In which ways has television changed society?

How Television Has Changed the World

LAST summer, TV turned the world into a global sports arena. In Rome, Italy, the streets were deserted. Some 25 million Italians were watching the World Cup soccer matches. In Buenos Aires, Argentina, the streets were likewise desolate, and for the same reason. In Cameroon, West Africa, the same grayish-blue light flickered eerily in the windows as millions cheered in unison. In war-torn Lebanon, soldiers propped televisions up on their idle tanks to watch. By the time the tournament reached its climax, an estimated one fifth of the earth’s population was watching, drawn to the box like moths to flames, their faces lit by its pale glow.

This mammoth TV event was not unique. In 1985 nearly a third of the earth’s population​—about 1,600,000,000 people—​watched the rock concert called Live Aid. A dozen satellites beamed the program to some 150 countries, ranging from Iceland to Ghana.

TV​—this ubiquitous box has been at the heart of a subtle revolution. The technology grew from the tiny, flickering screens of the 1920’s and 1930’s to the sophisticated screens of today, with vivid color and crispness, meanwhile fueling a global boom. In 1950 there were fewer than five million television sets in the world. Today, there are about 750,000,000.

Events such as the World Cup soccer matches only illustrate the power of TV to unite the globe in a single information network. TV has changed the way people learn of the world around them. It has helped to spread news and ideas, even culture and values, from one land to another, effortlessly flowing over the political and geographic boundaries that once stemmed such tides. TV has changed the world. Some say it can change you.

Johannes Gutenberg is widely held to have revolutionized mass communications when the first Bible came off his printing press in 1455. Now a single message could suddenly reach a vastly greater audience in a shorter span of time, at a greatly reduced cost. Governments soon saw the power of the press and tried to control it with licensing laws. But the printed media reached ever greater audiences. In the early 1800’s, historian Alexis de Tocqueville remarked that newspapers had the extraordinary power to plant the same idea in 10,000 minds in a single day.

Now consider television. It can plant the same idea in hundreds of millions of minds​—all in the same instant! And unlike the printed page, it does not require its viewers to be educated in the complex art of reading, nor does it ask them to form their own mental images and impressions. It delivers its messages with pictures and sound and all the enticements they can produce.

It did not take long for politicians to see the tremendous potential of television. In the United States, Dwight D. Eisenhower used TV shrewdly in his 1952 presidential campaign. According to the book Tube of Plenty​—The Evolution of American Television, Eisenhower won the election because he proved the more “merchandisable” candidate in the media. The book shows that TV may have played an even greater role in John F. Kennedy’s victory over Richard M. Nixon in the 1960 election. When the candidates debated on TV, Kennedy scored higher with viewers than Nixon did. Yet, audiences who heard the same debate over the radio felt that it had been a draw. Why the difference? Nixon looked pale and haggard, while Kennedy was robust and tanned, exuding confidence and vitality. After the election, Kennedy said of television: “We wouldn’t have had a prayer without that gadget.”

“That gadget” continued to make its power felt worldwide. Some began calling it the third superpower. Satellite technology enabled broadcasters to beam their signals across national borders and even oceans. World leaders used TV as a forum to garner international support and denounce their rivals. Some governments used it to transmit propaganda into enemy countries. And just as governments had tried to control Gutenberg’s invention once they understood its power, many governments took tight hold of television. In 1986 nearly half of all nations were broadcasting only government-controlled programs.

Technology, however, has made TV harder and harder to control. Today’s satellites transmit signals that can be picked up even at homes having relatively small dish antennas to receive the broadcast. Small, portable video cameras and videocassettes, coupled with a profusion of amateur photographers, have produced an often unstoppable flood of visual records of almost any newsworthy event.

One U.S. news organization, Turner Broadcasting’s CNN (Cable News Network), gathers news reports from some 80 countries and relays them all over the world. Its global, round-the-clock coverage can turn any event into an international issue almost instantaneously.

Increasingly, television has changed from a recorder of world events to a shaper of world events. TV played a key role in the string of revolutions that rocked Eastern Europe in 1989. Crowds in Prague, Czechoslovakia, chanted in the streets, demanding “live transmission” on TV. And whereas revolutionaries once shed blood to secure some government building, fortress, or police stronghold, the revolutionaries of 1989 struggled first of all to gain access to television stations. In fact, Romania’s new regime started to govern the country from the television station! So, calling TV the third superpower may not be farfetched at all.

But TV has done more than influence the political arena. It is even now changing the world’s culture and values. The United States is often accused of ‘cultural imperialism,’ that is, of foisting its culture on the world through the medium of television. Since the United States was the first country to build up a stockpile of profitable commercial programs, in the late 1940’s and in the 1950’s, American producers were able to sell programs to other nations at a fraction of what it would cost them to produce their own shows.

In the late 1980’s, Kenya was importing up to 60 percent of its TV shows; Australia, 46 percent; Ecuador, 70 percent; and Spain, 35 percent. Most of these imports came from the United States. One American show, Little House on the Prairie, was broadcast in 110 countries. The show Dallas appeared in 96 lands. Some complained that local flavor was vanishing from television around the world, that American consumerism and materialism were spreading.

Many nations are in an uproar over ‘cultural imperialism.’ In Nigeria, broadcasters have complained that the infusion of foreign shows erodes the national culture; they worry that Nigerian viewers seem more informed about the United States and Britain than about Nigeria. Europeans feel similarly. At a recent U.S. congressional hearing, broadcasting tycoon Robert Maxwell fumed: “No nation should tolerate its culture being subjugated by a foreign one.” Consequently, some nations have begun to impose limits on the number of nondomestic programs that stations may broadcast.

‘Cultural imperialism’ may damage more than cultures. It may even hurt the planet. The have-it-all-now consumerism of Western society has played a part in the fouling of the air, the poisoning of the water, the general ravaging of the earth. As a writer for The Independent, a London newspaper, put it: “Television has brought to the world a glittering prospect of material liberation​—of Western prosperity—​that is delusive, for it can be achieved only at the cost of damaging the natural environment beyond repair.”

Clearly, television is changing the world today, and not always for the better. But it also has much more specific effects on individuals. Are you vulnerable?

[Blurb on page 4]

Newspapers can put an idea in ten thousand minds in one day

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Television can put an idea in hundreds of millions of minds instantaneously

Like most people my age – 51 – my childhood was in black and white. That's because my memory of childhood is in black and white, and that's because television in the 1960s (and most photography) was black and white. Bill and Ben, the Beatles, the Biafran war, Blue Peter, they were all black and white, and their images form the monochrome memories of my early years.

That's one of the extraordinary aspects of television – its ability to trump reality. If seeing is believing, then there's always a troubling doubt until you've seen it on television. A mass medium delivered to almost every household, it's the communal confirmation of experience.

On 30 September it will be 84 years since the world's first-ever television transmission. In Armchair Nation, his new social history of TV, Joe Moran, professor of English and cultural history at Liverpool John Moores University, recounts the events of that momentous day. A Yorkshire comedian named Sydney Howard performed a comic monologue and someone called Lulu Stanley sang "He's tall, and dark, and handsome" in what was perhaps the earliest progenitor of The X Factor.

The images were broadcast by the BBC and viewed by a small group of invited guests on a screen about half the size of the average smartphone in the inventor John Logie Baird's Covent Garden studio. Logie Baird may have been a visionary but even he would have struggled to comprehend just how much the world would be changed by his vision – television, the 20th century's defining technology.

Every major happening is now captured by television, or it's not a major happening. Politics and politicians are determined by how they play on television. Public knowledge, charity, humour, fashion trends, celebrity and consumer demand are all subject to its critical influence. More than the aeroplane or the nuclear bomb, the computer or the telephone, TV has determined what we know and how we think, the way we believe and how we perceive ourselves and the world around us (only the motor car is a possible rival and that, strictly speaking, was a 19th-century invention).

Not not only did television re-envision our sense of the world, it remains, even in the age of the internet, Facebook and YouTube, the most powerful generator of our collective memories, the most seductive and shocking mirror of society, and the most virulent incubator of social trends. It's also stubbornly unavoidable.

There is good television, bad television, too much television and even, for some cultural puritans, no television, but whatever the equation, there is always television. It's ubiquitously there, radiating away in the corner, even when it's not. Moran quotes a dumbfounded Joey Tribbiani (Matt LeBlanc) from Friends on learning that a new acquaintance doesn't have a TV set: "But what does your furniture point at?"

Like all the best comic lines, it contains a profound truth. The presence of television is so pervasive that its very absence is a kind of affront to the modern way of life. Not only has television reshaped the layout of our sitting rooms, it has also reshaped the very fabric of our lives.

Just to take Friends as one small example. Before it was first aired back in 1994, the idea of groups of young people hanging out in a coffee bar talking about relationships in a language of comic neurosis was, at least as far as pubcentric Britain was concerned, laughable. Now it's a high-street fact of life. Would Starbucks and Costa have enjoyed the same success if Joey and friends had not showed the way?

But in 1929 no one had woken up and smelled the coffee. The images were extremely poor quality, the equipment was dauntingly expensive and reception vanishingly limited. In short, it didn't look like the future. One of the first people to recognise television's potential – or at least the most unappealing part of it – was Aldous Huxley. Writing in Brave New World, published in 1932, he described a hospice of the future in which every bed had a TV set at its foot. "Television was left on, a running tap, from morning till night."

All the same, television remained a London-only hobby for a tiny metropolitan elite right up until the Second World War. Then, for reasons of national security, the BBC switched off its television signal and the experiment seemed to come to a bleak end.

It wasn't until after the war that television was slowly spread out across the country. Some parts of the Scottish islands did not receive a signal until deep into the 1960s, but the nation was hooked. Moran quotes revealing statistics from 1971 about the contemporary British way of life: "Ten per cent of homes still had no indoor lavatory or bath, 31% had no fridge and 62% had no telephone, but only 9% had no TV."

My family, as IT happened, fitted into that strangely incongruous sector that had no inside lavatory or bath but did have a TV. This seems bizarre, if you think about society's priorities, but it's a common situation today throughout large parts of the developing world.

I don't recall much anxiety about the lack of a bath, at least on my part, but I can't imagine what the sense of social exclusion would have been like, aged nine, if I hadn't had access to Thunderbirds and The Big Match.

The strongest memory I have of watching television in the early 1970s is in my grandmother's flat on wintry Saturday afternoons. Invariably the gas fire was roaring, the room was baking, and that inscrutable spectacle of professional wrestling, whose appeal was a mystery to me (if not Roland Barthes), lasted an eternity before the beautifully cadenced poetry of the football results came on.

Perhaps a clue to the vividness of that memory is the potent ambivalence it evokes. That has always been the nature of my relationship with television, even – and arguably all the more so – during my various stints as a TV critic. I love it and I hate it. Its indolent allure and its magical revelations.

It can be enormously stimulating. Clive James, the celebrated Observer TV critic of the 1970s, attributed his daughter's decision to become a scientist to the high quality of science programmes on British television. And yet it can also be stupefyingly pacifying. Among the many things that TV has reshaped are the dimensions of our bodies. That we've grown visibly more obese in the past half- century is in large part due to the paralysing comfort of the armchair in front of the telly.

So television is stifling, dull, lazy, formulaic, predictable, repetitive and queasily melodramatic; and it is stunning, original, transfixing, compulsive, mind-altering and magnificently verifying. Oh yes, verifying. Even as it was, the moon landings managed to inspire conspiracy theorists who believed the whole thing had been staged on a film set. But imagine what that moment on 20 July 1969 would have been like without television – more like a fantastic rumour than a historic occasion witnessed across the globe.

If that day, around halfway through TV's history, stood as the epitome of American power and humanity's instinct for exploration, then its counterpoint 32 years later on 11 September 2001 was a vision of American vulnerability and humanity's capacity for violence. It was an awful crime but it was also, as its perpetrators would have known, an awesome televisual event. I'm not sure if there's another piece of footage that I've watched more times in so short a space of time than that of the two planes smashing into the twin towers of the World Trade Center.

There was something disturbingly pornographic about the need to see more and different angles of the impact over and over again. Yet television fed that insatiable need and the world came back for everything television could offer. This is why I've never understood the question: "Where were you when [fill in the significant historical event] happened?" Because the answer is almost always: "In front of the television."

I happened to watch the twin towers fall in a bar in Soho among a stunned, gasping audience. It was in more ways than the obvious the opposite of the normal way of watching television. Typically we watch TV alone or in a small number and gain a sense of being part of something much larger. But I was part of a large group silenced into being separate individuals. I remember feeling that I wanted to go home. I wanted to go home to watch television.

And here, I think, we see television's distinctively domesticated quality. It may be a window on the world but, for best results, that window needs to be located inside your home. For there's an intimacy to watching television, a comforting security like a glowing hearth. "Why should people go out and pay to see bad movies," asked the Hollywood mogul Sam Goldwyn, "when they can stay at home and see bad television for nothing?"

Regardless of whether the TV is good or bad, when you are inside you can deal with the world on your terms. The very worst news can be absorbed and normalised in the familiar surroundings of your own abode. An earthquake in Asia? What's on the other side? A famine in Africa? Let's put the kettle on. Like listening to a storm from within the safety of a sturdy building, watching television is both unsettling and reassuring. While the content may be moving, you always remain at home.

Again it's an attraction that can also be repulsive. I recall watching Live Aid in 1985 and feeling distinctly nauseous when film of starving Ethiopians was shown with the Cars' song "Drive" ("Who's gonna drive you home tonight?") playing over the top as if it were some sort of misconceived rock video. That event, too, was an example of television's curious paradox – the way it bring us together in our separate homes, unifying and atomising at one and the same time.

There have been countless predictions and received wisdoms about television since I first started taking notice of what was said about it. When I was a child it was trumpeted that British drama – gritty, naturalistic and socially engaged – was far superior to that of, well, anywhere else, but in particular television in America.

But if that were ever true, it became progressively less true, especially in the 1990s, and then became an exercise in the most deluded wishful thinking when HBO and other American cable stations brought us The Sopranos, Six Feet Under, The Wire and several more expansively ambitious series. As American cinema, which once produced intelligent adult films, has regressed into childish absurdities, so has American television revived the fortunes of creative filmmakers and an industry-load of talented but largely unknown actors. What a shame that this year saw the death of James Gandolfini (alias Tony Soprano), one of the greatest of them all.

It's hard to imagine that British TV, despite its enormous wealth, will ever produce something of a similar scope and brilliance. There are signs that, as in the case of this year's insidiously terrifying The Fall, it can still do a very slick version of gritty. But will it ever rediscover the glory days of The Singing Detective and Boys From the Blackstuff, complex, authored pieces that spoke of our times and our memories and the culture at large?

It would be nice to think so. But there's much more to television than signature dramas. There is, for instance, sport. Critically speaking, no one seems to take televised sport very seriously. Thanks to Nick Hornby, we may have come a long way since Martin Amis complained of "intellectual football lovers" being forced to "cringe and hide". But the idea still persists that televised sport is just sport captured on camera.

In fact televised sport is much more than that. When I first started watching, the viewer was left in no doubt that he was in a far inferior position to a spectator. Nowadays you pity the poor fan at the match missing out on the divine pleasures of seeing the same event on TV.

Divine? Yes, because modern televised sport – and specifically modern televised football – has turned the viewer into an omniscient, if not yet omnipotent, god. Much of this sporting revolution in television is down to Sky Sports, and let's face it, no one – unless you work for him – is in a hurry to praise a Rupert Murdoch enterprise. But credit where it's due. Up until its disastrous live-studio-audience launch of its Premier League coverage last month, Sky Sports has scarcely put a foot wrong – Richard Keys notwithstanding.

Yet more than sport, British television's greatest and most consistently groundbreaking offering has been its coverage of the natural world. Life on Earth, first broadcast in 1979, was a landmark in television and remains the benchmark of the natural history genre. Even coming in an era of excellent documentary series such as Civilisation, The Ascent of Man and The World at War, it stood majestically alone. By 1979 most of the country had gone colour (just 10 years earlier black and white was still overwhelmingly the norm). And how every colour was needed to appreciate the mountain gorillas meeting that greatest of living Englishmen, David Attenborough. It was a quintessential TV moment – us, the humans inside, being visited by that other, mysterious world out there.

Back then there were still only three television channels in this country (Channel 4 was three years away from its first transmission). Today, with satellite technology, there are hundreds available from around the globe. That diversity has inevitably led to a certain amount of fragmentation, as well as huge variations in quality.

The days of entertainment shows drawing audiences of more than 25 million are long gone. We are no longer one-nation viewers, but instead a multiplicity of niche targets who, thanks to TiVo and iPlayer, can watch our favourite programmes at any hour we choose. But if that spread of options has broken the communal bonds of shared viewing, it might also liberate us from the obligations of the armchair. In theory we can choose more and watch less.

There is talk of an imminent convergence, of the personal computer, the internet and TV all coming together on an intelligible and workable screen. Television has responded by making half-hearted attempts at becoming more "interactive". None has caught on for the simple reason that TV is something we watch, not something that watches us. And the only control viewers really want is of the remote channel changer.

So television will continue to beguile and bore, frustrate and fascinate for the foreseeable future. And that's just fine, because as long as the box continues to bring in the outside, there's no need to think outside the box.

Armchair Nation by Joe Moran is published by Profile Books (£16.99). To order a copy for £13 with free UK p&p, go to theguardian.com/bookshop or call 0330 333 6846