Television
Text inspired by the “Zapping” series, Juan Pablo Delgado Berman
By Eduardo Moguel Bautista
Teacher, nanny, companion, friend, confidant, controversial, corrupting, enemy; rarely, if ever, in the history of human culture has been an invention, a device that would capture many epithets, many adjectives, many human traits.
Mankind has noticed the revolutionary capacity that mass information brought a century ago: The printing press led to radical changes in the dominant social structure to the point of being a decisive factor in the development of the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution. But even the rise of printing paled against the effects of the magic box.
Television began his story presented as a harbinger of modernity, as a symbol of the triumph of the human mind, or rather as a technological curiosity, like contraption fair; walked the century as assigned various tasks: an educator weapon against ignorance, a reformer consciences axis of family life. Then he was blamed for the ills of the world, the perversion of postmodern society; was tried as a youth corrupter and lack of adequate hemlock, we sought to regulate, control customs and moral human. Nof much could be done, its nature, and the nature of their masters, mounted on this mighty sovereign artifice, turned into masters of information and therefore consciences and perhaps the world, made it an indomitable beast.
But where lies its appeal, it’s seductive mystery? In that capacity to bomb contents and messages at blazing speeds, where every minute offers something wonderfully new and wonderfully banal to his followers, and where the process of imagination is transformed and replaced by the act of looking? Or perhaps the ease with which moves between the most diverse topics, such astonishing ease with which simplifies (trivializes?) fiction and reality? Or perhaps this paradox that slowly takes control of human relationships, and from which pioneered: so far and so close. We see the world, the universe through the screen inches from your face. The mountains of Tibet, the rhythmic bursts of pulsars, wars in the Middle East, the poisonous jellyfish Southern Ocean, customs of the Masai, the infinite variations of Romeo and Juliet dressed in modern clothes, the infamous and the sublimity of the human creation in lush exhibition in front of our eyes and cruel veto to the other senses, Borges Aleph imperfect, stained by temporal succession, but equally doomed for failure to embrace, to deepen what is offered to us, to mark the memory and further to answer. Because that is the center of the maze: men and acts offers are unable to answer us, we are unable to engage with them such as human act which is dialogue.