living Elsewhere, in a land of make-believe

One Man's Meat, by E.B. White, better known as the author of Charlotte's Web and Stuart Little, is a delightful collection of essays written in the late '30's/early '40's. The following is an excerpt from a July 1938 essay in which White comments on the TV era, which was in its infancy (I added the bolding):

...Radio has already given sound a wide currency, and sound "effects" are taking the place once enjoyed by sound itself.  Television will enormously enlarge the eye's range, and, like radio, will advertise Elsewhere.  Together with the tabs, the mags, and the movies, it will insist that we forget the primary and the near in favor of the secondary and the remote.  More hours in every twenty-four will be spent digesting ideas, sounds, images -- distant and concocted.  In sufficient accumulation, radio sounds and television sights may become more familiar to us than their originals.  A door closing, heard over the air; a face contorted, seen in a panel of light -- these will emerge as the real and the true; and, when we bang the door of our own cell or look into another's face the impression will be of mere artifice.  I like to dwell on this quaint time, and when the solid world becomes make believe, McCarthy corporeal and Bergen stuffed, when all is reversed and we shall be like the insane, to whom the antics of the sane seem the crazy twistings of a grig.

When I was a child people simply looked about them and were moderately happy; today, they peer beyond the seven seas, bury themselves waist deep in tidings, and by and large what they see and hear makes them unutterably sad.

If this is what he had to say about TV, imagine what he would have made of our internet era.

Last Sunday was a beautiful, sunny 60 degree day in NY. My wife and I were walking in a park and she commented on the fact that there were so few children out on such a nice day.  I reminded her that children no longer go outside to play; they are happy to sit glued to a screen, and if they want to see the outdoors, they simply bring up a video of it to watch while they down their Prozac pills by the handful.