Five

This chapter details how television became the first modern technology to be entirely shaped by American culture and American ambition, and to take the American way of life to its fullest development. In the beginning, the new medium was literally the product of American power, a peacetime application of wartime technology used against German submarines and the Japanese navy. Later, the connection would seem less obvious, but only at first. As the mass medium of choice during the decades when the United States conquered the planet, television quickly became synonymous with an American future of material and spiritual progress. They were a window into America, but a window displaying the American dream in all its glory, a transplant of the American life energy. Arguably, the internet, mobile technology, Netflix, and binge-watching did not change this basic fact. By liberating content from the physical restraints of the old wartime vacuum tubes, they can only increase its powers and render it, as it were, more spiritual. Ultimately, the internet can be seen as an expansion of television culture.