A TV engineer or director.
That’s what 19-year-old me wanted as a career.
Since I vividly remember life before our dad brought home that first big box with a little black-and-white screen in 1956, the television industry called me to join the TV revolution — and I was a willing soldier.
Everybody watched TV back then … a lot. Typical viewership per household was an unbelievable six hours daily in the 1960s. It was America’s primary mass medium.
So, at age 19, I studied and then drove to Detroit to earn my Third-Class FCC Broadcast License, which allowed me to run basic radio and TV transmitters. I visited every TV station in Detroit, Flint, Saginaw, and Bay City that would give tours in 1969.
My dream job was behind the cameras, behind the scenes. I didn’t want to be a newsreader or entertainer — I wanted to be part of that magical medium beaming messages to the world. That’s where the action was.
Today’s equivalent form of mass communication is certainly the cellphone.
That dream led me to take every TV and radio class offered at CMU as a Broadcast and Journalism double major. I became a cameraman and photographer at Mount Pleasant’s TV station for nearly four years during college and absorbed every experience that came my way.
Ultimately, I chose my alter ego — a different yet similar career in journalism. After working at our family’s weekly newspaper while growing up, I spent three years at CMU’s student paper. Then, as a Saginaw News reporter in 1972, I began chasing a similar dream: covering news as it happened and sharing it with a public eager to be informed — mass-media style.
On my first day of work in Saginaw, presidential candidate George Wallace was shot while campaigning in Maryland. I was rushed into the newsroom mayhem of gathering local reactions for our next issue. We worked late into the night producing those timely stories.
I was hooked. I had chosen an exciting, adrenaline-filled career. It wasn’t TV production, but it was close.
Today’s equivalent form of mass communication is certainly the cellphone. Everyone over 25 remembers life before we all carried our own phones day and night.
We get our news, send pet photos to friends, and clandestinely watch exes and enemies alike. That device in our hands even lets us buy a used car, furniture, clothes, lunch — or even a TV set. And like television, the phone came to dominate communication rapidly — in just the last 20 years.
Statistics show the average American now spends more than five hours a day on their phone. That’s 1,825 hours a year — or 76 whole days — just scrolling. We all know cellphones are addictive, yet we almost never look away.
Talk about a staggering amount of time. And yet, compared to how Americans blindly watched that “newfangled” TV in our living rooms 70 years ago, it proves one thing:
We humans are very gullible.
We’re willing to follow any herd of sheep — devoting (and wasting) far more time than is healthy on something that isn’t all that healthy itself.
