The Fractionalization of Power

Who decides what we see?

There was an interesting story on NPR this morning on I Love Lucy and its impact on American television and culture.

I Love Lucy began with the birth of television as a seminal medium. It cast women and their relationship to men and the home and work in a totally new and different light. And it was the ‘killer ap’ for the new medium, with of the country watching each week. More people watched I Love Lucy than any other show.

The high numbers were the result of a technology that pushed TV signals through the air at great cost.  There were only a very few frequencies that could be had, and so very few programs were aired.  At the same time, the cost of making television was prohibitive. Only massive corporation could afford the expense.

Few shows, lots of viewers per show.

I contrasted that to an article in today’s NY Times about Pamela Geller, a rather unpleasant one-woman anti-Islamist race baiter who runs her whole operation out of her Manhattan apartment.

Make no mistake about it, she is no Lucille Ball, but even on her own, she has been able to drive a national ‘debate’ over the ‘9/11 Mosque’ whic is totally a contrived issue – built only out of her own polemical hatred of all things Islamic.

There was a time when people like Pamela Geller would have been regarded as simply ‘the nut down the hall’, but those days are over.

The new digital technologies have given her (and people like her) enormous power and enormous reach for almost no cost.

Once, to get her ‘message’ out, she would have required a massive transmitter atop the Empire State Building.

No more.

Now all she needs is a laptop in her kitchen.

While I find her politics absolutely reprehensible, (she refers to herself as a “racist-Islamophobic-anti-Muslim-bigot”), I find the impact that one person, married to the new digital technologies, absolutely fascinating.

We are a nation conditioned, over the past 50 years, to be swayed by what we see on TV.

We spend an astonishing 4.5 hours a day watching TV, and we have done so every day, day after day, for the past 50 years.

We spend more time watching TV than we do anything else.

Ms Geller has yet to discover video.

But she will.

Or someone like her will.

And that kind of drive, married to video, married to the web, will wreak havoc – or at least a very powerful change, in the kind of culture we are or the way we perceive ourselves.

This will come.

We have yet to find a political figure who really understands unline video – not yet. Not in the way that FDR (or Hitler) understood radio ro JFK understood TV.

But it will come.

And my guess is it won’t be someone like FDR or JFK or even some mainstream political figure – it’s going to be some nut like Geller.

So beware!

Lucille Ball may have driven a nation toward greater tolerance.  She was married to a Cuban on TV (and in real life) at a time when such marriages were illegal in 32 states.

She became pregnant on TV when censors would not even let her use the word.

She became an icon for women’s rights at a time when it was a given that women should be paid less than men.

Television (and video) are incredibly powerful tools for pushing cultural change.

Now that anyone can gain access, we all have to be all the more literate in the medium so that we can water down the ‘nut effect’.