Was there ever a point where television was an enjoyable experience? Was there some magical time, before I was born even, when the television gave people a legitimate welcoming feeling, or at least a feeling besides annoyance or pure indifference? Maybe at some early part of its life it gave a similar feeling that the small internet like Gemini does today, which to some is a feeling of comfort, while to others like Maya it’s a feeling of sadness.
If that’s the case, then television has gone the way of the web and is full of alienating nonsense.
In between the constant Grubhub ads (lol this is going to make no sense in a month or two) I have to deal with a stream of Biden as he lies through his teeth about caring about any of us. Say all you want but thousands of people are dying due to your inaction, especially us hispanic people. Our plights in this empire aren’t over and as of now we’ve seen minimal material benefits, so I will not fawn over him, but it’s almost like the news expects me to.
Huey Newton and Kia Melchor Hall both expressed the need for community control of technology, especially since “more and more of our daily lives and interactions are coded by men who mostly live apart from Black and Latinx consumers.” [1] Beyond that, the content of proprietary media technology is dictated by shareholders, CEOs, etc. By the bourgeoisie. Television is not controlled by the community, it’s often created with a disconnect to black and brown people’s experiences, and is more often controlled by the bourgeoisie at the expense of the proletariat’s experience.
While television may seem more and more obsolete by the day, one shouldn’t discount the power and reach it has, so we must take that power for our communities and use it! Power produces reality, after all, so that power must be in the hands of our communities in order for them to produce a reality without shitty ads and alienating content.
- Taken from Kia Melchor Hall’s essay “Technology in Black Feminist World”