Has TV replaced Oral Tradition?

American Idol and Lost were just "ok" last night. I was a bit disappointed. I should have known better than to waste 3 hours (with a break for bedtime for the kiddies) in front of the boob tube. Anyway, I'll probably still watch these shows on Wednesday nights, but Dan Edelen convicted me a bit with a great post concerning the media and how it has replaced the valued role of story-telling (the foundation of thousands of years of oral tradition) and mentoring of children. He says,

Imagine a campfire on the plains of Palestine circa 200 AD. A dozen people gather ’round its warmth, trading stories. At one point, the elder of the group stands up and tells of Jesus, His ways, and how those ways became the ways of their people. He talks for an hour, while the younger ones trade questions with him, learning, absorbing. Tomorrow night, the conversation will be similar, but varied enough to take others to a fractionally deeper place than the night before. The faces might be different this night, the main storyteller another of the wise ones, but what lingers in the cooling night air contains the same truth, the same life-giving wisdom.

On some nights, stories surrender to music. But the music doesn’t jar with the oral traditions. No, it reinforces truth, resembling what was taught and told, only in words set to rhythm and melody.

Night after night, this is how it unfolds for those people. This is their entertainment and their revelation.

A few sentences later he says,

Media stole the passed torch. It distracted those who came before us from their primary duty of ensuring the wisdom of the ages survived into the next generation. Whatever that wisdom may have been, that generation preferred the dull gray light of a cathode ray tube, or the voice of a box of transistors, to passing on the only things worth saving.

Read the whole thing here.