by Pavel Podolyak

Created on: August 02, 2009

If you think that current television programming is only good for poking fun at it, you've seen nothing yet. Television is obviously more useful than radio due to ability to transmit more visual information about the state of the world. However that is becoming irrelevant since demographic trends and profit driven industry is rapidly pushing television into the same insane circus as talk radio.

It was relatively easy for the elderly to switch from radio to the new medium of television in the 1950s. After all, it was roughly the same in terms of operational procedure. You turn on the new bigger box, turn the knob to switch the channels, and sit down to enjoy the passive entertainment.

At around the time of Sputnik, the radio companies began various flashy gimmicks that seemed ridiculous to those who remembered the seriousness that was radio broadcasting in the 30s and 40s. The fall of radio industry was much more spectacular than the current fall of television due to mass migration of virtually every demographic group away from it. Sure, there remained the very elderly who couldn't afford TV or clung to radio out of nostalgia. Unlike the aging demographics of today's television audiences however, it wasn't the technological inability to operate the two way entertainment that kept them from switching.

The cold logic of profit driven media wiped out audio programming that needed serious financial expenditure such as salaries for voice actors. Many cultural critics derided television for elevating the visual presentation over the actual spoken content. The percentage of cognitive energies an individual spent on focus and absorption for things like a news story declined because of TV presentation. When one listens to a radio news story, one's attention is just on the information presented (and perhaps the overly exaggerated and dramatic voice to a degree). When one sees the news story spoken by an actor pretending to be a kindly wise old man, a bit of the cognitive energies are spent noticing the objects in the studio such as the clothing of the speakers and the increasingly neat looking pictures and camera recordings.

Radio news networks could only compete with each other by getting actors to change their tone of voice or to use more humor. Television competition kicked things up a notch since the corporation with the most money to spend on paying people to get film footage won in the ratings wars. For a time, such competition was even beneficial for society. The

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