Visualizing the Future #17: Amusing Ourselves to Death?

I grew up in a house where TV was banned.  Sugar cereal and candy were frowned upon, but television, especially Saturday morning cartoons, was the ultimate forbidden fruit.  Prohibition rarely works and in my case that proved true; I begged for gum in the line at the supermarket, enjoyed orange-flavored aspirin a bit too much and looked longingly at lollipops dropped in parking lots.  But nothing trumped TV.  I remember waking early and sneaking downstairs to illicitly watch as the test pattern segued into Looney Toons.  Yet my stealth was insufficient -- one day in 1975 my mother caught me and kicked a hole in the TV's screen.  I'll never forget the days as the shattered set lay on the curb waiting for the garbage crew to haul it away.

Her logic was pretty simple (I think the words "rotting your brain in front of that wretched tube" may have been used).  She wanted me to read, to love books, to learn in a particular way. Was she right? Well she may have been and today I'll explore the affect that the evolution that media  is having on the stories we tell, how we think and the culture that we create.