Ant Farm
When, in 1961, Newton Minow, the chairman of the FCC, declared television to be a "vast wasteland," one might have imagined an arid tract of skittering tumbleweed, buildings in ruin, and perhaps a once gallant bronze statue lying face down in the dust-the end of civilization as we know it tersely summarized by the green glow of excited phosphors. Had this metaphor held true, though, television would have long ago lost its sway over the populace. A more apt metaphor might be that television is a "vast cornucopia," containing suburbs lush unto distraction, social travails transmuted into pleasant genres, and countless items for consumer redemption: the days of our lives with just the right measure of commercial interruption. Of course, something else lurked just beneath the luxuriant surface of the televised image, concealed within the magnetic pulses, faint within the fields and frames. You could call it, as video engineers would, the control track. Intractable and stodgy, television arose as a system of social discipline, not so much by determining behavior as by discouraging it through its uncanny promotion of passivity. Unresponsive, monolithic, unidirectional: was this an app…
Films