Re: [tlug] RMS is at it again

[Curt Sampson <cjs@example.com>]

On 2008-06-17 10:15 +0900 (Tue), Josh Glover wrote:

> 2008/6/16 Gernot Hassenpflug <aikishugyo@example.com>:
> 
> > Gernot "TV is evil" Hassenpflug
> ...
> Televisions can be used to display other things besides broadcast TV,
> you know.

Look, I know you know all this already, so let's just do the quick
review. "A television" is of course the box that shows pictures
and plays noises. However, "television," in appropriate contexts,
refers to the medium. This includes not just the various physical,
electromagnetic, etc. formats used to broadcast and view the materials,
but the entire "culture of production," if you like: how the material is
made, how it's broadcast, how the producers make money from it, etc. So
while you can project a sitcom in a cinema, it's still "television."

Geeks tend to like, in arguments like this, to assign a single meaning
to a word, and claim that other uses are invalid. ("Hacker" is the
classic example.) Perhaps this comes out of programming languages,
a breed quite different from languages used for communiation with
people--even ones such as mathematical notation. But let's not fall into
that boring old thing here; it's merely suitable for starting flamewars.

> If you don't want a television, fine, but I have always found it
> annoying when people wear "no TV" like a badge of honour....

Paul Graham recently said that, "Television...has after 50 years
of refinement reached the point where it's like visual crack."
(http://paulgraham.com/distraction.html) And he's right; any reasonable
study of the medium will reveal how truly sophisticated it is in
inducing addictive behaviour. That it's more acceptable than, say,
being an alcoholic (and I don't claim I'm not one :-)) is then indeed
something of a badge of honour.

> ...there is a lot of content on television that is better than that
> found in printed sources....

Sure. _The Wire_ is an amazing piece of work, worth of being called
"art." But notice two things about it: first, it comes from people who
made their careers in print, and second, it needed a production system
like HBO, which subverts the standard economic model of television, to
get made.

As for "toning down holier-than-thou-ness," well, one might be forgiven
for thingking that anybody who asks someone to do that could possibly
well do a little bit of that themselves....

cjs
-- 
Curt Sampson       <cjs@example.com>        +81 90 7737 2974   
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