Caster V Archer

www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHjXt6W-mnM
Into the cornfields
Into the cornfields

And we know a secret
It happened some time ago
A woman killed a man here
She was in a traveling show

Burlesque you could say
With breasts and body beautiful
But serpents appeared from her shoulder blades
That’s why the people come

Into the cornfields
Into the cornfields
Into the cornfields
We don’t we don’t we don’t want to go
We don’t we don’t we don’t want to go back there

"Just where to begin to examine the transformation of American attitudes since TV is a most arbitrary affair, as can be seen in a change so great as the abrupt decline of baseball. The removal of the Brooklyn Dodgers to Los Angeles was a portent in itself. Baseball moved West in an attempt to retain an audeince after TV struck. The characteristic mode of the baseball game is that it features one-thing-at-a-time. It is a lineal, expansive game which, like golf, is perfectly adapted to the outlook of an individualist and inner-directed society. Timing and waiting are of the essence, with the entire field in suspense waiting upon the performance of a single player. By contrast, football, basketball, and ice hockey are games in which many events occur simultaneously, with the entire team involved at the same time. With the advent of TV, such isolation of the individual performance as occurs in baseball became unacceptable. Interest in baseball declined, and its stars, quite as much as movie stars, found that fame had some very cramping dimensions. Baseball had been, like the movies, a hot medium featuring individual virtuosity and stellar performers. The real ball fan is a store of statistical information about previous explosions of batters and pitchers in numerous games. Nothing could indicate more clearly the peculiar satisfaction provided by a game that belonged to the industrial metropolis of ceaselessly exploding populations, stocks and bonds, and production and sales records. Baseball belonged to the age of the first onset of the hot press and the movie medium. It will always remain a symbol of the era of the hot mommas, jazz babies, of sheiks and shebas, of vamps and gold-diggers and the fast buck. Baseball, in a word, is a hot game that got cooled off in the new TV climate, as did most of the hot politicians and hot issues of the earlier decades."

McLuhan basically sees baseball as a product of typography; the hot medium of the printed word engendered a visual bias and linear reasoning skills. A game like baseball, then, with such a lineal structure and isolated, point-of-view play, was perfectly adapted to society. With electricity and TV came involvement in depth and more expansive images of the world, so sports with more movement and synchronization such as football became more popular.