Which Way Progress?

The image above is from the NPR site this morning. It is attached to a program about the evolution of television. There are just so many things about this photograph that speak to American life then and now.

My guess is the photo heralds from around 1965-66. We can see at least half of men are still wearing hats as part of their regular attire. Likewise, the sign on the wall advertises color, a technology that really came to the front in the mid-sixties. But, more than fashion and technology, I read so much else into the picture because it is a time I remember to some degree.

Odds have it, the couple looking at the big color console model are looking to replace a black and white set and will still end up with just one TV in the house. Odds have it that big TV will be on in the evening when the whole family is watching. Together. Odds have it at least the one man in the photo is a husband and has a job. With a future. A lot of assumptions can be made about the mid-sixties/mid-century demographic in this country, stylized in the advertiser's photograph, and much of which is tinted by nostalgia-- a feeling of loss for a past we think was more secure, more understandable, more compatible with our own image of social structure.

The real item in the photograph that gives me pause is the television set: To this day I am in awe of the people who had the audacity to think an image could be sent through the air, into a receiver, and re-assembled to be viewed again. I know I learned about this 1500 years ago in physics but not well enough to lessen my wonder at the imagination and ingenuity-- without computers-- that went into this device. I look at something that's become as common as the television and I have to wonder: Who's out there that could do it today? Do we have, and more importantly, are we producing, the intellectual curiosity to continue to imagine, ponder, and create at the level we saw evolve in the last 3 or 4 hundred years of human history? I'm not talking about new applications of existing technology. I mean new technology.

In as much as necessity is the mother of invention, I worry that we, in modern western society, have exhausted one of our most critical raw materials. In an era when everyone expects to be entertained at all times, in all places, and all within the palm of the hand, what gives rise to the next really big idea?