100 years watching TV

On January 26th, a century ago, John Logie Baird, a Scottish engineer, gave the first public demonstration of television in London before members of the Royal Institution. He had built the device himself, based on a previous invention, the Nipkow disk, created in 1884 by the German Paul Nipkow. A reproduction of John Logie Baird's device can be seen at the Science Museum in London. It had low resolution and the image was small, not much larger than a modern mobile phone screen. In terms of size, in some ways, we've gone back to the beginning.

While this was happening in London, in that same year, 1926, Francesc Macià was finalizing an invasion from Vil·la Denise, in Prats de Molló, to liberate Catalonia from the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera and declare it independent. The attempt failed: everyone involved was arrested. Five years later, now president, the legendary Avi Macià, a great film enthusiast, would promote the launch of Catalan television, a project of Ràdio Associació de Catalunya (RAC). After Macià's death, amidst the upheavals of the Second Republic, the project continued to gain momentum, and in 1936 Tomàs Roig i Llop (father of the future writer and journalist Montserrat Roig, who in the late 1970s would create the program) Characters (from interviews in Catalan on TV2) he traveled to Berlin to buy a powerful television station from the Telefunken company. Along with England (BBC) and the US (with CBS and NBC), Nazi Germany had been one of the pioneering countries in promoting television broadcasting. The Spanish Civil War definitively thwarted the Catalan public television that Macià had dreamed of.

Humanity has been watching television for a century. In the most advanced Western countries, at least three generations have grown up with it. In our case, two generations. Television is perfectly integrated into our lives, occupying many hours of our leisure time and opening the door to all kinds of audiovisual fiction and non-fiction. We are beings who increasingly live through the small screen. With mobile phones, television itself has lost prominence, but not its essence: moving visual images with sound, broadcast in real time or not.

What was the world like without screens? I recently revisited the delightful play at La Perla 29—I had already enjoyed it years ago. Natale en Casa CupielloWritten by the Neapolitan Eduardo De Filippo in the late 1920s. In Naples, of course, television hadn't arrived yet either. What did people do to entertain themselves? Well, they sang, they acted in plays, at Christmas they made nativity scenes, they had after-dinner conversations... They did, did, did. And they listened. Radio had entered homes. Now we watch, watch, watch. We chat less. We connect virtually through screens. Some will spend Christmas glued to their phones.

Perhaps all this I'm saying is just nostalgia. And in any case, there's no going back. Grandparents and great-grandparents, like Macià, already knew the cinema, of course, and they went too. The magic of moving images had begun to spread. But it hadn't entered homes. Now we carry it in our pockets, attached like a second skin. In prehistoric caves, our ancestors drew hunting figures that, viewed by the light of still flames, could create the illusion of movement: this magic can be appreciated in the Lascaux caves.

But the great change began 100 years ago. It's not that long ago. The industrial revolution came hand in hand with a technological acceleration that hasn't stopped. Mass communication is its offspring. Today, anyone, if they're skilled, can connect with hundreds of thousands of strangers through social media and their mobile phone screen. They don't need to be very original in their content. They can lie, and no one will stop them. They can even defend an impossible and absurd return to a supposed idyllic past of identity, as far-right populisms do. But the virginal past (without screens?) won't return. If anything, it might bring back barbarism: because technical progress is one thing, and moral progress is another. Television from a century ago has grown both large and small at the same time. It has made us both large and small at the same time.