TV Through the Ages

Old Television set
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Television is arguably the greatest invention of the 20th century if not the most influential. In the late 1940’s through the 1950’s television became a household staple. The whole family would gather around the earliest television sets and watch Howdy Doody and CBS News. If you were lucky enough to have a one of those T.V.’s you were the envy of the neighborhood. Television brought the family together to look in awe at the moving depictions of the happenings of the world. After World War II television sets became a highly popular consumer product, and the addition of color to broadcast television after 1953 increased the popularity of television sets even further.

Technology has shaped everything in the modern world, television being no exception. Those early televisions would be hardly recognizable to the center pieces of the living rooms of today. The original innovators of the television set could never have imagined the advances modern technology has made to their devices. In the early days there were two or three channels tops where as now we are swimming in options to tune into next. The 1980’s introduced television accessories such as the VCR and gaming consoles like the Nintendo. Three decades later we have seen these evolve into the Blu-ray players and Xboxes of today. We take for granted now that it was not always so easy to watch the latest movies. With the addition of concepts such as AppleTV and GoogleTV, the TV and computer have merged into one device. The introduction of smart phones has reduced the need for television sets at all, since streaming directly to the handheld device is gaining increasing popularity.

Scene from The popular 1947 Howdy Doody show
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The programming that has come into our homes these past 64 years has vastly changed over the years. In the beginning there were three major broadcasting entities that are still around today: NBC, CBS, and ABC. The main focus of the programming in the 50s and 60s were to make viewers laugh with shows that were an exaggeration of what happened at home as well as the original variety show, The Tonight Show. These original shows are the grandparents of the many shows that we have today including drama series, sports programming, cartoons, soap operas, etc. Technology has molded the programming in the sense that the advances in filming techniques and computer generated technology has allowed for the visions of even the wildest imaginations to come to life.

Cable Timeline
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 Television is just one of the areas technology has advanced. Like so many other things, however, it came at a price. Watching television is no longer the event that brings a family together to watch the events of the day. A snowball effect started long ago that makes television the background noise of our lives. Instead of bringing people together it is more of a distraction from each other. People focus on the programs behind the screen instead of the life in front of it.

The progression of how we view TV programming.
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