JF Ptak Science Books Post 1028
Television is composed of dots--or at least for the greatest part of its history it was. I wonder if we measured the amount of televised images entering the eye/eyes of everyone around the world this year if that total numbers of hours is multiples of all television watched by everyone everywhere for the 1928-1995 period? My gut wonders if it is orders (?) of magnitude more as there are more people, more television, more programming, more everything, everywhere, at any time. And when you throw in hulu and tvshack and so on, doubt grows that the history of television to 1995 could hold its own against whatever it is people are seeing today.
This comes from seeing this ad (below, from which these details are pulled) for Paul Jones whiskey in a 1947 issue of LIFE magazine. Big, 15" screen for the fights on a Friday night, the built-in radio with its 12" speaker ready to go, a pipe and matches (and no tobacco) at hand, and of course a very over-sized bottle of Paul Jones whiskey: if we kept a constant perspective that bottle I reckon would've been about two feet tall, accompanied by foot-tall glasses.
Television was still in its formative period so far as mass acceptance and affordability goes--there were still only 14,000 sets in the U.S. in 1947. Today there are something like 250,000,000 sets in this country, or about 8 for every 10 people. Worldwide the figures are pretty different: on a list of 209 countries for televisions per capita (where the U.S. is third) only the top 24 have tvs for every other person (the U.K. with 504/1000 is number 24) while countries with tvs for every third person comes in at #53 (Czech republic). Jamaica, listed at #100, has 168/1000 per capita, which means tv distribution for the rest of the 109 countries on this list gets pretty scratchy--no doubt because a television would represent a sizable chunk of a family's gross income for the year. Actually, about 50 countries on that list have a population that survives on One Dollar a day--which doesn't leave much for Sony and whoever might advertise on the set that these people can't buy. (Fox I understand is even now figuring a plan for a programming-over-food venue as a means to domination in a new post-Colonial world--Cuba won over, finally, with reruns of "Dallas", making the population revolutionary over the stuff that J.R. Ewing has that they don't but want..)
The televised world is the thin veneer of the existing world that isn't. Anyway, here's the start of it, all in beautiful black and white dots, selling a bad whiskey.
The "Television Schedule" is there, with an odd eye-on-compass logo that is barely visible before magnification.
Interesting. That picture has a certain smell to it.
Posted by: Jeff Donlan | 13 May 2010 at 11:00 PM