It would be easy to rant about Baby Boomers constantly. There are problems with every generation, but boomers are the most obnoxious about taking criticsm which makes them easy targets. I've been tempted to write another article on the generation for a while, but intentionally held off. However, there's been some observations I made that I think are worthy of their own article, and one article per year on the Boomers probably isn't too many.
What's been kicking around in my brain for a while is how Baby Boomers are the generation that was really ruled by the TV. This may initially strike you as odd, especially if you are in Gen X or Gen Y. Both of those generations were critcized constantly by Baby Boomers for being "raised by the TV." Let's put aside the fact that the Boomers themselves were the parents of part of Gen X and practically all of Gen Y, and hence they were criticizing these generations for being poorly raised by the very people criticizing them. I contend that the accusation isn't accurate in the first place. Or rather, that the accusation applies less to Gen X and Gen Y and more to the Baby Boomers. Now I'm not claiming that Gen X and Gen Y didn't watch a lot of TV growing up; they did. So did everyone in the 80's and 90's. What I am claiming is that the Boomers were even more influenced by the television as they were growing up.
First of all, let's get rid of a claim that Boomers would likely make in response to some of what I am going to say. It's common for Boomers to deflect blame to earlier generations if they are forced to admit fault. I may not have been too involved of parent, but MY parents were even worse, etc. For TV that doesn't work. Widespread adoption of TV wasn't really a thing until after WWII, with familiar Boomer childhood shows beginning around then. For example Howdy Doody (1947), The Lone Ranger (1949), Captain Kangaroo (1955). Older generations would not be seeing these things until their teens at earliest, so it would not affect their development in any particular way, especially when you get back to the so-called Greatest Generation. They had radio for mass entertainment, which was consumed in a very different way (for example you can more easily listen to the radio while doing other thing or on the go, while listening to the radio a family will look at each other instead of the device, you need higher verbal IQ, and you need to use your imagination.) It's not a situation where a kid would be parked in front of the radio for hours on end, doing nothing else. But this has happened with the TV and its descendants, and it started with the Baby Boomers.
What started me thinking about this is seeing many examples of people raised by TV in fiction, and realizing that this character was always a Baby Boomer. For example in Scrooged Bill Murray's character is a TV exec who stands in for Scrooge from A Christmas Carol. As such we see his past, and his childhood was literally nothing but watching TV, to the point where he confuses events he saw on sitcoms with things from his own life. His character presumably was born around the time as Bill Murray himself (1950). Certainly his childhood does some to be in the late 50's. Thus Baby Boomer.
We see a similar character in Network. Diane Christensen is another TV executive who was raised by TV. In Network the focus is less on how pathetic this makes her, but rather how this has warped her view of reality. She is fine having the news report on stunts, banal stories, and outright fakery because she just sees it as another TV show. She's even willing to work with a group of terrorists because in her mind their escapades are no different from another episode of I Love Lucy. As long as the "plot" fits into half an hour and the ratings are good, it's all the same. She even views her own life in terms of hackneyed plot structures. This puts her at odds with William Holden's character, who represents the "old guard" that has had a development fully independent of TV. Diane Christensen is played by Faye Dunaway who was born in 1941, which puts her just before the usual start of the Baby Boomers, but she's still in the same ballpark and it is very possible that her character is meant to be somewhat younger, and certainly the way that her character is described only makes sense if she was watching TV from her earliest memories.
Another example that is easy to overlook is Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. The character of Mike Teavee is another quintessential TV addict. Because the 1971 adaptaiton dominates the idea of Willy Wonka, it's easy to think of Mike Teavee as being born in the 60's, and thus not really a boomer (more of member of Generation Jones; which would still put him well before the usually criticized generations of X or Y.) However, the book is from 1964. Charlie is 11, and Mike seems to be a similar age. That puts his birth to 1953 or before, especially when you consider that the book was published in January and wasn't written in a single week or anything like that. Thus Mike Teavee is firmly a Baby Boomer. What's interesting is that the Mike Teavee in the 2005 version is no longer really a TV fanatic: he's a media fanatic in general, and thus also a gamer, internet surfer, etc. It's like an admission that the idea of someone raised by "just" TV was absurd by the time we got to the millennials.
This last example hints at why the purely TV obsessed kid can only come from a Baby Boomer's childhood, or maybe Gen Jones. Through the 70's the TV really was as Howard Beale describes it in Network: the gospel, the ultimate revelation, the tube from which an entire generation knows everything about the world. As we went into the 80's we saw the growth of video games and computers, as well as the very beginnings of the internet (though that didn't affect the average person until the late 90's.) Music as a culture made a resurgence due to casette tapes making things easier for kids to listen to as they pleased (tapes existed before the 80's of course, but it's the 1979 Sony Walkman that really made a culture out of them.) Speaking of tapes, there were also VHS tapes. This meant that a kid who wanted to watch something on television could choose to watch a taped show or movie instead, putting the control back into his own hands to an extent, at least more so than the Baby Boomer children who needed to watch whatever was on. The proliferation of local stations and cable also helped with that: if a Baby Boomer was lucky he'd have three networks plus PBS, though if he lived in a more rural area he might have only two networks or pehaps even just one. Thus watching TV really was an entirely passive experience; you could barely even change the channel. For Gen X and later if you didn't like what was on, you'd just move to something else. And of course things moved even further from the TV experience when Generation Y got home phone lines, Millennials got personal cell phones and Zoomers got smart phones. This isn't to say that the experience of later generations was necessarliy superior to that of the boomers: there's something chilling and vaguely evil about a child glued to a smart phone, especially since the very interactivity and portability that distinguishes it from the TV makes it harder for kids to break away, so that the "phone addicted zoomer" is a constant while the "TV addicted baby boomer" did not apply to everyone in the generation. However, if we are specifically talking about TV addiction, this is a particular plight of the Baby Boomers, not matter what they say or how they tend to portray things.
March 16, 2024