With the advent of television, for the first time in history, all aspects of animals and human life and death, of societal and individual behavior have been condensed on the average to a 19-inch diagonal screen and a 30-minute time slot. Television, a unique medium, claiming to be neither a reality, not art, has become a reality for many for us, particularly for our children who are growing up in front of it.
Imagine a child watching this little world within which Presidents and commoners walk; mice and lions, kissing lovers and dying soldiers, skyscrapers and dog houses, flowers and detergents, all are reduced to the same size, mixed, given the same rank, and see in the same screen to be looked at. The child watches this crowded world as he or she pleases, while eating, playing. What is the outlook of such a child? What does it expect of the world? What can it expect?
It expects all the things to be as equal as on television: neither bad nor good, neither pleasant nor painful, neither real nor unreal, merely more or less interesting, merely in better or worst color. It is the world without rank. To such a child, the world is to be looked upon; it is there to entertain its viewer. If it doesn't one alters it by switching the channel.
Parents leave their children in front of the TV as a babysitter, because many feel it is infinitely safer to watch the Sesame world of television than to walk in the world outside of their home. But is it? Unlike television, the child grows older. One day it walks out of the TV room. Against his expectations, he's finally put in a classroom full of other children. A child who has been trained to control the little world, by changing the channels when he didn't like it and was accustomed to maintaining the same distance between himself and the world televised for his amusement, is naturally threatened by the presence of people he cannot control. Others push him around, make faces at him, encroach. There is nothing ha can do to stop them. He begins to feel that this real-world unjustly limits him; it offers no channels to turn to.
In today's atomized, disjointed technological society, with so little attention paid to the individual, men need more than ever the inner strength to carry them through the daily pressures. This strength should come from early exposure to life at its most real- its sudden pleasures, joys, and abandonment; but also its violence, its lack of justice, its pain, illness, and death. There is subtlety to man's fate which lies beyond the thirteen channels.
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