By Kyle Peveto, Page Editor

Column Schmolumn

Last semester, while I heard each Students’ Association presidential candidate proclaim a platform, almost everyone mentioned to us the goal of placing televisions around campus that would be plugged into SATV and a national news service that would supply us with up-to-the-minute news and weather.

I wondered where these TV sets would be, and I imagined them posted in each building near bathrooms and water fountains and in the gathering places in the first floor of each building where students congregate.

Campus Life is teaming up with SA to purchase the system and put it in to place. One Campus Life administrator even told me the system “would be like Six Flags.”

None of the images I took from this news was pleasant. Six Flags is never pleasant. It’s fun and a little thrilling, but it’s hot and loud. And those TVs bustling with Looney Toons characters are pretty annoying.

No matter where the televisions will go, they will not be welcomed by me. They will be in an already loud Campus Center, in a peaceful Administration Building or, fearfully, they will shatter the perfect, natural silence of the outdoors. The “white noise” of the ongoing broadcasts and the eventual static that will occur in the absence of those broadcasts will inform and annoy.

I realize we need a forum for announcements on this campus. Many more things will go on than will be announced and a television system will definitely get the word out.

But the idea of ceaseless background noise haunting me in every building on campus is not pleasant.

The idea of our generation becoming any more reliant on television is sad. And this is coming from a perspective member of the media: a journalism major.

We can turn off our own TVs and throw away (or recycle) the Optimist, but we have no choice in this matter.