George Trow

It's the birthday of George W.S. Trow (books by this author) — essayist, novelist, playwright, and media critic — born in Greenwich, Connecticut, in 1943. His most famous work was an essay, published in The New Yorker in November 1980, which later became a book. "Within the Context of No Context" was Trow's view on the decline of American culture, brought about mostly by television. "The work of television," Trow wrote, "is to establish false contexts and to chronicle the unraveling of existing contexts; finally, to establish the context of no context and to chronicle it." As TV gained in popularity, people began staying home to watch it rather than going out and participating socially with their communities. As a result, wrote Trow, Americans were only involved with the "grid of intimacy" — their immediate families — and the "grid of two hundred million" other television viewers. "Middle distance" grids — community groups like bowling leagues and bridge clubs — began dying off as people abandoned them for a false community of celebrities and sitcoms. And people also began to see themselves as parts of separate demographic groups; they stopped seeing themselves as connected to other generations or to history. The New Yorker devoted its whole issue to the essay.