I declare that I am a large medium
by
Robert LaFrance
Although I don’t
have much of a sense of humour, I was struck by an online comment made by a
blogger named Cecil Adams. He writes opinion columns on a website called The
Straight Dope. He also bills himself as the world’s smartest human being, so
let’s not get carried away with all his opinions. Unlike myself, he probably
makes mistakes.
The comment to
which I refer is one he made about Google and its predecessors: “Libraries
were the Google of the 20th century.” And then, the world’s smartest human
being (he may well be) went on to say that “talking to actual human beings was
the precursor to Facebook.”
I
think I would expand on that a bit. The concept of speaking to each other face
to face took its biggest hit in the 1950s and 1960s when television (as it was
called before the acronym TV took over) became the staple entertainment of the
home. People stopped visiting each other – unless to watch television and not
talk – and entire evenings might be spent sitting speechless in front of the
electronic cube.
In Tilley where I was
born and allegedly grew up, our neighbours Rose and Fraser bought a television
about 1959 and every Saturday evening our whole family – and others living
nearby – would bundle into their small living room to watch the latest
offerings of small-screen entertainment. B-52s from nearby Loring Air Force
Base (whose lights we could see from our house) went roaring overhead and we
didn’t care. “Gunsmoke” was on.
At 9:00 pm Sunday, Ed
Sullivan appeared with his latest gaggle of Italian jugglers and comedians and
we were there again. Fraser and Rose must have gotten sick and tired of seeing
us coming in the driveway, but they didn’t have to suffer forever. In April
1961 my brother Lawrence, who had become rather wealthy from working in the
woods at a dollar an hour, bought a GE 21” black and white television. I still
stagger when I remember how much it cost – five hundred dollars. He was
probably clearing fifty dollars a week plus another five or ten from playing
guitar in Maunders’ band. Nowadays two hundred will buy a 32-inch flat screen
TV and the average salary is more than two dollars an hour.
So Cecil Adams is right
when he says that Google has replaced libraries, and Facebook has replaced
“talking to actual human beings”, but television was the original culprit.
Before we all bought TVs, it was not uncommon to see George and Elroy sitting
on the bench on Lila Goodine’s store’s verandah and talking. Now George would
have to dash home and see the hockey game, and Elroy would have to see about
buying snacks for a later show.
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As we wind down winter,
let us go to a variety of other subjects that are happening around us: My
friend Flug came by the other day to have a lemonade from my fridge and while
there was reflecting on whether or not he had any friends. “I know you’re my
friend, Bob, because you warned me that day that my fly was down before I went
up on stage in front of the Harger wedding crowd. A lot of people wouldn’t say
a word.” He took a sip of lemonade. “But I’ll tell you, I have developed a way
to tell if someone is my friend. If I’m in a restaurant I will deliberately put
a food crumb above my upper lip and see if any of my table companions will tell
me. If they don’t, I know they’re sitting there and thinking I’m a buffoon. By
the way Bob, you have a bread crumb in your beard.” What a friend I have in
Flugger.
New subject: On Tuesday
evening I walked into the River Valley Civic Centre and someone said: “Why,
it’s the media!” I know it was exciting to have a real live celebrity in the
same building, but I had to point out that I was only one person, and therefore
a medium. If Peter Mansbridge had been walking alongside me, WE would have been
‘the media’ then. Which reminds me, someone on the radio said last week that TV
news readers were: “overpaid, over-coiffed media types.”
Just thinking, considering Peter Mansbridge’s salary
and influence, maybe he is ‘the media’.
-end-
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