired from a job where they were still using punch cards with an antique mainframe computer system, and he now has satellite tv, uses a DVR, and keeps up with all of his friends using his laptop.
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