World Television Day: How the meaning and function of TV changed over?time.

Today is World Television Day! In 1996, the United Nations declared November 21st as World Television Day to celebrate the life-changing invention of this magic box that educates, informs, and entertains us all. According to the UN, television represents a symbol of communication and globalisation in the contemporary world, and one may even claim?that it is the most important invention of the 20th?century.

How television came into our?lives

Even though the first television, a.k.a. the televisor, was invented by the Scottish John Logie Baird, 21-year-old Philo Taylor Farnsworth from the USA demonstrated the first successful electrical television transmission in 1927.?

The first broadcast was in 1928, while it was in 1938 that television was commercially available. Data on the global television market shows us an estimated 1.74 billion TV households worldwide today. According to the source, this figure will continue to grow and surpass 1.8 billion by 2026. TV became the most dominant form of communication worldwide in one century.

According to the UN, TV provides a “great opportunity to raise awareness about the important issues facing our communities and our planet.” They continue to say that “World Television Day is not so much a celebration of the tool, but rather the philosophy which it represents. Television represents a symbol of communication and globalisation in the contemporary world.”

Are we what we?watch?

One of the reasons why the UN wanted to honour the contribution of television to our lives lies in the fact that television has had the power to shape the way we think, make decisions, and perceive the world around us. For instance, to test the theory, the producers of the children’s show Sesame Street conducted research in the 1970s to assess the show’s effect on children’s cognitive development: They concluded that the program positively impacted children’s learning and social skills. Yay!

Television also became a tool for nations to communicate their cultural values and lifestyles. For example, American tv-shows from the late 90s and early 2000s, like Lost, Friends, The Simpsons, and Modern Family, gained immense popularity and affected the cultural values of the previous generations by promoting the image of the American lifestyle at the time. Also, British shows like Sherlock and Doctor Who broadcasted on BBC became the representatives of British national identity for decades.

Western TV shows' worldwide popularity is one reason Western culture has become an influential driving force in our lives. However, with the recent popularity of online streaming services, people started to get the taste of non-Western productions, and the persistent popularity of Western shows came to a halt. (Read our analysis of how Korean — click here — and Turkish TV shows — click here — dominate the screens globally.)

Will television disappear in the years to?come?

According to The Guardian, watching traditional TV channels has almost stopped among younger viewers, as viewers aged between 16 and 24 spend just 53 minutes a day on average watching traditional broadcast TV. This is a massive fall of two-thirds over the last decade and seven times less than those aged 65 and over. As a result, streaming services are in demand among the younger generations, which began with the launch of Netflix and has grown to include competitors, including Disney+, Apple TV+ and Amazon’s Prime Video.

However, although television channels’ popularity has declined, television as a device will probably be a part of our lives forever. This is because its function and meaning will continue to change with our viewing culture. This is because television acquired a new meaning in the last decade and became a medium to watch streaming channels’ content on a bigger screen than our phones and laptops.

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