Each 21 November is commemorated as United Nations (UN) World Television Day.
The Thammasat University Library collection includes many books about different aspects of television.
Although it is usually taken for granted, television, as TU students know, is a telecommunication medium used for transmitting moving images in black and white or color, and in two or three dimensions and sound. Television is a mass medium for advertising, entertainment, news, and sports.
Television became available in an experimental forms in the late 1920s, but would not be widely marketed to consumers until after World War II.
At that time, a form of black-and-white TV broadcasting became popular in the United Kingdom and United States, and television sets became commonplace in homes, businesses, and institutions. During the 1950s, television was the primary medium for influencing public opinion.
In the mid-1960s, color broadcasting was introduced in the USA and most other developed countries.
Other developments such as digital television transmissions, high-definition television (HDTV), smart television, and Internet television have revolutionized the medium.
By 2013, almost 80 percent of all households in the world contained a television set.
As the UN website explains,
Background
In recognition of the increasing impact television has on decision-making by bringing world attention to conflicts and threats to peace and security and its potential role in sharpening the focus on other major issues, including economic and social issues, the United Nations General Assembly proclaimed 21 November as World Television Day (through resolution 51/205 of 17 December 1996).
World Television Day is not so much a celebration of the tool, but rather the philosophy which it represents. Television represents a symbol for communication and globalization in the contemporary world.
On 21 and 22 November 1996 the United Nations held the first World Television Forum, where leading media figures met under the auspices of the United Nations to discuss the growing significance of television in today’s changing world and to consider how they might enhance their mutual cooperation. That is why the General Assembly decided to proclaim 21 November as World Television Day.
This was done in recognition of the increasing impact television has on the process of decision-making. Television was thus acknowledged as a major tool in informing, channelling and affecting public opinion. Its impact and presence and its influence on world politics could not be denied.
Here are some thoughts about television from writers, many of whose books are owned by the TU Library:
- The role of television is the illusion of company, noise. I call it the fifth wall and the second window: the window of illusion.
Mumia Abu-Jamal, The Guardian, 25 October 2007
- The viewer of television, the listener to radio, the reader of magazines, is presented with a whole complex of elements—all the way from ingenious rhetoric to carefully selected data and statistics—to make it easy for him to “make up his own mind” with the minimum of difficulty and effort. But the packaging is often done so effectively that the viewer, listener, or reader does not make up his own mind at all. Instead, he inserts a packaged opinion into his mind, somewhat like inserting a cassette into a cassette player. He then pushes a button and “plays back” the opinion whenever it seems appropriate to do so. He has performed acceptably without having had to think.
Mortimer Adler, How to Read a Book (1940)
- The rockets that have made spaceflight possible are an advance that, more than any other technological victory of the twentieth century, was grounded in science fiction… . One thing that no science fiction writer visualized, however, as far as I know, was that the landings on the Moon would be watched by people on Earth by way of television.
Isaac Asimov, in Asimov on Physics (1976)
- What the mass media offers is not popular art, but entertainment which is intended to be consumed like food, forgotten, and replaced by a new dish. This is bad for everyone; the majority lose all genuine taste of their own, and the minority become cultural snobs.
- H. Auden, “The Poet & The City” in The Dyer’s Hand, and Other Essays (1962)
- The luminous screen in the home carries fantastic authority. Viewers everywhere tend to accept it as a window on the world… It has tended to displace or overwhelm other influences such as newspapers, school, church, grandpa, grandma. It has become the definer and transmitter of society’s values.
Erik Barnouw, The Sponsor: Notes On a Modern Potentate (Oxford University Press, 1978)
- Bread and circuses—to some observers, welfare and television seemed modern equivalents, pacifiers of empire, protectors of power and privilege. If television has assumed this role, it is not the result of a struggle between good guys and bad guys. If it were, it would be easy to solve, like problems in televisionland. … The sponsor who thinks in terms of maximizing sales and profits is doing his duty. … The advertising agency executive who recommends programs and time-slots in terms of audience size and demographic targets is likewise doing his job… The network sales executive who favors programs that advertising agencies will recommend to sponsors is performing his task. … The problem—the folly—is not in any of these, but in a system that has made the center of national attention a market item, for sale at auction prices. The system has put the leadership of our society on the auction block.
Erik Barnouw, The Sponsor: Notes On a Modern Potentate (Oxford University Press, 1978)
- First radio, then television, have assaulted and overturned the privacy of the home, the real American privacy, which permitted the development of a higher and more independent life within democratic society.
Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind
- A democratic civilization will save itself only if it makes the language of the image into a stimulus for critical reflection — not an invitation for hypnosis.
Umberto Eco, in “Can Television Teach?” in Screen Education 31 (1979)
- I used to think that television could be potentially the most powerful medium for the dissemination of knowledge that the world has ever known, it could be a very rich and rewarding thing if handled properly and that the problem was in the execution. I’ve now come, after ten years in the business, five years of which was as a television critic, to taking the very extreme view point. I think television itself is bad. The idea of television, the act of watching television kills the imagination. It’s not like radio, with radio you had to listen, had to make things, you had to build things in your mind. Movies do that. Television is something else again. Television lays it all out there in a very prescribed way and the bare minimum of imagination on the part of the viewer is needed and I really fear for all of us.
Harlan Ellison quoted in The Online Copywriter’s Handbook (2002)
- The young watch television twenty-four hours a day, they don’t read and they rarely listen. This incessant bombardment of images has developed a hypertrophied eye condition that’s turning them into a race of mutants.
Federico Fellini, in I’m a Born Liar: A Fellini Lexicon (2003)
- In the days before machinery men and women who wanted to amuse themselves were compelled, in their humble way, to be artists. Now they sit still and permit professionals to entertain them by the aid of machinery. It is difficult to believe that general artistic culture can flourish in this atmosphere of passivity.
Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception (1954)
- I find television very educational. Every time someone switches it on I go into another room and read a good book.
Groucho Marx, quoted in Halliwell’s Filmgoer’s Companion (1984)
- Television may represent a threat to our culture analogous to the threat of atomic weapons to our civilization.
Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History (1952)
(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)