Why did the band Television call itself television? To me, the singers were bathetic – overly off key, gushy, posing – posing as singers or feeling human beings anyway. So if they were thinking Television is lacking in human feeling, they picked a good name. They were in the punk days*, in New York, where lack of talent was not a show stopper. Was the name an attempt to challenge the dominant medium? To bring it - and all its production values - down from its pedestal? McLuhan called it medium cool.
I am not too satisfied with the Internet's answers to these questions. I'd say by the time of the band Televison, TV was a drone - a hissing signal that put nations to sleep. Iggy had previously come up with "She's got a TV eye on me." I guess that is about whatever comes to your mind. Maybe the drone or the stare of TV is what Television was critique-ing...McLuhan focused on the CRT emissions and electromagnetic field effect possible ... and its effect on libido/psyche.
By 1970s we sure enough called it the boob tube. For someone over here, the war was on TV. TV was there, but it wasn’t our beacon, at least in comparison with music. It was in our DNA by then, however. Television was an alternative world for me, growing up in the 50s, in Wisconsin, often in the cold, watching by myself. A secret world was TV. Cathode rays you could play with, using vertical and horizontal hold buttons.
Dave Garroway in an electronic news room under glass got under my skin. That would be the Today show on NBC. I’d wonder about the NBC building in Rockefeller Center. New York. This drawing is probably at the age of 8 or 9.
Would wake up before anyone in house, and turning on TV, say, before 7 am, and watch the Test signal.
Does media as McLuhan said form a unique environment that can 'shape people and culture.' Yes. - J.V.
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* For that matter, "Talking Heads" is a television reference.
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