Li’l Andy’s country singer anecdotes in the big city.

Understanding Tina: the Extensions of School Bus Debate

“When technology extends one of our senses, a new
translation of culture occurs as swiftly as the new
technology is interiorized.”
―Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy

It’s always one of those great, uncomfortable moments of conversation, when, by way of analogy, some harmless little tangent, one of your friends mentions something they saw on tv, and some clever wag seizes the moment as their big chance to declare: “I don’t watch tv.”

Talk about your small-talk road block. What can you do? You try to go on.

“Yeah but have you seen that Molson Ex Light ad where they spill beer all over this hot guy’s t-shirt and
he’s gotta take it off and put it in the salad spinner to get the beer back and in the version they play
during the French “Hockey Night in Canada” they show this hot girl’s tank-top getting sprayed with
beer―thereby implying that she’s soon going to take her shirt off too―but during the English CBC’s “Hockey Night in Canada” they cut that part out cuz we’re Anglo prudes and can’t handle it?!”

“Yeah: I don’t watch tv. I haven’t had a tv in my house since like ’98.”

At this point of your stillborn conversation, the implications are pretty clear. Allow me this subtextual breakdown:

“I don’t watch tv.” (I’d love to be able to speak with you in your charming monosyllabic English, but we just
don’t share the same cultural referents.”)

“Yeah, but have you seen that Simpsons where Homer starts bodybuilding with McBain―” (How ‘bout, for
conviviality’s sake, you humour me for a second, smartass?)

“I haven’t watched anything on tv in like years.” (Sorry, you plebe, but I spend my time reading Proust and listening to hard-to-find Stax/Volt-era R&B. On vinyl.)

I remember the first time I encountered this kind of character. Tina was on bus 13 back when I was in grade six. A self-styled hippie kid who was about two feet taller than anyone else on our bus, Tina did a lot of LSD. Even for an eighth-grader.

As usual on Thursday mornings, we we’re all reliving the highlights from the “Kids in the Hall” episode we’d
seen the night before.

“Whoa! I can’t believe they showed those two guys totally Frenching one another!”

“I heard that guy’s a homo in real life!”

“I heard they’re all homos! Tina, didja see that one?”

“No,” and here she left an emphatic pause. “Tv rots your brain.”

“Oh yeah, and acid doesn’t, eh Tina?” my brother piped up.

Then the other kids joined in. “Yeah, Tina. Why don’t you go break on through to the other side somewhere?”

But despite our witty rejoinders, Tina had bested us. Won the sparring match in the philosophical salon that is every junior high school bus. Because in grade eight intellectual life, asserting that television is largely a waste of time actually is a radical belief.

But not at the post-university level. Somewhere between those two stages of education, most figure out
Professor McLuhan’s greatest hit, that the “message” of any new technology isn’t its content, but the rate of change it introduces to our civilisation. So anyone who is part of that civilisation will be affected by the
presence of a technology like, say, the television regardless of their best attempts to guard their purity.

Or, at least, that’s what I understood from that 30-second, Part of Our Heritage “minute” where that
actor from “Street Legal” plays McLuhan stumbling upon the realisation that “the medium is the message.” Which I saw, on tv, in between a commercial for CLR and right before one of those episodes of “Jonovision” that I used to watch after getting off the school bus each day.