Rising tide

And the lasting effects of TV shows.

The other day, after a Mythbusters show and after seeing the video games tirade of the NRA chief, we were sitting around talking.

That's when one of our folks told us a story of a friend.

That friend had related a personal experience about the power of television.

He had grown up far from the sea and, in his mid-twenties, found himself at the ocean for the first time in his life.

He and a friend were hiking along the top of the cliffs, when the friend saw some tide pools on the beach, so they went down to explore.

After a short time, the friend's companion casually observed: the tide is coming in.

It was at this precise moment that the friend noticed he was getting very uncomfortable, and he turned around to hurry back up the cliff.

There are a few more tide pools over there I want to check out.

But you said the tide was coming in.

And...? 

We need to get out of the way.

Oh, no, we have lots of time.

The friend later recounted this event as an example of how deeply, unwittingly he had been influenced by the standard TV dramatization of incoming tide in various shows set along the seaboard.

Just think about it, he would say. In all these shows, you have episodes where people get stranded on rocks or outcrops.

Most of the time, you'll hear someone say something about the tide, like, isn't it time we head back before the tide comes in, or, hey, the tide is coming in.

And the next thing you see is a cut, they are surrounded by sloshing water, and everybody fears for their lives.

The friend would conclude the story with: if you had ever told me I would panic like that, I would have laughed. Yes, we did learn in school that it takes hours for the tide to go from low to high, but at that very moment, there were several minutes of apprehension.

TV and movies dramatize all the time, so,  what about scenes like someone walking away from an explosion is slow motion, would you feel compelled to slow-mo after an explosion?

We settled on the possibility that the dramatization of simple, everyday experiences is more likely to trip you. Not many people experience explosions from which they would then walk away in slow-mo, and car chases are not as common either.

Which would take us straight to TV commercials and their dramatization of true everyday experiences, from detergents to cars, from burgers to yoghurts.

Why would we doubt that TV, movies, video games have an effect on us when there is such unquestioned acceptance of the effect of the spoken word and the written word?

Just because it is easier to say, now, let's go to page 5 and look at the first paragraph?

As we at the K-Landnews see it, we should not get all bent out of shape by video games or TV but be aware of their effects, after all Klingon may already be more popular than Esperanto.