After talking about television in class, I started to
think about what it means for me and my family. Growing up in a nuclear family
of four people, we always have at least two different television sets in our
house. They were the center of our entertainment, until of course when my
brother received his first computer. Even though my relationship with
television now consist on connecting YouTube videos via Wifi, the meaning of
television for my parents and their families always interests me.
My grandmother was born in Crimea and had to move to
Turkey when she was six. She always liked telling and reading stories but she loved
watching them. I remember her coming to visit us, since we lived in different
cities, with a bus and right after she kissed my brother and I several times
she always asked about her "dizi"s and whether we can make it on time
to watch them. If you could ask her she would have told you about a hundred
episodes and never left a detail. It was a delight to watch any dizi with her,
because she used talk to the screen, make comments and exclamations as if the
people in the show were right there. My favorite story of her about television
is when she was in US for a year, visiting her siblings in 1970's. Noting that
everyone in the house was speaking Turkish or Tatarian, she was actually able
to understand English because she was watching "General Hospital" on
television,
Her son, or my father, has a slightly different
relationship with the television, or maybe I should just call it sports
channel. Like most of Turkish people he is a football fan. If there is a match
on dinner time, we used to have our meals in front of the TV, even when we have
guests. My parents are still living in a two-story house in Bolu which gets
really cold and snowy in winters and we had our satellite dish on the
roof. I watched him countless times while he was climbing our roof to clean the
satellite dish because there was a football game. Predictable enough, we made
them move the dish near the kitchen window due to his nine broken ribs. He
still loves to watch and yell at the games as much as he used to though.
And finally, my mother loves to talk about the
television trips they used to make when she was a child. She and her extended
family had to go the village in an hour away to watch the only television and
the only channel. Today, I have a big screen television, an iPad and a mobile
phone to watch Netflix from. Clearly from my point of view a television set is
not a necessity but my parents it is the single most important thing in their
house.
I am sure they are watching a dizi or a football game while I am writing this.
In my opinion, television, which is located in the living room generally, is losing its importance by time for people. For example I do not have a TV in my home and me and my husband invited his grand parents to our home and we hoped that they would stay with us for a couple of weeks. After they came to our place from the airport, we talked for an hour because we missed each other.
ReplyDeleteHowever after one hour they were bored because they used to watch television all the day! We decided to arrange our computer as a television and tried to teach them how to use it. However they could not adapt to that and they wanted to go back to their home after one week.
My parents are also watching television but not as much as my husband's grand parents and the next generation me and my husband we do not want any television in our living room.
I also didnt want a TV, so did my brother, but we both have one now in our living rooms. Because our parents think it wouldnt be a real house if there is no TV. We had this broken oven in my parent's kitchen and it took them 30 years to get a new one. But when their TV broke down, it was replaced in almost 2 hours. But thinking about it, if my pc gets broken I would try to get a new one as soon as possible too. :)
DeleteI have a similar case in my family about what it means to watch TV for my family members; my grandma and her relation with her TV set is really interesting. She is a big fan of Survivor and she calls the contestants as her "guests" and it is almost impossible to communicate with her while she is watching her favourite TV show. As an old women living alone, she usually doesn't have the energy to go out so it is impossible for her to get a hobby to spend her free times. But it is also interesting that how she becomes isolated during her TV times. Normally she adores me but if I call her at the wrong time (meaning during Survivor) she gets nervous and I feel like she blames me because I called her. In that sense I'm not sure if TV is a good thing or a bad thing since it entertains her but also causes her to live in a imaginary world and get separated from us:)
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