Iconic

From the birth of television until very recently, there were two constants. The first was the analog signal transmission, and the second was the cathode ray tube (CRT).
Analog transmission went through various upgrades over the years, first with the addition of colour then teletext, and even stereo sound, but the basic structure of the signal would still have been recognised by television pioneers of 50 or 60 years ago.

Similarly the cathode ray tube defined the bulky nature of televisions from the start. They got bigger, the fronts got flatter and squarer, but the CRT was the last piece of valve-era technology to hang on in there. Television pioneers would still have recognised the way they looked and worked.

In the last few years all that has canished from the UK. The CRT had been replaced by new flatscreen technologies such as plasma, LCD and LED. The final analog transmitters were turned off in the last week or so. Television has finally moved to the point where its pioneers would find the technology almost completely unrecognisable.

CRTs are pretty tough, but when they do break, they do so implosively thanks to the vacuum inside. I think that a broken TV has become a powerful symbol. One of violence, one of revulsion with mainstream media, one of rebellion.

Seeing these two shattered TVs dumped at the side of the road brought home to me the fact that we are saying farewell, sometimes brutally, to iconic technologies that lasted more than a generation.