If you could erase one event from history, what would it be?
I sometimes wonder what evenings would have been like if television had never been invented. Not in any grand sense. Just ordinary evenings.
People would have read more, probably. Listened to the radio. Played records. Gone outside. Talked to neighbours. Sat around a table for longer than they intended. Children would have made up games because there wasn’t much else to do.
That doesn’t mean it would have been better. Television gave us things too. It brought the moon landing into the lounge room. You could suddenly see things you had only heard about. But it also changed what happened when there was nothing happening.
Before television, boredom had to go somewhere. You picked up a book or wandered outside or found someone to talk to. You fiddled with things. You listened. You made something up. Then television arrived and there was always something to watch.
I think that is the part that interests me. Not that television was bad, but that it began to remove the empty spaces. Smartphones have more or less finished the job. Now there is barely a spare minute that cannot be filled.
Maybe we have gained an enormous amount from that. But I wonder what used to happen in all those empty minutes. And what might still happen if we left a few of them alone.
The Afterword 
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