The Grey Screen: simultaneidade perdida e multiplicação de telas (C2)
The set in the corner has undergone the quietest of demotions. For a few decades it was the hearth of the house, and rooms were arranged around it as villages are arranged around a well: every chair angled towards the same rectangle, every evening subdivided by a schedule composed elsewhere, by strangers, for millions at once. That tyranny is now remembered fondly, which should tell us something about tyranny. What replaced it is not freedom but multiplication — a hundred screens, each private, each obedient to the individual appetite, none capable of gathering anyone. The old machine's genius was never its content, most of which was forgettable and was duly forgotten; it was its simultaneity. To watch was to know that others, unseen, were watching the same nonsense at the same hour, and this knowledge, cheap as it was, constituted a kind of civic membership available to anyone who could afford the electricity. Turn the thing off now and you get the effect that always unsettled me as a child: the screen goes not black but grey, and the room appears inside it, curved and dim, furniture included, people included, everything a little smaller than life. The device's most honest programme was always the one it broadcast when switched off.
Fonte: English for ALL (texto original).
A oposição que organiza a argumentação do texto contrapõe
- A) a alta qualidade da produção televisiva de outrora à banalidade dos conteúdos fragmentados que hoje circulam em dispositivos pessoais.
- B) a passividade do espectador de televisão à participação ativa que os dispositivos contemporâneos finalmente vieram possibilitar.
- C) a memória afetiva da infância do narrador à frieza analítica com que ele julga, na maturidade, os meios de comunicação.
- D) a simultaneidade compartilhada, que produzia uma forma mínima de pertencimento, à multiplicação de telas privadas, incapaz de reunir quem quer que seja.
- E) a imposição autoritária de uma grade de programação à liberdade de escolha que caracteriza o consumo audiovisual atual.