Many of us, I suspect, harbor the secret conviction that the next generation somehow dropped the vessel of culture as we were handing it off to them. It doesn’t matter that the generation before us thought the same thing; this time we’re sure it’s true.
Every once in a while, though, I get a sliver of evidence that we are too pessimistic.
Such was the case the other night.
Our Air Force son and his family have been visiting with us between assignments, and several of his friends and their children – the next couple of generations, if you will – were guests at our house over the July 4 holiday weekend.
They don’t get to see each other in person very often, and after dinner they were catching up.
Eventually, the talk turned to entertainment – particularly to television programs that they have followed for multiple seasons. I was largely an observer. We do not watch very much television at our house, and I had never seen any of the programs that they were talking about.
Television has always been part of their lives, and it is a different medium for them than it was for us.
Television and we were relatively young at the same time. Our choices were limited, and if there were a program that we liked, we bent our schedule to that of the television network. Either you watched a show at the time it was broadcast or you missed it.
This generation doesn’t operate that way. They record the programs they like, or get a whole season on DVD, or download programs from the Internet.
They watch movies, too, and as they talked, they compared their movie watching with their television habits.
A more apt comparison, I thought, was with books, with literature.
Movies are more like plays. From Aristophanes to Shakespeare to Albee, playwrights have tackled the human condition and stimulated their audiences to think and discuss as well as to enjoy.
But a play or a movie, as arresting as it may be, is of a far more limited nature than a book.
As they discussed their television shows, they took a much longer view than they would of a movie: “The first two seasons were really good, but they got off track in season three; this season is much better.”
It wasn’t just the individual story lines that occupied most of their attention. They talked about characters – and character. Is one of them good or evil, or some of both? How has the character changed over time?
Aren’t those the kinds of things that people who read Tolstoy or Faulkner talked about, too? And good literature is entertaining as well as enlightening.
Personally, I still get far more from the printed word than I do from television. But just because a younger generation gets its literature in a different fashion, it does not mean that it is less intelligent or thoughtful.
Perhaps the vessel carrying our culture hasn’t been broken so much as it has changed shape.
The writer can be contacted at billatthelake@gmail.com
