Tube Transformation

Although I suppose I'm of the original generation raised on TV (just as my children were the first on personal computers), it comes as a bit of a shock to read a narrative of just how much the Tragic Lantern has changed in the past half-century. It's actually a book review, but "Tune in Yesterday" by Nichlas Leman (New Yorker, April 30th) gives a decent précis of the transition between the live to the canned era....along with other changes that I'd never considered. One example would be the revolution from the early days of single-sponsorship, where a corporation exercised almost complete control over a program's content, to Sylvester "Pat" Weaver of NBC's introduction of so-called "magazine" sponsorship, which reduced corporate power to comparatively low levels. Then there was pioneer Weaver's notion of TV as a vehicle for cultural uplift, as opposed to the realprogrammatik of William S. Paley of CBS, who clearly perceived television as an unalterably mass medium....with all that that implies. And yet some people -which would include me, I suppose- think of TV not only as being more than it is, but that it can be more. Yet, after reading this article, I'm not sure that The Tube has any more than the lowest common denominator in it.