While on hold yesterday, the soundtrack was something that sounded like Elvis, made even more retro by the poor sound quality. That made it easy to for the imagination to slip back into Norman Rockwell Americana, when radio was the workaday window into the world for most. But Elvis's America--at least in pop history--is more about television than radio, I thought. Which, alas, more or less broke the spell.
But I'm not certain I regret that as a loss of anything more than a way to keep myself amused while waiting for customer support. Here's why. Even at the time I was old enough to be self-aware, the phrase "As Seen on TV"--don't ask me how--still conveyed some sense of significance. It was a time when "reality TV" meant the public access channels (and their low-to-no-budget production values). Even several years on (i.e. after cable became commonplace), my post-college roomie's bored channel-surfing landed on a recording of our teammates from Forensics doing improv. theatre (as "Sounds Like Fish") on public access. I clearly remember thinking something like, "Man, they're too talented for this," meaning that they were good enough for "real" channels.
More aptly, though, they were just too early for an internet capable of mass-hosting and mass-streaming original content. Serious bummer, that. As soothingly "simple" as a dial-driven, one-way world driven by radio and television seems, this is still the world I would choose, hands-down. The world where professionally-produced content is voluntarily released cheek-by-jowl with shaky videos of children and cats, Lego animations (both poignant and twisted), mashups, you-name-it. True, the amateurish stuff is why the phrase "As Seen on the Internet" would be laughed into oblivion. But the lack of a content caste system (dictated by the Bicoastal Brahmin) is everything. Absolutely everything.
(Now, if we could only get all the Fish back in the same pond while the flip-cam's rolling, I'd be sorely tempted to call it a perfect world...)
