Why Video Is Disconnecting You From Your Ancestors

Counter-intuitively, video has done nothing but disconnect us from our ancestors. Hard to believe, since in some ways it brings them to life again.

But in pre-video society the past was a consistent thing. Consistent with the present. Not only in the sense that the your father and your father’s father worked the same land or same trade as yourself, but that your forebears’ world was the same colour as yours. The human eye was all we might see the universe through. The world was literally the same in your mind’s eye as his or her oldest ancestors.

Picture a girl in the year 1025, 1000 years ago. Ask her to imagine her father’s life before she was born. Her grandfather’s. The people 1000 years before her. Now ask her what her children might make of her world before them.

Because they can only picture a world the same as their ancestors’, each person can assimilate the culture and the history of their lineage. The lessons her ancestors learned and fought to teach can be entirely adopted because there is no reason for her to imagine their world as alien.

Now picture the 2025 woman. A TV programme from 2010 is enough to puzzle her. The camera quality paints an alien picture. The year 2000, 1990, 1975, 1935. Greater and greater is the effect that if not for living remnants, grandparents, she’d not believe anything of herself had come from those times. There would be nothing at all linking them. And 2025 is young in the era of video. Will people in 2125 really believe the people in grainy black and white footage from 1940 were related to them? Can you imagine Freddie Mercury bearing the clarity people of his day saw him with?

For a species relying mostly on eyesight to interpret the world, the danger is that we fail to learn from past generations’ mistakes. Video is to inter-generational relationships what languages are to inter-cultural ones. Is it a coincidence that the advent of television sees the advent of counter-cultural rebelliousness? The belief that days gone are days buried, never to re-emerge, helps propel people forward, but we are running ahead too quickly. Pre-video society understood that humanity’s shadow constantly looms.

Languages. Particularly the English one. It does not exist. At risk of sounding psychotic I’ll tell that story another day.