The tech reified as curriculum — E.T.A.'s History of Entertainment and the analog-to-digital shift

texture · YDAU (3 Nov)

• When: Tuesday, 3 November YDAU (scene 032 dateline)
• What: In the locker room the upperclassmen quiz each other for Disney Leith's History of Entertainment exam, and the media revolution surfaces as pedagogy. The "most crucial difference" between a historical broadcast TV set and a cartridge-capable TP: the Cathodeluminescent Panel — no cathode gun, no phosphenic screen, no analogs, no snow or ghosting or vertical roll; the shift from analogs to digitals that Leith calls "seminal" ("The biggest advance in home communications since the phone," one student glosses; "In home entertainment since the TV itself," another), the InterLace de-digitizer replacing the antenna. Definitional terms of the new medium recur as flash-cards — acutance, halation. The through-line for the thread: within a decade of the collapse (events 4-5), the dissemination order is settled enough to be taught as history to teenagers who take it for the natural state of the world.