Class response- Television

          When you watch old movies and TV shows set in the past, you notice that everyone is dressed so nicely at almost all times. They're always going out, they hang out at drug store food counters and ice cream parlors. They seem to annunciation more clearly and use a better vocabulary. Nowadays, this is certainly not the case, and television is a big part of the reason why. In class, we learned that TV made us all more lazy, which would explain why the social part of the description of the past is true. It was also said that TV was instrumental in trend setting. This explains the change in wardrobe and speech. That being said, the piece that really got my attention, was the bit about how TV alters our sense of reality. Because while this means that it changed our ideas about what was and wasn't acceptable in society, it also means that this look at the last that we have might not be accurate. The scenes that I described at the beginning of this paragraph really glorify life in the early and mid 1900's. But, I think it's interesting, albeit slightly confusing, to think about the fact that if TV alters our sense of reality, those times might not have actually been quite as glamorous as they seem on the screen.