(2 of 4)
But the most technological entertainment medium in history is movies, as anybody can surmise from seeing the small army of technicians on a sound stage or location. Technology gave the silents a voice in 1927 (though some of the great silent performers, such as Charlie Chaplin, took their time about speaking), but more important, it enabled film to refine its unique visual language.
What created the movies' vivid, fluent brand of illusionism--besides the talents of great filmmakers, of course--was the development of more mobile cameras, more expressive lighting, more sophisticated editing and, above all, more ingenious special effects that could bring to life prehistoric worlds of dinosaurs and future worlds of space travel. And let's not forget animated films, perhaps the purest cinema of all, in which technology allows the creation of an entire visual world unimpeded by such tiresome exigencies of the real world as sets, props and actors.
New technologies meant new audiences--and new relationships between artists and audiences. Movies were the century's first mass medium after print. But although millions of viewers could have the same experience at the movies, they experienced it a few hundred at a time, in individual theaters. Radio was the first entertainment medium to enable a mass audience to have the same experience instantaneously and simultaneously. Even more than movies, radio gave audiences an intensely communal feeling, a sense of being part of something national, as well as a special intimacy with its stars.
TV upped the ante by being as immediate as radio and as visual as the movies. Indeed, TV's mesmerizing hold is something unprecedented. A major TV event is overwhelmingly a shared national experience, and a TV star is a celebrity of a new order. When Lucy Ricardo has a baby, when Seinfeld goes off the air, it's not something that's happening out there--it's an event in our homes and in our lives.
And this is to say nothing of TV's power to bring us real-life events: a moon walk or the Olympics, an uprising in Tiananmen Square or Princess Diana's funeral. We conduct not only a lot of our fantasy lives on TV but also our political campaigns (and sometimes it's hard to tell which is which). From the Persian Gulf in 1991, we learned that global TV can even be a means of waging war.
The first two assumptions made about the advent of TV were dead wrong: that it would bury radio and that it would be a threat to movies. From the start, TV has provided a generous showcase for other arts--radio performances and movies included. Millions of people who, in earlier centuries or even earlier decades of this century, would never have seen world-class ballets, operas, concerts or museum works of art have seen them on TV. Not quite the same as live, perhaps, but considerably better than nothing.