The smartphone (and the various tablets and laptops that reiterate its malevolence into different shapes) has universalized, ennobled and guaranteed the existence of TV. It has done this by the strange virtue of being a bloody TV. The remote control is built in, sure. The advertising is more evil, I’ll grant it. And, yes, the paltry thousand-some channels have merged into an infinite river of increasingly interactive programming, as often produced by your friends and their psychotic need to be a reality TV show as by your corporate enemies and their (also psychotic) need to make reality TV shows. But whatever novel chemicals lace our current crack, we’re still smoking the stuff.
The predominant activity of a people made “smart” by their devices is still tele-vision, the individualized watching of images for entertainment on the slight condition that such watching moves money towards the corporations who design, maintain, and hold out those images for the viewing. The existence of the Apple TV, and the inability of anyone to distinguish between it and an obscene, wall-mounted iPad, simply proves the identity. Sure, smart TVs give some visual priority to the “TV show” over the ongoing peep show we call “social media.” But the suggestion that we watch this before we watch that hardly constitutes an essential difference in our fundamental mode — vicarious watching. Likewise, the ability to comment on the TV we watch, and for this to be, in turn, watchable, does not mean that we have transcended the TV for Something Else, any more than the ability to cheer at a football game, and be seen cheering, means that we have transcended Watching Sports unto some new thing called Social Sports.
And this is pernicious because, wonder of wonders, the smartphone got hot precisely as our passion for television was beginning to grow cold. As early as the 2000s, televisions were not merely growing thinner — they were also growing rather thin. It is not so much that shows were becoming boring — watching them was becoming boorish. Once, having a TV in every room of the house was a sign of wealth. Now, it is most certainly a sign of poverty. “Having the news on” used to be the sign of an informed voter. Now, I presume that the man blaring FOX News to an empty room must be doing so to hide the screams coming from his basement dungeon.
We were sick and stupid, sure, but we were moving, in the large, from a people who thought TV could be family time to a people who realized that it most emphatically could not. We had begun to heal from a mental disorder, cultivated in the 1950s and perfected by PBS programming in the 1970s, wherein parents were earnestly convinced that their offspring could be educated, raised, and kept in relative peace by a series of morning, daytime and nighttime shows. Now, childrearing by TV is considered a lighter form of child abuse. It still happens, but no one would willingly admit to it. And all the vulgarity and stupidity of daytime TV was beginning to be acknowledged as such. Young people at dentist offices and waiting rooms would catch a glimpse of some calculated exercise of televised despair, like Ellen, and wonder, as I still wonder: “Does anyone still watch this stuff?”
Now that people do still watch this stuff, I won’t deny. There is a generation of Americans for whom the drone of TV advertisement is like the drone of the refrigerator — constant and comforting. I have visited a death-bed in which the last words heard, prior to the last rites, were a pitch for a new mop; the man’s dying breaths competing with a salesman explaining why buying new wipes, every month, in order for his mop to function, was a step forward in the mopping field, and not a slip backwards. I’d like to think that the man died as a sort of protest. But in truth, he probably hadn’t heard the TV in years. Television has become an increasingly background experience. Restaurants play muted TVs just because their owners happen to be over the age of sixty. TVs mutter to the empty community rooms of nursing homes for no particular reason.
By the 2000s, actual TV-watching was beginning to be carried on as a mere habit, and even a self-acknowledged bad habit, rather than some conscious engagement with a frenetic box. We may still have had a taste for the soaps, but most people knew that they were in bad taste. If we took pleasure, it was an increasingly guilty pleasure, and even as we paid for cable, we denied being wrapped up in it. Conversion, I think, was around the corner. What form it would have taken is anyone’s guess — we may have even revived those communal forms of entertainment, like theater, dance, and comedy, scraping them back from their museum-status in New York City and reviving them as living forms in our local communities, to the happy detriment of the wealthy. But now that we’ve put the You in the tube, the Net in the flicks, and engorged the great TV monopolies, like Disney, into singular apps rather than multiple channels — we are back to square one. We have been reset. It was beginning to be genuinely possible to say “throw away your television” — but we have lost hold of the mood. “Throw away your smartphone” sounds like the unabomber’s threat. In fact, I imagine it sounds exactly as saying “blow up your TV” sounded to a white, middle-class, family in the 1960s, only more alarming, in that the world of friends, family, and peace is increasingly only accessible in and through these TV-screens we call phones.
We scorn the couch-potato, covered in chips and watching TV. But we keep his antiquated image around to distract from the fact that we have universalized the couch; that we do the same thing with our phones every night; that it is not the snack, but the breakfast, lunch, and dinner that is soundtracked and gilded with television. We have not transcended TV, only made it less visible by making it omnipresent and less noticeable by holding it right under our nose. The average American child, that poor bastard, now spends 7.7 hours a day on the recreational use of screens, making even the most neglectful parenting of the Cartoon Network Era look positively wholesome.
The same people who would scoff to see a house with a TV playing in every room are playing with their TVs in every room; the young person who dutifully disdains the 24-hour news channels digests more, and not less news. We pretend to belong to some new, digital age, but the young are rather more like the grandparents they have put into nursing homes — of both, we can earnestly say that they are spending the rest of their lives watching TV. Those who believe we can moderate our addictions say things like, “make a special time and space for checking your phone,” which is good advice, so long as we acknowledge that we are simply reverting to a bygone age in which the TV was bolted to an entertainment center.
We do not protest, not because the TV has been thrown away, but because it has been thrown over everything. One may as well protest the profusion of oxygen as the profusion of smartphones, or advocate the throwing away of one’s right hand as of the screens they clutch. It may be the Digital Age for the billionaires cooking up the stuff, but for the ones eating it, it is still the TV Age — seedy, saccharine, advertisement-addled, pornographic, and more powerful than ever. The only real mercy of this exchange of the Bad Old TV for the Good New TV has been to create a class of people — poor, uneducated, and unable to keep up — who still watch TV as a living room fixture, and so serve as convenient foils to everyone else. “At least we are not like those lazy, sad people watching whatever’s on at 2PM,” we can say, as we quietly nurse our addiction under every green tree, at every stoplight, upon every toilet, all money, skill, attention, and ownership quietly flowing into the hands of the rulers of the present age.