Decline of television

Our less than 2 month old dvr bit the dust a few days ago. We had recorded quite a few things that I never got around to transferring to dvd. Needless to say we were upset over losing everything. It got me thinking though. Yes, I watch too much television. I always have since I can remember. I do other things too, but a lot of the time I will have the tv on in the background.

I wonder now if I should change my habits though. The more I thought about all the recorded shows/movies we lost on the dvr the more I realized it really does not matter. Television really does not matter that much anymore. Unless you are watching a breaking news story or something live like the Presidential Debates does it really matter what is on? I did a quick check of the top rated tv show for this season. In case you did not know it is CSI Las Vegas with a little over 21 million viewers. That seems like a lot. Then stop and think about the population of the U.S. at a little over 300 million. Now we are only talking about maybe 7% of the total population watch that particular show. Even with taking out the under 18 crowd it still is less than 10% of the total population. How relevant does that make CSI? Or any show since they will have an even lower percentage of total viewers?

Thanks to cable the television landscape has become so fractured as to be meaningless. Throw in the internet, books, games, and countless other activities and tv is no longer the driving force in pop culture. Is that a good thing? I still am going to wait to decide that. It was nice in the old days to have a limited number of choices. That meant a much larger percentage of people would be watching and discussing the same things. In a way it helped to bind our culture together. Now we are becoming so many separate sub-cultures we are becoming disconnected from society as a whole. The more choices we have the less we see the bigger picture.

Or am I just getting old. Did I become my parents and start lamenting the loss of the good ole days...

Harry Potter...

So I finished the last book on Thursday night. I have to say she did a good job wrapping things up. I could have done without the epilogue though. And it did have some slow parts. All in all though it was a fitting ending. More so I was wondering about its place in popular culture. I read a piece where the writer questioned how later generations would look at the Harry Potter series. Would it have the same impact on them? I think about how I was lucky enough to see the original Star Wars in the theater. It had such a huge impact on me and popular culture at the time. When George Lucas re-released it years later to a new generation I do not think it was the same thing. You had to be a part of that original generation to really appreciate it. Is that true of all pop culture? Is that the definition of pop culture--what has an impact at that particular moment in time? So does that make any art pop culture? Isn't anything a part of their particular time? It may have universal themes, but is still rooted in the times of the day. We revere Shakespeare today, but weren't his plays really a product of his times? Yes, they may have been better than anything else at the time and still resonate with us today--but they still reflected the current times. Isn't that what Pop Culture is?

I am just glad I was able to read the Harry Potter books as they came out. And I am glad to be back. An existential meltdown? Maybe. Then again maybe not....