"It just wouldn't look
right to have the world without color television in today's society."
The above is a sentence in a student-essay on the topic of
technology and how it could both "free" us as well as enslave us to
itself, simultaneously.
The one thing I like in the sentence is the stupendous conviction.
The writer firmly believes in what she says.
But everything else radiated by
the sentence is ripe for critical thinking.
The writer is technically stating
the obvious: Color televisions are the only televisions available today in the
market, is my guess. Black and white TV’s are out, aren’t they?
Perhaps, the child is implying
something else?
Were you to be discovered with
a black and white television set in your possession, you might be perceived as
someone not belonging to this era, or you might simply be perceived as “weird”.
Would you not you look askance at the owner of a flip-phone?
In the world of certain types
of technology, I believe, the progression from old to new is mercilessly linear.
In the world of audio-visuals, the march from black and white to color and
silence to sound, among other marches, is irreversible such that black and
white is now a subset of color and silence, as is demonstrated so exquisitely
by the 2011 Oscar nominated film The
Artist, is a part of the wholeness of sound.
However, what the writer of the
sentence does is not just confine the statement to a specific context, but draw
an absolute truth of “life”, as it were, from it.
And that is precisely where the
trouble—of me accepting the sentence’s conviction at face value is—begins.
The writer believes, I feel,
that the movement from black and white to color is a movement of progress in
general. To have color is to be modern, but to have black and white is to be
anachronistic.
I feel the writer reflexively draws from the advancement in the
field of technology an unexamined truth and applies it to the field of life.
The syllogism is faulty,
reducing the sentence itself to black and white.
No comments :
Post a Comment